I was struck by this comment from John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, “ We got knocked on our tail last year. Market transitions wait for no one. The ability to recognize and move on these is critical. If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

We all talk about how our customers are changing–what they do, how they buy, their expectations of suppliers is changing.  No business or individual can afford to stand still and survive.  Every organization is constantly string to innovate and improve.

This presents a special challenge for sales and marketing professionals.  Too often, we’re playing catch up–our customers are changing faster than we are.  We are still using our old techniques, approaches, and methods.  We’re marketing to them in the traditional ways.  Too often, we find our efforts are producing the results we need, our demand generation programs aren’t generating enough leads, we can’t get into customers to talk about their needs and requirements, our customers are leveraging the web and other sources to identify and narrow solution alternatives for their business.  We struggle to be relevant and create value for our customers.

But for many top sales and marketing professionals, this is a tremendous opportunity to provide leadership to our customers.   Imagine if we could help the customer recognize the transitions earlier–and help them take advantage of them.  What about helping customers create the transition?

“But Dave,” some of you might say, “the transitions Chambers speaks of are major structural changes in the world markets and economy, you can’t expect us to be driving those!”  In reality, they missed some major transitions as well as lots of smaller, more subtle transitions.  Cumulatively, they had a tremendous impact on Cisco, as they have had on many other organizations.

But I still maintain, “we” have the opportunity to help our customers anticipate and even drive transitions.  At an individual level, there are all sorts of things our customers may be blind to.  After all, too often, they are just caught up in the day to day.  They may not take the time to look around to see what’s happening to their customers, market, or with their competitors.  Or some of the things may just be beyond their experience base. 

We set ourselves apart by helping our customers recognize these transitions—by helping them understand what’s changing, how it might impact them, what they could achieve if they took advantage of the opportunity.

At a broader level, our companies should be providing leadership.  If the company is truly customer focused, we spend lots of time not just responding to our customers’ needs, but anticipating changes they may be facing and developing compelling solutions for them.  Product development people who look beyond our customers and their needs, to their customers and what they are doing. 

We and our customers can’t wait for the transitions and respond—we must anticipate, create and lead the transitions.  We must constantly be innovating.

When we see transitions happening around use–whether it’s to our customers or within our organizations, we can’t ignore them, we can’t resist them, we have to recognize them, embrace them and change.    There is no option, as Chambers says, “If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

“Well duuuuuh Dave, what a stupid question, isn’t easy to tell?  After all, isn’t easy to tell, we’re either hitting our numbers or not?”

Hitting the number is how we tend to measure sales performance, but it’s really a terrible indicator of whether the organization is performing to the highest level possible.  Hitting the number only tells you that you’ve hit the number–but it tells you little about performance.

Let’s look at some real examples I’ve encountered in the past few years:

• Perhaps arrogantly, I called a sales executive of a large company and suggested his sales team had a performance problem.  I wanted to meet to discuss it and how it might be addressed.  The executive came back to me saying the team was consistently hitting it’s goals, he didn’t believe there was a performance issue at all, and was a little offended with my suggestion.  But when I pointed out, his competitors were growing faster in the same markets and, in fact, his organization was losing share, he became alarmed.  After some discussion, he came to realize the organization was really under-performing.
• Several years ago, I worked with a CEO who was appropriately concerned about his sales team’s performance.  They were growing wildly, exceeding their numbers, but they had a customer loyalty or retention problem.  They had, like many organizations, an 80-20 distribution of their revenues.  In fact, every year 100 customers represented about 80% of their revenues–but when you looked year over year at those the 100 customers, every year there were 70 different names in those 100!  They had an enormous customer retention problem!  They were great at acquiring customers, but they couldn’t keep them!  Imagine how they could grow if they could retain those top customers and complement it with their ability to acquire new customers.
• There’s the organization that was making their number–but struggling.  The senior executive was talking to me, do we need to train our sales people?  Do they need to improve their skills.  Upon investigation, we found a different problem—67% of their sales people were leaving the company within a year of being hired.  We started measuring the impact of that employee churn, we discovered between open territories, customer confusion about who their sales person was, and a few other things—the impact of this churn was costing them over $300M a year in lost revenue.  They didn’t have a general performance issue, but they had a major challenge in hiring the right people, onboarding them, and helping them become successful as quickly as possible.
• Another organization was handily making it’s numbers.  The sales people were achieving their goals.  But at the corporate level, there was tremendous concern.  The executives of this company recognized their business was shifting from a hardware centric business to a software and service centric business.  They had established several new divisions, strictly focused on bringing new software and services products to the market.  These were viewed to be core to their future, as the hardware business declined.  However, the CEO was faced with shutting down those groups.  The problem was, the sales people weren’t selling the new software and services products, they were selling what they knew and were comfortable with, the old hardware products.  The entire company business strategy was at risk, yet the sales people were making their numbers.
• Finally, another organization was hitting its numbers—struggling, but hitting them.  The problem was, they could only win by deeply discounting.  Their margins were plummeting, they weren’t generating sufficient levels of profit to sustain the business over the long term.  Soon the organization would fail.

