Donal Daly’s Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World should be on every business leaders’ mandatory resource list, especially for those of us who know they need to boost their commercial team’s organic impact … but don’t know how to practically tackle all that needs to be done in such a complex customer / competitor world. Donal gives practical advice, processes and metrics that you can adapt to your own business circumstances and his contemporary and extensive research into how today’s customers are thinking and wanting to be served differently brings a critical mirror to reflect how well or not you are servicing your key and future accounts … and what you should be doing about changing the way you manage your sales force’s interactions with their customers. While much is talked about the data evolution and artificial intelligence, Donal breaks it down into a realism he coins as ‘augmented intelligence’ and again challenges us to apply these new tools in a smart way to overcome the tidal wave of overwhelming reports that fail to inform adequately or fast enough.
Patrick Hogan | Vice President Commercial Excellence | Honeywell
The customer of the future is not the customer of the past and sales organizations have to engage differently. At the core this book is a blueprint for the future of Digital Sales Transformation.
Tiffani Bova | Global Customer – Growth & Innovation Evangelist | Salesforce
Most people just assume the Digital Transformation is all about tech. I love that Donal sees what’s always been at the heart of transformational change – people. That sounds philosophical, but this book is actually more strategic and execution-oriented: a must-read for anyone in sales and post-sales leadership.
Nick Mehta | CEO | Gainsight
Customer first. Donal reminds the reader of this important theme. As we navigate in this complex world, a seller must stay focused on the customer, in order to be successful and truly transform sales. This book provides a blueprint and is one I recommend to anyone working in a Sales or Marketing organization.
Sanjay Poonen | Chief Operating Officer, Customer Operations | VMWare
Digital Transformation is driving profound change in how customers engage. With the right balance of methodology, technology and a focus on the customer, Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World is the blueprint for salespeople to make their customers successful and outpace their competition.
Mark Roberge | Senior Lecturer | Harvard Business School / former CRO | Hubspot
Outstanding food for thought in this book for modern enterprise B2B sellers. Donal provides great insights around how to select the right customers and then create value for them. A clear guide on how to balance Augmented Intelligence with human judgment to achieve success.
Chano Fernandez | Executive Vice President, Global Field Operations | Workday
The future, with all its anticipated marvels and challenges, is not just around the corner; it is already here. Digital Transformation is impacting every aspect of our lives. The everyday flow of information and the attention that it demands is only going to increase, and all of us have to adapt to it in order to deliver business success. This ‘race for attention’ impacts our customers as well. Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World does a wonderful job explaining the details and the technological impacts of these changes, as well as dedicating a lot of space in the book to describing the inevitable changes in the way that customer relationships will develop. Donal delivers vital advice for any sales manager living in our new digital era, at the same time putting his finger on a key and ever-relevant point, saying that the basics of sales aren’t gone. The first and perhaps the most important question a salesperson can ask himself is: “What problems does your customer have that you can solve better than anyone else?” This question is really timeless; business problems might be different, the way you solve them might be different, but the basic rules of selling are as relevant as ever.
Richard van Wageningen | Senior Vice President IMEAR | Orange Business Services
This book is thought provoking and inspirational. Donal explains with tremendous clarity how Digital Transformation can be used to get closer to customers. It is a must read for all sales leaders who value and aspire to a Customer First experience.
Jon Ireland | Business Change Executive | SDL plc
The world of selling (and buying!) is undergoing dramatic changes driven by Digital Transformation and most importantly, customer expectations. Donal provides a clear framework to assess these changes and enable leaders to adapt to extract value for themselves and their customers.
Avanish Sahai | Vice President Worldwide ISV and Technology Alliances | ServiceNow
Digital Sales Transformation is a recipe for collaborative customer success. Donal unveils his Customer Impact Architecture to explain how today’s customers want to buy and clearly explains how to apply methodology, process and technology for sales success. This book is extremely valuable to both buyers and sellers.
Ingrid De Doncker | CEO | iDDea
Donal’s book provides a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of modern sales strategies, reflecting the twin dynamics of Digital Transformation and Customer Centricity. A must-read for those preparing for the future of selling, by one of the world’s foremost experts in sales transformation.
Umberto Milletti | CEO | InsideView
Sales process automation has become table stakes for organizations looking to maximize growth. In Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World, Donal expertly outlines how you can take the next step by leveraging AI. The potential to deliver near real-time actionable insight to buyers based on where they are in the process is game changing. That being said, this is more than a theoretical discussion on technology. It’s a blueprint for how a company should run Sales. Any Sales Leader, CEO or Board Member would benefit from reading this book.
