So, you think you can sell? - Deane Vipond

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So, you think you can sell?

Some things are timeless. Like our good-old Sales Wheel. And despite still holding second place in the world’s oldest profession stakes, the wheel never changes. All business need do is honour its humble perfection and apply paint-by-numbers staffing, and bingo! Right? But hang on just a cotton-picking-minute. If that’s true, what’s motivated businesses to play with wheel? Before we see how they’re getting on, let’s acknowledge nothing lasts forever, especially when change offers compelling benefits. At the time, it really did feel that advancing computer technology and new, slick communication platforms had the potential to provide a hallmark of sorts…

Some things are timeless. Like our good-old Sales Wheel. And despite still holding second place in the world’s oldest profession stakes, the wheel never changes. All business need do is honour its humble perfection and apply paint-by-numbers staffing, and bingo! Right?

But hang on just a cotton-picking-minute. If that’s true, what’s motivated businesses to play with wheel? Before we see how they’re getting on, let’s acknowledge nothing lasts forever, especially when change offers compelling benefits. At the time, it really did feel that advancing computer technology and new, slick communication platforms had the potential to provide a hallmark of sorts – a new cleansed sales frontier. Well, at least that’s how it was pitched, having the most stoic of sales managers scratching their heads. Now the story feels more like The Emperor’s New Clothes are almost at the laundry. So, what went on?

Turning back the clock, tampering with the wheel was probably a more accurate description, and which typically leaned more heavily toward online sales lead generation to traditional hunting methods. Advocates for change promoted not having staff out in the real-world meeting real people, instead favouring slicker, more efficient tactics to convince customers to either come on board or stay. No surprises this train of thought extended to other areas, such as customer services teams replacing the art of speaking to real people in preference to more emails and chat-bots. Marketing and communication teams – newly equipped with gung-ho automated customer qualifying systems, the promise of smarter and easier ways to do business, and social media algorithms to fool – simply can’t go wrong. Someone must have also tampered with Marketing 101, because the problem here is very few bothered to tell their customers or prospects!

Some businesses did have early successes, helping feather the nest-for-change even when closer inspection suggests much of the gains were attributed to managing the lumps of coal-face sales activity already on their plates, having banked up from an already choked post-Covid pipeline. Most embarking on more substantial change, having nurtured a new sales model into existence, remain determined to stay-the-course. A deeper dive also suggests some advocating for changes here may have been pussyfooting around instead of confronting and managing things like sales employee call reluctance.

Albeit a sensitive issue for some, a factor also worth considering: the environment at the time ripe for the ‘tail to wag the dog’ evidenced across a wide global political, social and cultural landscape. The key takeaway here? ‘If we are clever, we won’t need to do the stuff we don’t like doing, or the stuff we just don’t want to do’. The reality now is many businesses are suffering a hangover of sorts, facing confusion and lacking an assertive sales development plan. Attempts to automate arguably the most important piece of the sales puzzle (hunting) may have placed financial success more to the hands of the four-winds, and it seems obvious to many that sales employees not already in love with picking up the phone or meeting people in person, need to turn that round quick-pronto or find another job.

On another sobering front, science widely regards our human species survival (to this point in time at least) dependent on us doing something different or better than any other hominid species on the planet. And that is social engagement. Despite our distant-past’s genetic programming echoing strong support of toward traits of social engagement, those factors or influences which dissuade social engagement (in both business and private lives) entertain a worrying premise. Despite how it sounds, ‘social media’ is far from social, and instead dissuades the art of human touch. Social media may well one day soon be shaking in its boots.

On a more positive note, catching up with an old work colleague saw him run through taking his business successfully back to a more traditional sales wheel, having previously axed face-to-face selling roles in favour of cheap, online lead and social media campaigning. Now he describes a business much more positive, having reignited their market offer and much happier and unified staff. The business is now well ahead of their main competition, modestly through the efforts to re-engage sales wheel basics.

There are still oodles of healthy businesses out there determined to keep peering through a ‘fog’ toward new business with fancy tools in the utility belt (mostly unwrapped), yet standing right back it still seems to make some sense having left the Yellow Pages-days behind to boldly embrace a new technology frontier, even if feeling at the time a bit like The Return Of The Bean Counter days of persistent effort to demote sales to the rubbish bin in the corner office. But now there is no denying it. The sales wheel is back, baby! So, let’s all… wake up, eat, prospect, contact, visit, ferret, ferret, eat, present, close, service, service referrals, eat, fall asleep, rinse and repeat…and while the 35+ salespeople will be screaming, ‘But we’re ‘closing’ the whole time, not just at the end!’ it is precisely closing which deserves some attention.

Wait, what!!? Haven’t you just been saying we should leave the sales wheel alone!!??

Well, yes. But it’s time to apply a bit of modern psychology to the old girl. Starting with turning the term ‘sales close’ on its head to ‘sales open’. Stay tuned. The plot thickens.