I could go on.  There are countless examples we can think of where sales organizations may be making the number but under performing.  But in just these three examples, there were completely different issues impacting performance.   The key metric. quota/revenue performance was masking serious performance and competitiveness issues.  The focus on quota and revenue performance, the fact they were meeting their revenue targets prevented executives from seeing serious underlying problems–threatening the sustained viability of their companies.

To be able to answer the question of whether our sales organization is under performing, we have to have a rich understanding of what performance is, as well as a set of metrics by which to evaluate performance.  Quota attainment alone is an insufficient measure of performance and success.

First, we have to look at the overall strategy of our companies.  Is what we do, is our performance aligned with the strategy of our company?  If our company has a strategy to shift from a certain set of products and solutions, are we setting performance objectives that are aligned with the shift in strategy and measuring our performance against those objectives. We do our companies a disservice by not aligning our objectives to support the overall priorities and growth strategies for the organization.

Second, we have to benchmark our performance against others–not just our competition, but against other types of sales organizations.  We should seek to look at a rich set of measures to compare what we are doing to top performers and best in class.  We should strive to set objectives that enable us to outperform those organizations.

Third (actually maybe first), we have to understand the fundamentals of performance, we have to understand what performance really means.  It’s not just about achieving our quotas.  There are many other dimensions to performance.  A short list includes, are we maximizing our customer retention, are we maximizing our share of customers, are we creating rabid fans who will refer us out of enthusiasm for our solutions not out of doing us a favor, are we maximizing our share of market, are we delivering customer success, are we having each person in the organization perform and contribute to their full potential, are we improving productivity, effectiveness and efficiency, are we reducing our costs of selling, are we maximizing our profitability in each deal……   I can go on.

Knowing whether our organizations are performing well or under performing is actually difficult.  In good times, in healthy economies, sometimes we succeed in spite of what we are doing, and are blind to understanding performance issues.  In bad times, it’s harder to hide performance issues, but still the excessive focus on quota and revenue targets can create great challenges.

Sales executives and leaders must constantly ask the question “Are we performing to our full potential?”  Top sales people must challenge themselves, “Am I performing to my full potential?”  Making the number is an insufficient answer to each of those questions.  We have to have richer sets of criteria to really be able to understand and answer the issue of whether we are top performers.

I commented on the results reported in IBM’s outstanding  survey of CMO’s.  The absence of concern about aligning and working with sales was alarming.  It generated a lot of discussion an comments.  My friend Bob Thompson at CustomerThink commented that absent anything else it would take 10-20 years for marketing and sales to get aligned.  He suggested the only other alternative was a strong CEO, taking action to align the functions.

I agree with Bob–perhaps I am more pessimistic.  The wall that’s existed between sales and marketing probably dates back to the formation of the first sales and marketing departments.  Each has had a different function, each has performed those functions.  Executive running sales and marketing focus on optimizing the performance of their own organizations.

In truth, marketing and sales have worked together, though not always in sync or in total alignment.  But absent any stronger incentive, it’s highly unlikely that on their own inertia, sales and marketing will ever get better aligned—it’s natural, each has differing goals and objectives.  Each is focused on achieving those goals in the best way possible–for them.

Another reader commented on the wasted resources and money resulting from the lack of alignment between sales and marketing.  This is a critical issue.  As long as marketing and sales aren’t aligned, aren’t working hand in hand, they can’t optimize their impact with the customer.  The investments made in both sales and marketing will not create the return they might.  It’s kind of like 2+2= 3, when if integrated and aligned it might be 5 or 6.

So what’s going to get sales and marketing together?  Does it take a visionary CEO to understand the organizations need to be aligned, they need to share common goals, measurements, and rewards?  That’s great, if that happens.  Historically, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence for that.

I don’t want to overstate the problem.  There are many leading organizations taking major steps in aligning sales and marketing. They’re seeing tremendous results.  But they are the exception.

I actually think sales and marketing will start getting aligned and integrated more quickly.  The forcing function for the alignment will be the customer–the markets.  Customers will no longer accept or respond to differing messages, disparate conversations, clumsy engagements.  Customers will not waste their time—it’s too precious, they can spend it and their money in better ways.