Don Soucy | Executive Vice President of Global Sales | Spok
The heart of digital transformation is the business model shift. In this post-sale, on demand, attention economy, we no longer sell products but deliver on a brand promise. This ‘must read’ book by Donal will help executives understand how the seller can start with empathy for the customer and build their transformation from this first principles design point.
R “Ray” Wang | Principal Analyst & Founder | Constellation Research, Inc.
DIGITAL SALES TRANSFORMATION
IN A CUSTOMER FIRST WORLD
Donal Daly
Published by OAK TREE PRESS
www.oaktreepress.com / www.SuccessStore.com
© 2017 Donal Daly, Altify Inc.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78119 328 0 (Hardback)
ISBN 978 1 78119 329 7 (Paperback)
ISBN 978 1 78119 330 3 (ePub)
ISBN 978 1 78119 331 0 (Kindle)
ISBN 978 1 78119 332 7 (PDF)
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or electronically without written permission of the publisher. Such written permission also must be obtained before any part of this publication is stored in a retrieval system of any nature. Requests for permission should be directed to Oak Tree Press, info@oaktreepress.com.
CONTENTS
Figures
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1 Introduction
2 Digital Sales Transformation Part 1: Discover Impact
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Mat Singer, Level 3 / CenturyLink
3 Digital Sales Transformation Part 2: Customer Engagement Model
4 Digital Sales Transformation Part 3: Capabilities Assessment
5 The Ideal Customer Profile
6 Relationships: The Buyer’s Perspective
7 A Structure for Building Relationships
8 The Executive Sponsor: Their Role in Large Accounts
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Glenn Davis’ 7 Key Principles of Enduring Executive Sponsor Programs
A Practitioner’s Perspective
5 Benefits of Executive Sponsor Programs Thanhia Sanchez, Vice President Solutions Engineers and Sales Enablement, Deltek
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Jon Ireland, Business Change Executive, SDL plc
9 Know Your Customer First
A Sales Story
10 Create and Communicate Value
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Janice Rapoza, Sr. Director, Global Sales Enablement Programs, Brocade
11 Communicate Value at Scale: Account Based Marketing
12 The Role of AI in Enterprise Sales
13 Sales Process
A Practitioner’s Perspective
JP Knapp, AVP Vocera Communications
14 Opportunity Management
A Practitioner’s Perspective
5 Benefits of Relationship Maps
Marc Parizot, B&GA Sales Director at Honeywell Aerospace
15 Account Management
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Benefits of Account Planning / Management Billy Martin, Senior Director, Global Sales Enablement Programs, Salesforce
16 Sales Performance Management
A Practitioner’s Perspective
Benefits of AI for Sales Management
Haiden Smith, Vice President Business
Development – Automotive America, syncreon
17 Final Words
Index
About the Author
FIGURES
1 The Buyer’s Problem
2 The Customer Impact Architecture Model
3 The Buyer’s Statements and the Seller’s Strategies
4 Digital Sales Transformation in a Customer First World
5 Customer Impact Levels – Determining Factors
6 Customer Impact Levels – Determining Factors – Definitions
7 Customer Impact Levels – Determining Factors – Guideline Values
8 The Buyer’s Statements and the Seller’s Strategies – 2
9 The Sales Process in CRM
10 Smart Sales Content
11 Guided Sales Call Planning – Example
12 Customer Impact Level 1 – Blueprint
13 Structured Opportunity Qualification
14 The Customer Insight Map
15 Pipeline Management
16 Sales Analytics
17 Customer Impact Level 2 – Blueprint
18 Collaborative Account Management
19 The Account Scorecard
20 The Executive Dashboard
21 Account Reporting
22 Market Penetration
23 Customer Impact Level 3 – Blueprint
24 Customer Impact Level 1 – Indicators
25 Customer Impact Level 1 – Evidence of Sales Problems
26 Customer Impact Level 1 – Obstacles
27 Customer Impact Level 2 – Indicators
28 Customer Impact Level 2 – Evidence of Sales Problems
29 Customer Impact Level 2 – Obstacles
30 Customer Impact Level 3 – Indicators
31 Customer Impact Level 3 – Evidence of Sales Problems
32 Customer Impact Level 3 – Obstacles
33 Pareto in Practice
34 Cohort Analysis: Revenue by Customer Size
35 Cohort Analysis: Growth in Annual Recurring Revenue
36 Firmographics – Attributes
37 The Customer Business Problem
38 Positive Impact Potential
39 Sellers’ Interaction with Key Decision Makers
40 The Likelihood of Purchase Completion
41 The Relationship Map
42 Sellers’ Access to Key Buying Influencers
43 When Buyers and Sellers First Engage
