The concept of the trust based relationship sales orientation is well established in sales. Old time strategies like pressure selling or canned selling have absolutely no relevancy. The trust based seller is consultative, and wants to help the buyer achieve their strategic priorities through the sales process.
Technology has exploded and given way to sales acceleration through various types of sales rep software, CRM systems, and etc. but something isn’t clicking. The state of the sales rep is in a continued trend of decline, and even with more time spent on sales preparation activities, the buyer is less satisfied than ever.
This begs the question; is the issue somewhere in the process? Or is there just a lack in real sales enablement software.
SUMMARY
- The trust based relationship seller is facing obsolesce
- The empowered buyer see’s less value in developing initial relationships with sellers
- The high speed growth of content marketing is providing no value to buyers, and drowning sales
- The result is less time spent actually selling, and less buyer satisfaction
- The solution involves adaptive content management and closed loop marketing
- Firms using his kind of solution are seeing strong measurable growth and business processes
- A new technologically based sales orientation may be upon us, the Adaptive, trust based relationship seller
The Goal of Sales
Sales reps practicing the trust based relationship sales orientation have three real objectives. (Source: Nelson – Sell 1st Canadian Edition)
1) To understand customer value
This is the first stage in the buyer-seller relationship. It generally involves initiating the relationship with the buyer, conducting background research, uncovering the buyer's needs or strategic priorities (understanding their value), and organizing sales calls and sales presentations in order to establish an open line of communication and understanding. Part of trust is competency and commitment, this is where you show it.
The other part of trust is internal. A sales rep must have the right attitude, perceptions, motivation, ethics, behaviour, and etc. in order to expedite the trust development. Integrity and sincerity play a major part in establishing trust.
2) To create and communicate customer value
Creating and communicating customer value is, in essence, making the sale. If you can successfully establish a relationship and communicate value to the client, you are able to close the deal (earn commitment) and make a sale.
You cannot reach the point of earning commitment without laying a deep and solid foundation of understanding the buyer’s value, in the same way that you cannot build a 50 story building without a solid and deep foundation.
3) To deliver and increase customer value
Sales reps know that the relationship doesn’t end at the sale. In reality, the sale only consummates the relationship, there is still room to grow and improve. Sales reps know that retaining customers is anywhere from 3 to 10 times less costly than acquiring new ones. (Source: The Sales Way)
The result of enhancing the relationship is future upselling, cross selling, and referrals for new business.
Trust Based Relationship Sales VS. Sales Relevancy
Just like every sales orientation of the last 150 years or so, the trust based relationship seller is butting heads with changes in the business economy. When WWII ended, the high pressure sales orientation of that decade crumbled to the changing sociocultural needs of the buyer, who demanded a more professional orientation.
Today, technology is to blame for the negative impacts to sales relevancy, and the contemporary sales orientation can’t keep up.
1) A very empowered buyer
It is common knowledge that anywhere from 50% to 70% of the buyer’s journey could be over/complete before the buyer ever contacts sales. (Source: Zambito, T.) They spend more time researching than ever before, and this rate is growing (Source: Hubspot), and perhaps the craziest of all, it is expected that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without ever talking to a human. (Source: Forbes)
The empowered buyer didn’t just happen, they developed with the internet. There are countless online mediums through which a buyer can self-educate about a product, company, and solutions to their need.
What does this mean for the sales rep? The buyer: (Source: Brainshark)
- Conducts more research online before reaching out to a rep
- Asks much more complex questions
- Requests custom assessments, thus making a longer buying cycle
- Demands more custom information about a solution
- Makes more collaborative purchases which involve many actors, reps may never actually meet the final decision maker
The empowered buyer also presents another challenge, the ‘information’ they collect could be entirely incorrect, out of context, or unrelated to their understanding, which means the new age buyer has a set of buying criteria which is completely unknown to the sales rep, and may in fact challenge to reps knowledge, whether it is accurate or not.
2) Growth of Digital Content Marketing
Some call it inbound marketing, others call it content marketing, but most understand the general idea of content/inbound marketing is about creating valuable content that pulls the buyer to your business. (Source: Hubspot 2014 State of Inbound)
85% of companies are practicing inbound Marketing today, with several years of continued growth, inbound budgets are steadily overtaking outbound across several industries. (Source: Hubspot)
It’s easy to see why, content marketing has stronger ROI, it increases buyer engagement, and it leads to the creation of more content for sales reps to use.
In reality, content marketing has created a nightmare scenario for sales reps. Marketing teams are hungry for MQLs and pump out endless reams of content, capture contacts, and send them to sales with a smile.
Reps are now sifting through more leads, much of whom are far from what would be considered ‘Sales Qualified’, and all of whom possess information that Sales has absolutely no awareness of.
Worse still, the growth of vendor content is heavily disjointed, and is resulting in buyers shying away from ever interacting with vendor content. The common complaints: (Source: Zambito, T.)
- Content oversells or overhypes the vendors product
- Content lacks practical usability and is overly technical
- The content lacks objectivity and is largely self-serving
- The content is generic, lacks depth, and doesn’t seem to be buyer specific
The result, Marketing is producing useless leads that sales can’t use, and even worse, they’re producing useless content that the buyer doesn’t want.
