Post-Modern Sales
Much of sales is still largely premodern. You start at the bottom. You prove your worth by hitting your numbers. You progress. You develop by trial and error, failure and success, you find coaches and mentors, you attend a sales training course using a popular method - e.g. SPIN, Miller Heiman, Challenger, etc. You are an artisan of relationships and persuasion. You have carefully guarded knowledge and a voluminous address book. The salesperson is irreplaceable because you own the customer relationship (not your employer) and your work was opaque. You make your numbers and you are a hero. You miss and the door is over there (don’t let it hit you on the way out).
This isn’t the only model of sales. Just as industrialization took artisanal manufacturing and broken down the construction of an artifact into discrete roles specialising in repeatable activities, so models like the “Predictable Revenue” one beloved of B2B SaaS companies have broken down the manufacturing of deals into discrete roles. Inbound and Outbound SDRs focused on lead generation and qualification, Account Executives focused deal closing, Customer Success, Renewals Specialists and Account Managers focused on adoption, expansion, renewal, up-and-cross selling.
All of this supported by repeatable processes and technological systems - mostly based on the core CRM systems that have proliferated through sales organisations over the last 30 years. In the industrial model, CRM operates as the conveyor belt that moves the prospect along from one specialist worker to the next. The main goal of industrial sales is to optimise the productivity of your workforce and deliver revenue reliably and cost effectively. The last 10 years has seen an explosion of RevTech - marketing automation, sales enablement, revenue intelligence, customer success, lead qualification, configure price quote, etc. All of these systems tend to plug into the CRM backbone of Accounts, Contacts, Leads and Opportunities. However, after all these years, most salespeople have a love-hate relationship with the CRM system - as all humans enabled and constrained by technology do.
It also shifts the ownership of the customer from the individual salesperson to the organisation as a whole - just as no single factory worker is responsible for your car. Power in this model also shifts upwards to the Sales Leader - who orchestrations the different roles and technologies.
The predictable revenue model fitted well with the 2010s. Cheap venture capital encouraged startups to focus on ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) growth at the expense of everything else. Profitability probably meant that you weren’t trying hard enough. The winding back of QE and the raising of interest rates in 2022 has ended that era with a resounding thud. And that’s not the only challenge that salespeople face.
New AI-driven technologies (such as chatGPT) are removing the easy work of order taking and basic prospecting.
The industrial model has led to a focus on narrow specialisation at the expense of deep customer, domain, and industry knowledge. Should your company’s first contact with a CEO be a 22 year old SDR who started 3 weeks ago?
The heavily metrics driven approach of predictable revenue combined with the high ARR growth demands of businesses puts huge stress on individual salespeople. Tempers can get frayed and mistakes made. Relationships are delicate and they can be easily damaged on the brutal sales factory floor. In particular, the importance of discovery (understanding the needs and wants of the customer) can be lost.
So what can you do? As a salesperson? As a sales leader?
The lessons from Marketing are instructive here. Technology has transformed marketing execution. And the focus on execution has pulled many marketers away from the broader focus of their profession. Mark Ritson (the Jim Jefferies of Marketing Education) has bemoaned the average marketer’s lack of knowledge. He expands the focus of marketers beyond TikTok and Facebook ads to the importance of Market Orientation, Diagnosis and Strategy before Execution and the role of Product, Price and Distribution alongside Communications. And his Mini-MBAs in Marketing and Brand Management have been highly successful (with over 19,000 graduates worldwide).
If anything, Sales is far more anti-intellectual than Marketing. Marketing degrees is an accepted subject to be taught and researched within business schools. Outside of the US, Sales is not. Business schools show little interest in developing courses around this and salespeople little interest in demanding them. This is a mistake. Sales can be a noble profession - with an emphasis on that last word. “Professionalism” is important for most salespeople - and it generally means dressing nicely and being polite and punctual. But these are just table stakes. We expect more of our doctors and lawyers than to just wear a tie and turn up on time. We expect them to have access to an evidence-supported base of knowledge, to be able to articulate that knowledge, and to be able to relate that knowledge to us personally. Shouldn’t we expect as much of salespeople? And getting to this without some type of formal training is not easy.
As for process, we should not throw away the lessons and advantages of the artisanal and industrial approaches. They can still work. But neither of them is enough. We should start by recognising that there is no one best process to rule them and in the darkness bind them. The work of Leff Bonney shows that out of four common sales approaches (Consultative, Product-Expertise, Disruptive, Vision) no one is the best in all circumstances. Rather, the situation with the buyer defines which approach a salesperson should use.
We should then recognise that we need to think about sales operating at many levels. Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana distinguish Call, Opportunity, Account and Territory management - shifting from the micro to macro - that sales functions need to master. Many traditional sales processes focus on Call and Opportunity (as these are most frequently encountered by salespeople). But it is not just sales leaders who need to understand how decisions at one level impact decisions at the others and to understand the whole buyer journey from before they contact your organisation to after they end their relationship with it.
Salespeople will work technology in new ways.
AI will automate low value tasks. How do you know a task is low value? Well, because a machine can do it. The list of activities that AI will be able to undertake will grow significantly over time.
Salespeople need to use machines to help them where they can and focus heavily on where they can make a difference - in deep knowledge of the customers wants and needs, in the forming and finessing of relationships, and in the building of prospect confidence.
Successful salespeople will not reject technology that measures their performance, they will embrace it (in much the same way that elite athletes do). But to embrace it, they will need to own it (and feel that they own it).
Finally, the role of the sales leader shifts from managing in a factory to enabling a highly agile dance of salespeople and machines - a sales cyborg ballet. To do this you will need to move beyond simple deal coaching skills (although these remain critically important) to mastery of the disparate people, processes and technologies discussed above. On top of that, you need to be able to talk to your peers in the business (e.g. Marketing, Finance, Operations, Services, Production/Engineering) in the languages of these different groups. Sales does not stand by itself but enables and is enabled by others. You don’t just need to do discovery outside the business. No one ever said being a leader was easy.
As long as there are humans who need and want things, there will be work to be done. Happy selling.