44 When Buyers Find It Helpful to Speak with Someone
45 The Buyer’s Problem – 2
46 The Business Relationship Pyramid
47 The Customer’s Decision Cycle
48 Marc Benioff’s Sketch for Angela Ahrendts
49 A Bureaucratic Culture – Attributes
50 An Entrepreneurial Culture – Attributes
51 A Collaborative Culture – Attributes
52 An Individualistic Culture – Attributes
53 The Relationship Map for XCo
54 The Relationship Map for XCo – Annotated
55 The Level of Influence Map
56 The Relationship Map – 2
57 The Relationship Map – 2 – Focus Area
58 Buyers’ Adaptability to Change
59 Preference with Key Players
60 Relationship and Preference – Current State
61 Relationship and Preference – Desired State
62 The Preference Gap
63 Buying Roles – Definitions
64 The Decline in Trust in Institutions
65 The Executive Sponsor Program – Risk and Impact
66 The Executive Sponsor Program – Key Performance Indicators
67 The Internal Responsibilities of the Executive Sponsor
68 The External Responsibilities of the Executive Sponsor
69 The Responsibilities of the Account Manager
70 The Customer’s Commitment to the Executive Sponsor
71 The Executive Sponsor Program Action Plan – Program Set-up
72 The Executive Sponsor Program Action Plan – Program Execution
73 The Executive Sponsor Program Action Plan – Program Measurement
74 Firmographics – A High Level Customer Description
75 The Customer Insight Map – 2
76 The Problem Discovery Model
77 The Propensity to Buy Curve
78 The Value Creation Curve
79 The Customer Insight Map – Annotated for the Sales Leader
80 Organizational Impact Factors
81 Organizational Impact of Products and Services
82 Value Creation
83 What Percentage of Meetings are Valuable to the Customer?
84 Solution Sales Kit Components
85 The Sales and Marketing Continuum
86 The Impact of Sales and Marketing Alignment
87 Account Tiers
88 ABM – Ownership and Roles
89 ABM Activity, Mapped to Owner and Applicability for ABM Tiers
90 Understanding Personas
91 Awareness and Interest ABM Play: Get Closer to Your Large Accounts
92 Awareness and Interest ABM Play: Get Closer to Your Large Accounts – Detailed Steps
93 A Simple ABM Account Play
94 Other Types of ABM Plays and their Components
95 Contact Metrics
96 Contact Roles
97 Website Traffic
98 Website Minutes Spent
99 An ABM Play – Interaction Summary
100 The Knowledge Curve
101 Cork to Waterville
102 Altify Max: Insights – Opportunities
103 Altify Max Insight Editor – Rules, Advice and Context Edited in a Simple GUI
104 Altify Max: Insights – Feedback Loop
105 Altify Max: Closing the Loop
106 Hindsight, Insight and Foresight
107 The Four Phases of Analytics
108 Sales Process – Overview
109 The Benefits of a Buyer Centric Sales Process
110 An Automated Sales Process in Software
111 Sales Stage Duration / Win Probability
112 Weighted Pipeline Approach
113 Guided Forecast Approach
114 Forecast Guidance
115 Opportunity Management – Overview
116 The Customer Insight Map – 3
117 The Relationship Map – 3
118 Four Key Questions
119 Is There an Opportunity?
120 Can We Compete?
121 Can We Win?
122 Is It Worth Winning?
123 Account Management – Overview
124 The Whitespace Map – Detail (Blank)
125 The Whitespace Map – Detail (Updated)
126 The Whitespace Map in Software
127 The Whitespace Map – Detail (Updated 2)
128 Pipeline Objective, Strategy and Actions
129 Revenue Objective, Strategy and Actions
130 The Behaviors and Practices Required in the Sales Manager’s Role
131 Sales Performance Management – Overview
132 The Sales Velocity Equation
133 Measuring Won and Lost Sales Cycles
134 Measuring Value and Number Win Rate
135 Revenue Outlook – Current State
136 What Changed in My Revenue Outlook?
137 Pipeline Management – 2
138 The Digital Sales Transformation Architecture Model
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At times like this I feel very fortunate. Writing for me is sometimes hard, but more often it is a joy. It is how I think and formulate my thoughts. I have never been one who has been able to outsource writing. I think and I start to write and then I interact with people who have lived in the world I am trying to improve, and then I think again. It is only through that process that the threads come together. Sometimes the hypothesis I present is flawed and I learn from many who are wiser or more experienced. Then there are those few enriching moments when I cause my collaborators to think, to question their perceptions, or exercise their imagination. In every case though, the conversations are inspiring and I am the beneficiary of wisdom more often than not. For that, and the genuine efforts many have made to make this book better than I could ever have managed on my own, I am eternally grateful.