The Current State of Customer Relevancy
The trust based relationship seller is failing to maintain customer relevancy in the face of the empowered buyer and content-heavy marketing strategy brought about by technology.
The result is two major blows to maintaining relevancy that continue to trend downwards:
1) Less time spent selling
The trust based relationship seller is adapting to the empowered buyer by investing more time in learning and understanding the buyer’s value, which makes sense, as this is the first priority of this orientation.
In 1998, 47% of a reps day was spent on specific selling activities like the sales presentation, in 2013, that number is down to 35%. This is a 25% drop in the time spent actually selling. (Source: ROInnovation)
That time is being invested into a mix of creating and searching for customer facing content to use for their sales presentation. When placed side by side, it’s almost laughable, Marketing teams are investing more in content creation, and sales teams are investing more in content creation, and state that they cannot find any relevant or useful content to use.
2) Less satisfied buyer
It wouldn’t be so bad if the buyer was being delighted with the extra time and effort being invested into them, but they’re not. (Source: The Sales Way)
- Only 62% of reps were deemed knowledgeable by buyers about their own products
- Only 24% of reps were classified as knowledgeable about the buyers specific business situation
- Only 22% of sellers understand the buyers issues, and are able to see and position where they can help
All the digital sales aids of the technological revolution seem to be doing nothing to support the sales rep, and the ‘content management’ being delivered by Marketing is more akin to “random acts of sales support”. (Thanks to Scott Santucci for that excellent phrase)
A Real and Practical Solution
Believe it or not, the answer to the uncontrolled spread of technology wreaking havoc on the trust based sales orientation, is technology, in the form of Adaptive Sales Enablement.
Before I lose you, try and imagine it like fighting fire with fire. This is a very common method to handling a difficult to control blaze like a forest or oil fire. In the former, the brush ahead of the flame is burnt, leaving no fuel, in the latter, an explosive is thrown in the mix like dynamite, which consumes all the air. (Source: How Stuff Works)
Adaptive Sales Enablement is a control technology that can be throw in the mix, and though more technology is being added, it effectively controls the problem in a way which is maneuverable to the operator.
If the empowered buyer and abundance of content are the raging fire which is destroying the state of the sales rep, adaptive sales enablement technology is the control, and this control is achieved in two ways.
1) Adaptive Content Management & Monitoring
The first issue is the growth of content, which is overly abundant, lacking in value, or both.
Adaptive Sales Enablement ensures that a sales rep has the most relevant and powerful content available to them at all times, and through any device, online or off.
Depending on the industry, your content could come in a variety of formats, it could open only on proprietary software, and it might not be mobile friendly.
Both of these are essential for the next generation of trust based relationship sales. The buyer is digital, and knows anything about everything. You need to take back that power by being able to match the conversation at any time, and on any device.
This is more than a mobile sales app, and much more than a digital sales aid like a CRM system. It’s about customer centric playbooks with micro-marketed content design for an honest and sincere value proposition, not an argument over what some article online said about the problem.
2) Closed Loop Marketing
It is well known that actionable and data-driven analytics are going to be a driving force for marketing teams in the next 5 years, if not already at some best in class companies. (Source: Marketing Charts)
Adaptive sales enablement isn’t your typical sales analytics software, it’s more than open rates and click through ratios. It’s about creating extensive visibility for the marketing team to understand the content consumption patterns and user behaviour.
These kinds of insights allow Marketing to literally see not only where, when, and how their content is being used, but also why.
The result is a marketing team that knows what content works, and what doesn’t. They can create content that delights the buyer by adding real value based on statistical behaviours, not marketing research.
On a long term scope, this insights leads to more sales and marketing alignment, by virtue of knowing how the other impacts the process.
Taking these end-user insights and bringing them back to the front of the content creation chain is known as closed loop marketing. In essence, you turn a one-way traffic flow into a closed loop of real time updates and content developed for buyer needs and personas.
The Results of using Adaptive Sales Enablement like this
It wouldn’t be enough to just present a solution and not give some social proof. Companies that implement this kind of solution are seeing strong positive measurable results. (Source: Aberdeen)
- 48% decrease in the amount of time spent conducting non-selling activities
- 33% increase in MQL acceptance rate
- 23% increase in lead conversion rates
Thought not at all surprising, the benefits of closing the information loop and ensuring accessibility to content are strong. Why:
- Marketing can tailor content because of visibility into usage and a greater understanding of its value. This leads to sales needing to spend less time actually creating content, and more time using it.
- As the quality of the content increases, more qualified buyers gravitate to it, and fall into the funnel for nurturing. Marketing becomes more aware of what a SQL entails, and the result is more MQL acceptance.
- Lastly, as leads are given more quality content that offers value, and sales is able to leverage content management and predictive analytics to guide a sales presentation, buyers better realize value and commit to the sale.
Of course, customer relevancy is only one area addressed by adaptive sales enablement, and many others exist in the encroaching technological barriers being presented to the trust based relationship seller.
What may be needed is a new orientation, not unlike the trust based relationship seller, but grounded in technology (fight fire with fire) that is adaptive to the challenges presented.
The Adaptive Trust Based Relationship Sales Orientation may be upon us.
Are your sales teams struggling with an empowered buyer, is marketing’s shift to a digital content strategy missing the mark with customers and drowning sales in useless content?
Do you need a new sales orientation based in technology? Maybe we can help.