Customers don’t differentiate between our marketing programs and sales programs.  They want a seamless customer experience.  Customers will respond to those organizations creating the best buying experience–through the life cycle of that experience.

Marketing and sales will align out of survival.  If customers are buying from companies that have an integrated and aligned customer buying experience–then out of survival, marketing and sales will start working more effectively together.

Don’t wait for the customer to vote with their pocketbooks.  Customer experience matters.  Drive alignment between marketing and sales in your organizations.  Align your goals, align your programs, align your metrics.  Look at how your customer engagement process–not just from the point of view of marketing, or sales, but look at the total customer experience.

Design your marketing and sales programs to optimize that experience.  Take a leadership position.

I just read the IBM 2011 Global CMO Marketing Study.  It’s a fascinating report, based on in-depth interviews with more than 1700 CMO’s worldwide.  It’s a must read for any sales and marketing professional.

As I devoured the 72 page report, something struck me—where’s sales?  In a discussion of critical issues facing CMO’s there was no discussion of the Sales Function or how Sales and Marketing need to work together.  I wondered if I missed something, so I searched on the words “sales, sale.”  Those words occurred 23 times in the 72 page report.  Two times in the title of someone quoted, one time referring to campaigns, two times referring to data, sixteen times indicating revenue, and two times referring to the sales organization.

The CMO’s stated their four biggest challenges are:  Explosion of Data, Social Media, Proliferation of Channels and Devices, and Shifting Consumer Demographics.

Where is Sales?  Where do CMO’s talk about the Sales Function or the importance of Sales and Marketing aligning to maximize their impact on revenue generation?

I reread the report three times, thinking I had to miss something.  I didn’t.  Apparently the sales function and organization is not on the radar screens of these 1700 CMO’s.

For some time, I’ve been evangelizing the concept of sales and marketing integration.  As we look at the new world of buying, we find that sales and marketing processes must be tightly integrated and aligned to maximize impact on customers.  As we look at Challenger Sales, the new customer engagement, the importance of social selling, rich content, and so many other things; sales and marketing are becoming inseparable.

Yet this doesn’t come up at all in the concerns of CMO’s from around the world.  How can any CMO ignore the role of sales in impacting their own effectiveness? 

As bad a picture as it paints, at least we start understanding the magnitude of the disconnect between sales and marketing.  For each of us to be focused on maximizing our impact in our markets, for each of us to be seeking to engage our customers in meaningful ways, for each of us to contribute to the revenue and share growth of our organizations, we must depend on the other.  We are wasting money, resources, and customer equity by working separately or, at worst, with conflicting objectives.

The new buyer is changing all the rules.  The new buyer is telling us, sales and marketing, that they want something different from us–in how we educate and inform them, how we engage them, and how we help them achieve their goals.  They are demanding value, but how can we maximize our value if the right hand (marketing) and the left hand (sales) aren’t working in lock step.

It seems that before our organizations can maximize our impact on customers, we must first learn how to work together, knocking down the walls between organizations, aligning ourselves, our goals, our programs, presenting a single face to the customers.  What is unstated in the survey, but implied by it’s absence is the single biggest problem for sales and marketing executives is their inability to work with each other.  Until, we focus on this problem, until marketing and sales become inseparable, until our processes are so intertwined, until we can complete each other’s sentences, we will never maximize our impact on our markets and customers.

I’m looking forward to IBM’s 2012 survey of CMO’s.  I hope this comes up as an issue in that report.  If it doesn’t, then perhaps the 73% of CEO’s who are dissatisfied with the performance of their CMO’s may take action.

I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management.  At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.”  Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve.  There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance.  Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.”

These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of the organization, of sales strategies, and of performance management.   In reality, top executives must continue to shift the curve to the right, continuing to raise the bar on performance.  We have to look constantly at improving sales performance, effectiveness, and efficiency.  We must look at constantly improving and innovating, enabling each sales person to continue to grow in their abilities and in their contributions to the business.

Whether it’s “shifting the curve to the right,” or “raising the bar,”  it’s critical for sales executives to focus on this.   Nothing stays the same–what we do must continue to evovle and change.  It’s critical to have a clear picture of where we are moving the organization, and how we will achieve it.  It’s critical to have a establish and execute a plan to “move performance to the right.”  Our goals, strategies, structures, and sales deployment strategies will shift and change.  Our processes, systems, tools need to change to support our goals.  Our hiring profiles, our performance expectations, our metrics, our compensation and incentive systems will change. 