Firstly, to you the reader, I want to express my appreciation that you have given of your time to read the book. Please let me know if it provided you with even a few thoughts to improve your sales performance, and let me know what else you would like to know. I will continue this story on my website at donaldaly.com.
Mike Rosenbaum is one of the most important leaders in the global Cloud industry. As EVP CRM Apps at Salesforce, his hand is on the tiller guiding the future vision for millions of the world’s knowledge workers. I am fortunate to have known Mike for many years. Even as his role in Salesforce expanded to its current scale and scope, Mike has always remained gracious and generous with his time. He is one of the world’s gentlemen. I am proud that Mike agreed, without fuss or hesitation, to write the Foreword for my book. A huge expression of gratitude is due to Mike, and also to Kate Wesson at Salesforce, who shepherded and supported this effort.
To the reviewers: thank you for your feedback and for your generous testimonials – Avanish Sahai, Chano Fernandez, Don Soucy, Ingrid De Doncker, Jon Ireland, Mark Roberge, Nick Mehta, Patrick Hogan, Ray Wang, Richard van Wageningen, Sanjay Poonen, Tiffani Bova, and Umberto Milletti.
Many of the early reviewers really valued the Practitioner’s Perspective vignettes. For telling their stories and sharing wisdom, I want to thank Billy Martin, Glenn Davis, Haiden Smith, Janice Rapoza, Jon Ireland, Marc Parizot, Mat Singer, JP Knapp, and Thanhia Sanchez, for enriching the narrative.
Many others toiled selflessly to improve my work: the core content, the design, the methodology, the writing, the references, and of course the proof reading, the layout, and the flow.
Wendy Reed’s advice on the kernel of the methodology ensured that I did not go astray as she constantly probed and questioned the structure and integrity of my thinking. I am indebted to her for her gift of time and energy to this project. Her vast experience and attention to detail greatly enhanced the methods and the flow of the overall book. The coalface experience of Phil Trapani, gained through multiple customer engagements (everyone loves Phil) and the decades of methodology wisdom from Greg Kiernan, further strengthened its coherence and completeness. This book is much improved by their contributions.
As this book is set in a Customer First world I was extremely fortunate to have the guiding hand of Ingrid De Doncker, making sure that the buyer’s perspective was honestly reflected throughout. Ingrid’s vision of the future of the buyer, and her expertise as a strategic procurement consultant, gave me an unfair advantage. I could look at the buyer / seller engagement though both sets of eyes at the same time. It is down to her frequent and good-natured interventions that I might appear somewhat knowledgeable about the buyer’s perspective.
Looking at this book in its totality, I am delighted with the overall feel. That’s due in no small part to the design talents and graphics flair of Rachel Quinn, Nigel Cullington, and Kelley Joss. They delivered their immense workload in an amazingly short timeframe, and always with a smile. I can’t thank them enough.
And, then there is my indefatigable editor, Brian O’Kane. This is the fifth book on which we have collaborated. His ability to turn my sometimes convoluted writing into consumable reading, his patience and tenacity, and quite unbelievable productivity has been the solid foundation on which this project was built. I’m privileged to have Brian as my editor.
To Anthony Reynolds, the new CEO I was fortunate to hire at Altify, and his entire team, I want to express my sincere thanks. They allowed me the space to write this book and set out my thoughts and concepts that I hope will improve not just the lives of the sales organizations that Altify serves, but also others who choose to embark on the journey of Digital Sales Transformation.
As ever, my family supported me through the ups and down of this effort, and I am forever grateful to Cleona, Robin and Christian for putting up with me and who know that when I am writing a book it just means that Dad is spending a lot of time in “the box.”
Thank you, Donal
FOREWORD
Mike Rosenbaum
EVP, CRM Apps, Salesforce
We are living in an era of unprecedented change. An obvious statement, sophomoric even, but it’s true. Technology has had a sweeping impact on society and nothing has been left untouched. Business models have been indelibly upended. Communication is constant – our daily lives are punctuated with texts, emojis and videos that capture every moment, from the mundane to the magical. How we communicate, how we relate to each other and what we expect from each other has changed forever. It’s also changed what we expect from companies, how we expect to relate to them and communicate with them, and what it means to be a customer.
At Salesforce, we call this the ‘Age of the Customer.’ In this book, Donal Daly calls it ‘The Customer First World.’ It’s the idea that information technology advances (the cloud, mobile, social, artificial intelligence, and whatever we think of next) have ushered in a new type of customer expectation. And the businesses that succeed will reorganize to put customers at the center of everything they do. Customer centricity isn’t radical. Family-run restaurants, neighborhood hardware stores and local coffee shops have practiced customer centricity for decades – they just called it ‘good business.’ But, the explosion of information technology has changed everything. Not just what’s possible but what’s expected and customer expectations are now sky-high. We want instant answers, fast customer service and effortless, frustration-free experiences that just work. We expect great service wherever we go – whether we’re ordering coffee at our local independent coffee shop or using the Starbucks mobile app. And when we don’t have a good experience, we’re underwhelmed, we’re annoyed, we tweet about it and we remember it.
