Image Copyright Shironosov

One of OMG's sales candidate assessment clients in Europe purchased two goldfish. In keeping with their tradition, the client named the two fish, Recommended and Not Recommended.  Surprisingly, recruiting salespeople was not one of the topics addressed in the Richardson 2017 Selling Challenges Study.  Meghan Steiner, from Richardson, was nice enough to send me a copy of the results.  There were a number of interesting findings and of course I had some insights from the report.

Respondents said the following issues are challenges for their companies:

• 24% said gaining higher prices 
• 20% said closing win/win deals
• 17% said maintaining profitability
• 24% said competing against a low cost provider
• 16% said creating a compelling case for change
• 19% said customers who continue to reopen the negotiation
• 15% said positioning a competing value proposition

The 7 findings I listed above came from two different chapters of the report.  Higher prices, win/win deals and profitability came from the chapter on Negotiation.  Positioning, reopening negotiations, competing against low cost providers and the case for change came from the chapter on closing.  

It is clear to me that if you combine those 7 challenges, the real problem
these companies have is that their salespeople are unable to sell value!

The findings came from a survey where most of the 300+ respondents were from companies larger than $500 million, with sales quotas generally running more than $1 million each.

How do the findings compare with OMG's scientific data from the evaluation of 2 million salespeople from 30,000 companies?  Let's compare!

The average score for the Selling Value competency is 56 which means that the salespeople in the 370,000 rows of data in my query have, on average, 56% of the attributes in the Selling Value competency.  You can see that the top 10% are significantly more effective and the bottom 10% are significantly worse!

Another way of looking at this competency is to determine the percentage of salespeople who have selling value as a weakness.  

68% of the salespeople I looked at were weak at Selling Value.  

OMG's data shows that selling value is a much greater issue than the survey suggests.  The likely reason for this is that respondents from large companies probably don't understand the reasons why they have the seven issues bulleted above.  They only recognize the symptoms.

You can see the attributes of the Selling Value competency in this screen shot from a sales force evaluation.

When companies mistakenly believe that their problems lie in negotiating and closing, they tend to seek training on negotiating and closing!  When the real problem is selling value, the training needs to be on what the selling conversations should sound like when you take a more consultative approach, sales process to support a consultative approach, a value-based pricing strategy, and training on selling value.

Here are four other things you should do:

1. See how your salespeople compare to others in your industry and to salespeople in general in any or all of the 21 Sales Core Competencies with OMG's complimentary stat finder tool.

2. Select only strong (16%) and elite (7%) salespeople with OMG's accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment.

3. Become more effective coaching your salespeople in all 21 Sales Core Competencies 

4. Download the 2017 Sales Challenges Study from Richardson.

Image Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo

Yesterday, I was listening to a radio promotion when they said, "Take a selfie with a standie and then, using your smartphone or tablet, upload it to Facebook, or tweet your image using hashtag [something I can't remember]."

Now, pretend it's 1995, and reread the quotation.  Twenty years ago, would you have recognized any of the words other than "take", "and", "then", "using", "your", "or" and "to?"  In 1995, selfie, standie, smartphone, tablet, tweet, hashtag, upload, and Facebook would have had you believing that you were listening to a foreign language.  That's just one example of how dramatically some things have changed in the past 20 years.

Let's take selling.  How dramatically has that changed in 20 years?

There are some obvious changes that most people in sales will recognize, like:

• Salespeople are no longer sources of product knowledge or pricing, both of which are readily available online.
• Salespeople enter the sales cycle only to find their prospects much further along in their buying cycle.
• Salespeople utilize Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, email marketing, blogging, and the web for knowledge and to connect with prospects, before they speak for the first time.
• Personal online networks, like Facebook, Google+, and LInkedIn are exponentially larger than the physical networks of twenty years ago.
• Salespeople with transactional products and services, like tickets, travel, commodities and most retail items have found themselves being replaced by online sales.
• Many salespeople who once worked in a territory or vertical, now find themselves doing the exact same thing by phone.
• Video conferences and phone calls are replacing face-to-face visits.
• Inbound, Lead-Gen, and Appointment Setting Teams are recent additions to Inside Sales.
• Value Propositions and Added Value have given way to salespeople who must now be the value.
• A vast array of productivity tools, especially those that sync between devices, make selling not only more efficient, but more fun.
• National and global competitors are making it more difficult to win the business.
• Demos can be easily conducted online.
• There are vast amounts of free, online resources that individuals can use to improve themselves.

And then there are the changes which are not as obvious, like:

• Selling is more difficult than at any time in the past 30 years.
• Sales Cycles are getting longer.
• Win Rates are getting smaller.
• It's more difficult than ever to reach decision makers.
• Fewer decision makers are making decisions without first getting consensus.
• A modern sales process must be both milestone-centric and customer-centric.
• Salespeople must be able to sell consultatively in order to differentiate themselves.
• The gap between elite salespeople and mediocre salespeople is growing larger.
• Companies are finally recognizing the necessity of formal, customized sales processes, integrated with their Pipeline Management Tools.
• Reliance on demos, early in the sales process, has caused some of the lowest win rates in the past 30 years.
• Salespeople are no longer the money-motivated, materialistic, greedy, self-centered jerks they used to be.

So my question is, are these changes good or bad?  Have you made any or all of these changes?  If you have ignored any of the changes, was it due to ignorance, discomfort, or arrogance?

What is the next change that will rock your world?