Discipline and Process Confront Chaos: Liberating the Sales Machine in the Internet Era

If there is any part of the organizational hierarchy that has clung to a legacy of business regimentation in the face of the 'whatever, ethos' prevalent in the internet era it is sales.

Terms like 'discipline,' 'process' and - gasp! - 'control' are still bandied about like, well, when they were still reflected in actual outcomes.

But the 'net - and the availability of data - have created a new environment in which customers are no longer as dependent as they once were on the knowledge of the sales force. Now they are looking for a partner they trust to advise, not a high pressure spiel-meister. As the following article explains, this can work to the sellers' advantage, assuming they are cognizant of the change and willing to work with it rather than fight it.

The investment required to make the sale has gone up, so there is a benefit in better understanding about what the customer wants and then delivering it because it has become apparent they will pay more for what they want, which means getting to that point is better for everyone involved. JL

Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nicholas Toman comment in Harvard Business Review:

Sales has been caught off guard by a dramatic shift in customers’ buying behavior. Even as leadership has tightened compliance with the processes that have served so well, sales performance has grown increasingly erratic. Companies are reporting longer sales cycle times, lower conversion rates, less reliable forecasts, and compressed margins. The sales machine is stalling.
Sales leaders have long fixated on process discipline. They have created opportunity scorecards, qualification criteria, and activity metrics—all part of a formal sales process designed to help their team members replicate the approaches of star performers. This is the world of the sales machine, built to outsell less focused, less disciplined competitors through brute efficiency and world-class tools and training.
For years, tuning this machine has been the primary means of boosting sales productivity.

The good news is that the way forward is clear. In our research at CEB, we have found that the very approaches that made the sales machine so effective now make selling harder. We have also identified the keys to winning in this new environment: Leaders must abandon their fixation on process compliance and embrace a flexible approach to selling driven by sales reps’ reliance on insight and judgment.
The Rise of Insight Selling Until recently, customers seeking business solutions had to ask suppliers for guidance early in the purchasing process, because crucial information wasn’t available anywhere else. But today customers are better informed than ever before. By the time they approach suppliers, they generally have a clear idea of the problem they need to solve, the solutions that are available, and the price they’re willing to pay. In this world, process-driven sales machine approaches fall short, because they give sales reps no room to exercise judgment and creativity in dealing with highly knowledgeable customers. They leave reps with little to do but compete on price. As we explored in our HBR article “The End of Solution Sales” (July–August 2012), the new environment favors creative and adaptable sellers who challenge customers with disruptive insights into their business—and offer unexpected solutions (see the sidebar “Selling to Empowered Customers”).

Selling to Empowered Customers

Sales strategy used to center on answering a simple question: In a world where customers learn primarily from suppliers, how do you become the one that customers learn from first? Being that favored resource allowed suppliers to shape and ultimately win deals. The approach went like this: Identify customers early in their learning process; put a solution in front of them before anyone else does; highlight how it meets their needs; and push the deal through faster than competitors can.
Like their colleagues in manufacturing, sales leaders invested heavily in performance management systems designed to track how well reps complied with this process, and they continually tuned the performance of their sales machine. This approach worked well as long as suppliers offered discrete products and controlled the information about them.
But today, as suppliers have moved from selling individual, easily commoditized products to offering complex “solutions,” customers—wary of the scale, disruption, and cost—have responded by scrutinizing deals more closely. They require consensus from more stakeholders than ever before; the days of the one-stop decision maker are over. IT sales executives complain that they must “sell beyond the CIO,” and medical device suppliers grumble about the need to sell to purchasing organizations. Worse, even after they’ve tracked down these stakeholders and won them over, sales reps still need to stitch the buy-in of these individuals into an organizational decision.
Empowered customers now approach suppliers armed with a clear idea of their own needs, the potential solutions, and what they’re willing to pay. When suppliers encounter such customers, there’s often little left to negotiate but price.
As a result, a supplier’s biggest competitive challenge today isn’t so much the competition’s ability to sell as it is the customer’s ability to learn. Whereas competing against a rival’s ability to sell requires superior sales discipline—more calls per hour, visits per week, and so on—competing against a customer’s ability to learn requires superior teaching skills, a talent for revealing novel and important information about the business that the customer has overlooked. The best sales reps excel at this kind of teaching and can link the insights that arise to the solutions their firm provides.

Such “insight selling” is flexible, in recognition of the many possible routes to a sale. Delivering the right insight in the right way requires determining what the customer has already concluded about its needs and available solutions, who the decision makers are (often not the usual suspects), and what it will take to change their minds. The most effective approach to a sale varies, sometimes radically, from deal to deal. As a result, in recent years sales has seen a dramatic uncoupling of specific sales activities and specific outcomes; the sequential tactics that once led to predictable progress in a sale no longer do.


How can sales leaders best support insight selling? To find out, CEB spent the past year surveying 2,500 sales professionals from more than 30 B2B companies representing every major industry, geography, and go-to-market model in our client membership. We zeroed in on the managerial and organizational attributes most closely associated with star reps’ success. And we corroborated quantitative findings through more than 100 structured interviews with heads of sales, sales operations, and sales excellence, and with frontline sales managers.
The study showed that most large B2B organizations are still designed to achieve peak efficiency by ensuring that reps abide by an established “optimal” behavior. These organizations, all vivid examples of the sales machine, are marked by a strong process orientation, clear lines of authority, and close governance through formal rules. They particularly emphasize individual performance, nurturing a competitive atmosphere characterized by frequent contests, campaigns, and the regular updating of leaderboards. And they monitor sales reps through close attention to near-term metrics—especially cycle times and close rates.