The forward thinking companies that put customers first are setting a new standard that their competitors must compete with. Like 80 million others,1 I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber and at least once a week, I order something that usually arrives within one or two days. There is hardly ever a problem and when occasionally there is, fixing it is as easy as opening my Amazon app. Now ordering something from anywhere else is a risk, because a high bar has been set. I’m very happy with that bar and anything below that bar is frustrating. On a rational level, I understand that Amazon has a world class distribution network and an incredibly talented information technology organization that smaller companies can’t match. But on an emotional level, the bar has been set and I really want that consistently ideal experience. I am a demanding, exacting and somewhat irrational customer. We all are.
Amazon’s not unique. It has embraced technology (and supply chain, distribution and logistics) to create an amazing customer experience, but so have many other companies. Warby Parker has reinvented the once-painful process of buying glasses. Casper has made it possible to order a high-end bed online, saving you (and your marriage) a Saturday of mattress haggling. Tesla has redefined luxury cars – everything from the manufacturing to the purchasing experience – making their dealerships like Apple Stores, a place where high-pressure sales don’t exist and Tesla owners and enthusiasts are equally welcome.2
These brands and many others have digitally transformed so much so that they are actually technology companies. Information technology is such a disruptive force that every company today is a technology company, whether they want it or not.3 Almost every company that I meet with wants to digitally transform but faces trade-offs: legacy systems, competing priorities, budget, change management, the list goes on and on. There are always countless reasons why it’s hard to change. But I urge every single one of them – and you – to get started. Now. Today. Find a project where you can move and move fast. Do that one project, chalk up a win and then do another and another and another. You won’t regret it. In fact, you’ll be amazed by what you can accomplish.
Mike Rosenbaum
EVP, CRM Apps, Salesforce
A Note from Anthony Reynolds, CEO, Altify
When I first met Donal I was excited about the company he had built. I was looking for a company to lead that could stake a claim, make a difference in a market, and solve an important problem. The vision, the product-market fit, the great customers were all the right core ingredients. So Donal and I got to talking.
Over a period of about five months I got to know Donal and Altify, and joined as CEO on February 1, 2017. Even though I had spent a lot of time before that doing diligence, talking to customers and getting to know the people at Altify, I still wondered a little about what I would find under the covers.
As a new CEO, you are always constrained by time and as a result you worry about two things when joining a new company. First, there’s the product. If the product doesn’t work, then it is really hard to grow a business and fixing product issues is often something that does not happen overnight. The reality at Altify is that I did not need to have any concerns there. This is the first time in my career as an executive where I have not had to give up a weekend to work on a customer’s problem with the product. It just works.
The other thing that is hard to fix is company culture and from our first company kick-off in Dublin, Ireland in February 2017, I have been struck by the amazing collegial, collaborative and supportive nature of the team at Altify. People just love to come to work every day to help each other and help our customers. Our customers’ success drives our operational priorities and is the bedrock of our culture. That is an asset I didn’t know we had, and it is a tremendous accelerator for growth.
But beyond all of this I am excited to lead a company with such a great vision, constantly challenged and always evolving. The company started in 2005 with a vision, in Donal’s words: “to improve the lives of salespeople.” I’ve seen so much evidence of that in my short time here.
So, I am delighted to introduce this book painting the vision, grounded in today’s realities, and peeking just a little around the corner into the future. The re-imagined methodology, and the creative application of technology are very exciting. The book lays out clearly the fact that there are better ways to do what we do today, and Donal has helped us to visualize how we can drive value for and with our customers in ways that heretofore seemed impossible.
I am proud to be CEO at this great company, and I hope you find this book as helpful and inspiring as I did. I look forward to joining you on your journey to Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World.
Anthony Reynolds
CEO, Altify
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
It was a day in July, in the middle of summer, and it was raining. Not just light rain, but that kind that bounces off the roof of your car doing its best impression of a Buddy Rich jazz drum solo, staccato one minute and almost harmonious the next. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was in Cork in Ireland, sitting in my car outside the Boole Library in my alma mater University College Cork (UCC). It rains a lot in Ireland, but that’s why the country is so beautiful, and the people so imaginative. When it’s raining all the time you need to be creative.
