Four Trends that are Shaping the Sales Profession and Driving Changes in Buyers’ Expectations. Four Changes on The Buyer-Seller Relationship Contract.

February 4, 2011 by smsadmin
Filed under: Sales Management

Four Trends Shaping the Sales Profession
This landmark report was created with the participation of more than 2,000 sales practitioners who helped define the current and future state of the sales profession in the global marketplace. They also identified key trends—economic, social, and technological—that are shaping the profession. The following four trends are driving change in the marketplace and will have significant implications for sales team members.

Globalization
The globalization of the marketplace is increasing the pressure to perform in all business areas. Salespeople are often the front line of a company’s presence in a new country, but can face potential language, cultural, and geographic challenges that require specialized knowledge to overcome. These dynamics create teaming requirements that can strain communications and information flow across departmental boundaries and slow down the solution definition process. Sales team members must understand logistical implications as well as cultural differences within the buyer-seller relationship to sustain long-term relationships.

Competition
As organizations seek to expand, intense and often brutal competition can be a fact of business life. To meet revenue goals while penetrating customer organizations and maintaining solid customer relationships, decision making must become flat and frontline sales managers must be empowered to make decisions, maintain momentum in the sales process, and acquire the right resources in support of the sale. Sales teams must have (and sales training teams must develop) strategy-building capabilities to cultivate increased capacity for more customer-centered relationships and adapt responses to opportunities, requirement changes, and competitive threats as they emerge.

Technology
The field of professional selling has been buffeted by technology in multiple ways. Today, both buyer and seller have begun to leverage technology to help manage all but the most routine buyer-seller activities and purchases.
Buyers arm themselves with information through the wide variety of technology and tools available, long before the sales call ever occurs. Online marketing materials and product information helps buyers understand their options. More buyers have access to highly technical buying consultants, sophisticated decision-making support tools, and real-time access to customer reviews of products and services. Technology also has helped buyers hold fewer inventories, manage just-in-time inventory, and embrace systematic purchasing.
Sales team technology is increasingly sophisticated, and salespeople must become skilled at using the handheld devices, mobile computing, instant messaging, and social networking applications that have revolutionized how salespeople sell.
Selling is taking place in new venues and channels. For example, the “click to talk live” feature of many websites blends customer service with telesales in a call-center environment. Selling is also becoming the responsibility of non-traditional sales roles, and companies are cross-training installation, service, product development, and other staff in sales techniques.

Demographics
For the first time in history, sales managers may find themselves managing members of three or four distinct generations in the workplace. In industrialized markets, these diverse workers bring differing approaches to their work, their learning, and the ways in which they respond to management and hierarchy.
The United States and many other industrialized nations are also facing the imminent retirement of hundreds of thousands of skilled, knowledgeable workers. Despite the fact that technology has rendered many jobs obsolete, the need for skilled salespeople remains great; and, while most other professions can rely on a steady supply of potential employees from high school, college, or workforce-development programs, the sales profession lacks a comparable system to generate new talent. Over the past five years, colleges and universities have begun to offer courses in professional selling, but not nearly enough to meet the need.

Implications of these Trends: Changes in Buyers’ Expectations
Buyer expectations are rapidly changing. As they become more knowledgeable and informed, they expect the same from their salespeople. They expect sellers to be stakeholders in the buying organization’s —as well as the selling organization’s — success and to work as partners to find advantageous business solutions. Increased competition means that buyers have many more choices and can be more discriminating and demanding. Further, the requirements of a rigid bottom line and brutal competition have driven the commoditization of many products.

The buyer-seller relationship contract has irrevocably changed. Here is how:
 Increased responsibility on the part of the salesperson. Salespeople are under increased pressure to attain not only the goals of the selling organization, but the goals of the buying organization as well. Salespeople are learning that they must be willing to accept responsibility for ensuring the success of both the buyer and the seller, as defined by each party.
Sales managers should recognize that their products, which they thought were sufficiently different from other competitors, may be viewed as commodities by many buyers who cannot make the connection between the problems they have, the outcomes they wish to attain, and the potential solution being offered.

 Increased need for relationship selling. Salespeople also are continuing to transition from transactional selling to consultative selling. More firms are striving to become trusted advisors to their customers. As a result, salespeople are focusing on developing deeper relationships and personal networks inside their target companies as well as within the specific industry.
Such salesperson skills as listening, analyzing, problem solving, and questioning help buyers navigate the complexity of the solution and the plethora of available information. Communication skills such as active listening can help sellers identify root problems and hidden obstacles that affect the buyer’s business success. Building rapport, demonstrating patience, and exercising astute timing contribute to building the foundation for a trusting relationship.

 Increased seller responsiveness. A keen focus on monthly or quarterly results forces many sales professionals into a commodity-selling situation that is very transactional. However, sales team members must maintain professionalism with buyers who may not have the same timeframe or who may have strong negotiating skills. The salesperson must stay focused on delivering value to the buyer based on mutually agreed-upon goals and objectives. This requires taking the client’s best interest into account while providing a relevant solution to the business issues at hand. At the same time, salespeople need to balance revenue implications with ethical and legal considerations.

 Truly productive sales environments. Changing times have brought a decreased emphasis on quotas as more firms examine the profitability of specific sales and of service to the individual customer. More sophisticated productivity measures are surfacing as organizations attempt to shift or replace direct selling with lower-cost sales channels, such as telemarketing, direct mail, or email marketing—with little or no success.
More important, because of the increased complexity of the selling environment, organizations are working hard to ensure their sales team stays focused on the most appropriate use of time. These challenges place an increased expectation upon those who deliver sales training—and rightfully so. Learning organizations and sales team members are uniquely positioned to work together to achieve revenue growth goals, improve salesperson competency, and achieve world-class sales performance.

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Comments

One Comment on Four Trends that are Shaping the Sales Profession and Driving Changes in Buyers’ Expectations. Four Changes on The Buyer-Seller Relationship Contract.

Inspiring Stories on Sun, 6th Feb 2011 1:18 pm

For the first time in history, sales managers may find themselves managing members of three or four distinct generations in the workplace. In industrialized markets, these diverse workers bring differing approaches to their work, their learning, and the ways in which they respond to management and hierarchy.

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