Now, a few decades after I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, it was my daughter’s turn to start her university life. As she was registering with the college I was performing my duly appointed role as chauffeur. As I sat in my car I reminisced about the things I had learned during my time in UCC. I enjoyed college a lot (I mean really enjoyed it) so I might not have been the world’s most dedicated student of engineering. As I reflected on that time, it came to me that more than anything else, I discovered how to think and was taught how to solve problems. These skills have served me well. Thinking matters.
George Boole, he of the eponymous library, is famous not for spending time in Cork, Ireland – in 1849 he was appointed as the first professor of mathematics in UCC – but for the creation of Boolean Logic; you know all those ones and zeros that are the foundation of digital computing.4 (It all started in Cork, so just to annoy my Dublin friends I claim that the Internet was invented in Cork.)
Once the rain stopped, and the sun started to shine – it shines most days between the rain showers – I got out of my car to explore the Boole Library, and came across this quotation:
No general method for the solution of questions can be established which does not recognize the universal laws of thought.
George Boole: The Laws of Thought (1854)
With the evolution of language in the 160 years since, this sentence may now seem a little cumbersome or convoluted. But the key message that I took away from it was that thinking matters if you are to solve any problem.
Seems obvious, right?
But I worry about it. I am concerned that critical thinking skills are diminishing now that Google seems to provide all of the answers and appears to many people to be the ‘solution of questions.’ In too many situations we race headlong into quick answers to slow, deliberate questions. In sales, as in many other business professions, this is dangerous.
As I was driving home, Buddy Rich once more invoking the rain gods to drum on my roof, I asked my daughter what she thought about this. Her response: “Don‘t you help people think for a living? Isn’t that, like, what you do?” prompted me to write this book.
She’s right of course. All great sellers are strategic thinkers first, adopting the maxim of ‘measure twice and cut once’ before they meet with a customer or embark on a sales pursuit. Now, with the rapidly changing dynamics in the market, it seems a worthwhile endeavor to help all knowledge workers – with a particular emphasis on salespeople – to amplify their critical thinking skills.
In 1934, T.S. Eliot, the poet and playwright wrote:
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Eliot was in many ways presaging the Internet Age, the reality shared by Gen-Xers, Millennials and the upcoming Thumb Generation:5 too much information – but too little insight. Millennials who are becoming an increasingly important force in the workplace are characterized by some as tech-savvy and proficient in applying technology to everyday problems efficiently.
But I wonder if the habits learned in an environment where the answer to everything is just a Google search away have in any way reduced their critical faculties, removed the need to develop ideas from first principles, or through that journey to nourish their own perspective. If that is the case with Millennials and indeed with an increasingly large proportion of Gen-Xers – the term ‘Millennials’ is representative much more of a mindset than an age group – then we need to be careful that this trend does not continue with the Thumb Generation.
We want our future sales leaders to leverage the wisdom of others. As they do, they will see the horizon more clearly if they stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before them. We want them to respect the value of lessons learned and to build on those lessons, and to stretch their minds, to extend those models, but we need them to seek insight, to learn the skills of primary research, to be inquisitive, curious and questioning.
We need to help them to think.
The Rise of Digital Transformation
The world in which we live is a world dominated by the race for attention. In the two minutes it has taken you to read to this point in this Introduction, the world sent 300 million emails, watched 15 million videos on YouTube, and searched 8 million times on Google. Salesforce customers processed 6 million transactions in that time, and together we managed to send 10 million emojis! The world is truly moving at Internet speed and it is only getting faster. I wonder though when we will realize that there is no deficit in information; there is a deficit in insight – and that insight is not solely the dominion of machines.
In case you hoped that one day things might slow down or you wouldn’t have to worry about things changing all of the time, well, unfortunately, today is not that day. The future is not around the corner. It just passed you on the street. The world is being digitally transformed as we watch and wonder. Boole’s ones and zeros are affecting every aspect of our personal and business lives:
• According to a September 2017 study6 from BT, the $30B British telecommunications company, 40 percent of CEOs have Digital Transformation at the top of boardroom agenda, with many CEOs leading the projects personally
• The Altify Business Performance Benchmark Study 20177 has similar findings, placing Digital Transformation as the top priority for 47 percent of the study’s 800 participants
• McKinsey & Company, the worldwide management consulting firm, takes it one step further, saying8 that expectations for growth are highest at companies that pursue digital to create new business.
The impact on business of Digital Transformation is clearly immense. Defining a Digital Sales Transformation blueprint to guide sales organizations to respond to this disruption as they struggle to catch up to their more digitally advanced customers is one of the core themes of this book.
The Customer First Mandate
Everything starts with your customers, of course. It always has – and that’s how it should be. But never before has the customer been under so much pressure, or so impatient. The business and personal productivity tools on their smartphones inform the mindset of digital business leaders, and they operate in a fast-moving attention-deficit economy. Wasting their time trying to sell them something they don’t want or need is the worst crime you can perpetrate against these executives.
There are reasons why:
• Only 25 percent of executives want to meet a salesperson9
• Salespeople in the US spend $574B per year in meetings with customers that never progress10
• 41 percent of buyers say they do not prefer incumbent suppliers.11
And yes, there are reasons why just 53 percent of salespeople make quota.12
The role of the salesperson is not just to communicate value to their customer. It is to create value with the customer. Consider the ‘one third problem:’
• Only one third of buyers think meeting a salesperson is valuable13
• In the Altify Business Performance Benchmark Study 2017, one third of sellers admit to not being able to uncover the customer’s problems
• In the same study one third of marketers say they do not understand their customers.
Customers need help. As the world increases in complexity, customers struggle to prioritize their growing list of business pressures. The imperative to make decisions and act quickly creates tremendous anxiety. There is extra-ordinary opportunity for the Customer First salesperson who seeks above all to solve the customer’s problem, understanding that the impact on a customer of a poor buying decision is usually greater than the impact on a salesperson of a lost deal. Winning sellers who adopt this approach rise to the top in the ever-growing SaaS economy. But this time SaaS means ‘Salesperson as a Service’ – always on, always connected, on-demand, in service of the customer, reliable and secure. That’s the path to recurring business.
Customer First is the second main theme of the book and I dedicate a large part of the book describing how to drive mutual value for seller and buyer.
Introducing Digital Sales Transformation | In a Customer First World
Digital Sales Transformation is not solely or primarily about ‘digital sales.’ It is about selling in a digitally transformed world. Ray Wang of Constellation Research defines Digital Transformation as more than just a technology shift:
The digital disruption comes from both transforming business models and shifting how brands, enterprises, people, and machines will engage.
Digital Sales Transformation changes how you sell and transforms how you engage with your customer. Gone are the days when sellers use worn out sales methodologies to battle with their customers, ‘deepen the pain,’ ‘burn the platform,’ or ‘drown them,’ however rationally. (Rational Drowning is one phase in one of the methodologies!) It is now about innovative ways to deliver value to the customer with integrity and respect.
How customers perceive value from a seller is shaped significantly by the impact on their business of the product / solution they purchase. It all starts with the customer.
In Chapter 2: Digital Sales Transformation | Part 1: Discover Impact, I suggest that if, for example, a customer buys a CRM system from Salesforce, the impact will be significant. Buying copier paper from Staples, not so much. When you can categorize customers into levels of Customer Impact you can select the optimum sales engagement model and discover potential sales problems that may exist.
Knowing what’s broken is one side of the coin, and is balanced in Chapter 3: Digital Sales Transformation | Part 2: Customer Engagement Model where I describe the technology components required at each level of Customer Impact to optimize the prescribed sales strategies and execution models. This is where our Digital Sales Transformation journey begins.
To ensure you are ready to begin the journey, in Chapter 4: Digital Sales Transformation | Part 3: Capabilities Assessment, I ask the question: “How do you know if you have a sales problem?” I suggest some symptoms that you might observe in your business and point to the underlying causes.
In a world responding to the Mega Trends of Digital Transformation and Customer First, companies are under pressure to act strategically, collaborate proactively and respond quickly, earning their customer’s business month on month, time over time. Chapter 5: The Ideal Customer Profile invites you to answer three questions to make sure that you’re selecting companies for whom you can best deliver value:
1. Is the company in your sweet-spot (industry, size, region, etc.)?
2. Are they likely to have problems that you can solve?
3. Will they be successful with your product / solution?
This is all about deciding what companies to call on so that you can ensure that you are playing on a field where you can deliver value and win.
The problem sometimes though is that, even when you identify the right companies, you struggle to build relationships with the right people. When I talk about building successful relationships, as I do in Chapter 6: Relationships: The Buyer’s Perspective, I’m talking about mutual authentic engagement between buyer and sellers, founded on trust and respect, guided by shared values in pursuit of shared goals. While this is a high threshold to achieve, it is what your customers deserve, it is how the best customers want to engage, and it provides a safe-zone for constructive brainstorming, bargaining and building rapport.
This not always easy to do, so in Chapter 7: A Structure for Building Relationships I get down to the nitty-gritty, and provide a framework to uncover:
• Who matters?
• How do they think?
• What is your current relationship?
• What is the relationship gap?
• How do you bridge that gap?
Most deals are not lost because you don’t have the best solution or the best price or the best terms and conditions. They are usually lost because you didn’t understand the people or problems. I will get to the problems in a minute, but first I want to spend a little time on the secret weapon that you might not know you have.
In many sales organizations one of the most under-utilized assets is the executive management team. When deployed effectively and with precision, as described in Chapter 8: The Executive Sponsor: Their Role in Large Accounts, companies can achieve deeper strategic relationships and an uncommon level of value alignment with their key customers by leveraging their senior executives. This results in accelerated value creation for you and your customer.
An executive swooping in to help close a deal is not an Executive Sponsor Program – it goes much deeper than that. It’s about the customer’s business and it’s about the long game. It comes down to knowing the customer’s business. Whether you are pursuing a single strategic opportunity or building a strategy to maximize revenue from a large customer, we know that this matters.
Most customers don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. The best way to convince customers that you care is to demonstrate you understand their business, their business issues, the cost of resolution, and the full implications of inaction. Chapter 9: Know Your Customer First explains how to get to know the customer’s business, the cornerstone to maintaining long term business relationships and delivering value to your customer. It sets out seven steps in a repeatable method to know the customer’s business and help them make progress:
1. Who is the customer (company)?
2. What goals matter to the customer and who are the key people that care?
3. Why do these goals matter to the customer?
4. What related projects or initiatives are in place?
5. What is broken that is stopping them being successful?
6. How can you help?
7. What is your gap in knowledge or solution?
Humans can be irksome creatures. When asked, they say they want to make rational decisions based on evidence and science. In practice that’s never the full story. Emotion plays a critical role.
If math was the single arbiter of customer decisions then the role of the salesperson would be greatly diminished. Anyone can present the facts, and as long as those facts are correct and independently verifiable, the messenger is less important than the message. But math without magic is just math, a cold accurate guardian of rational decisions, but a poor custodian of personal connections. In Chapter 10: Create and Communicate Value, I show how to create true insights – honed from deep knowledge of the account, the buyer’s persona, and their typical personal goals – to find the key to unlocking a connection that is both rational and emotional.
Customer engagement is a continuum with a constant focus: consistent delivery of value to the customer. Chapter 11: Communicate Value at Scale: Account Based Marketing introduces how you can begin to turn that value key for many customers at the same time. For any purchase, the customer goes through a number of phases, beginning with Awareness where they learn that you and your product exist. This is followed by Interest where they care about what you (and others) have. The next phase is the critical one: it’s when they establish Preference for a given solution or supplier. The determination of what specific value you can provide to a customer better than anyone else is the fulcrum upon which successful customer engagement is balanced. Once you have targeted the right accounts using your Ideal Customer Profile, and identified the personas, your vehicle to communicate this value at scale is your Account Based Marketing (ABM) play – but only as part of a Customer First integrated Account Planning and Management solution.
The explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions is a wonderful opportunity for practitioners of Digital Sales Transformation. I am particularly excited about the work that Salesforce is doing in this area, democratizing AI in the same way that it has revolutionized cloud computing for all businesses. The optimum solution is a combination of data, science and human judgment, the last based on knowledge and experience. For me the ‘A’ in AI stands for ‘Augmented,’ not ‘Artificial.’
In Chapter 12: The Role of AI in Enterprise Sales, I talk about my AI journey and its pervasive role in all that we do to serve sellers. In 1988 I wrote my first AI book called Expert Systems Introduced. Its purpose was to demystify for the businessperson much of the enigma that was AI at that time, shrouded, as it was, in academic publications replete with inaccessible language. My goal back then was to deliver AI or expert systems for the rest of us. In hindsight that aspiration was perhaps a little premature. But now AI is exploding as a core part of Digital Transformation. My latest AI book Tomorrow Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think, published in late 2016, brings those concepts up to date.
Chapters 13: Sales Process, 14: Opportunity Management, 15: Account Management and 16: Sales Performance Management bring all the concepts of the book together to set you off on your Digital Sales Transformation journey. Mapping process, methodology and technology to the Customer Impact Levels defined in Chapter 2, and the Customer Engagement Model in Chapter 3, these chapters outline the methods – a systematic repeatable series of steps – so that you can execute on the applicable strategies.
This is a time of great opportunity for sellers and customers alike. Technology has enabled an unparalleled velocity of innovation, collaboration and communication. There has never been a time like this. Individuals can do more with their minds than ever before. Innovation offers new ways to do the tasks that we struggle with today and exposes new possibilities that were heretofore impossible. How this plays out is yet to be determined, but the choices we make are important. The coin has been flipped towards the sky and, as it spins in air, we get to influence how it lands for sales professionals and their customers.
I am optimistic about the future of the sales professionals who take a Customer First attitude with them to work every day. This book is intended to be their companion on that journey, equipping them to pause to think about the customer, and to consider the important questions, lest they stumble towards accidental answers.