Outstanding performance today, may be just OK tomorrow, and unacceptable the day after.  Today’s “A’s,” may become tomorrow’s “B’s” unless we are coaching them and developing them to support our future needs.  Likewise for “B’s and C’s.”  We can’t afford not to address these performance issues today, because they will become bigger challenges in the future.

• What are you doing to shift the curve to the right?
• What does this mean for your strategies, organizational models, priorities, and programs?
• What does this mean for the skills and capabilities of your people?  Do you have the right people?  Do you need different people?  Have you changed your recruiting profiles?  What are you doing to prepare your people to shift to the right?
• Do you have the right processes, systems, and tools to support this shift and your people? 
• Do you have the right performance expectations, metrics, and incentives?
• Do your people understand the “shift?”  Do they understand their role?  Do they understand your expectations? Have they bought into it?
• What are you doing to coach and develop your people do drive the shift?  What are you doing with those that can’t?

Life and business never stands still.  We must constantly change and improve.  Are you shifting your curve to the right?

My post yesterday, The Secret To Sales Success, stirred up a twitter discussion about whether there is a Selling Process or if everything is about the Buying Process.  Since I have a hard time saying my name in 140 characters, I thought I’d move the discussion to the blog, and hope the folks tweeting could follow the discussion here with comments.

Let me step back a little.  Years ago, we sales professionals had the arrogance to focus only on the Sales Process.  Everything was about the steps and activities we went through to move the customer through our pipelines and get them to order.  Sure, the process involved lots of activities with the customer, demonstrating our value, answering their questions, producing solutions to their problems, but is was largely driven by a self centeredness about ourselves and what we had to do.

In the past 5-7 years, our customers have given the sales profession a giant wake up call.  They said, “Guess what, we don’t care about your stinkin’ sales process, all we care about is our buying process!  You better get on board!”  We started recognizing that customers had a whole set of activities and issues they were going through to make buying decisions. 

We also recognized that too often, our selling activities were not in alignment with the customer buying activities.  We discovered the more out of alignment we were the less effective we were as sales people.  Take for example an extreme case (which still happens too often), where the customer is still determining their needs and priorities, and the sales person keeps asking for the order.  That sales person needs to be thrown out.  So effective sales people start aligning their selling activities and processes with the customer buying activities and processes.

More recently, astute sellers have discovered that many customers don’t know how to buy.  Unless they are procurement professionals, most B2B “buyers” have very little experience in buying–that’s not their job, they run a function or an operation or do something that doesn’t involve buying every day.  Think, for example, how many times in her career is a CFO going to purchase a new financial reporting system?  Probably a handful of times.  Or an EVP of Sale buying a new CRM system, again probably a handful of times.

So astute sellers realize they can bring the customer a lot of value by helping them buy–or facilitating their buying process.

So the sales profession has made great strides in recognizing  that it’s not just the Sales Process.  We’ve recognized there is a customer Buying Process and we need to be both aligned and deeply engaged in that process if we are to be effective.

But is everything about the customer Buying Process and has that displaced the need for a Sales/Selling Process?  I still think they are separate things.  While aligned and overlapping significantly, there are differences.  For example, in good sales processes, there are things that may be totally disconnected with the customer buying process.  For example, an assessment of “Is this good business for us–does it fit, do we want to chase it?”  Customers may want us engaged in their buying activity, but it might not be good for us.  This is an independent activity or assessment that needs to be part of any selling process.  There are also activities that we undertake in the selling process to align and engage our own resources to effectively engage the customer that are not part of the customer buying process.

More importantly, the sales process should be based on our best practices of engaging customers in their buying processes.  We want to be as effective and efficient as possible, our customers want us to be as effective and efficient as possible.  So our selling process has to be based on our best practices and experiences in engaging customers as they buy.  And our best practices in doing this will be different than our competitors!  (And that difference also creates great value and choice for our customers as they buy).

We cannot own the customer’s buying process–it is theirs!  It is based on the things they need to do to organize themselve to buy, to make a buying decision, and to manage all the things they need to get done within their organization to make a decision and implement it.  Great sales people will do everything they can to help and support the customer with those activities.  They will do everything they can to influence the customer to buy their solution while facilitating the customer buying process.  But in the end, it is the customer’s buying process and their responsibility.

We have our Sales Process.  They customer has their Buying Process.  Both must co-exist, they must overlap, they must be executed synchronously (and the sales person has the responsibility to manage that).  As sales people we must facilitate the customer in their buying.  But they are different.  We need our Sales Process (sure we can wordsmith it and label it a customer buying process–but it really is our selling process.).  Our customers need their Buying Process.  We must work collaboratively to accomplish our shared goal–which is solving the customer’s problem.

There has been an important revolution in marketing thinking over the past years.  The move from thinking about campaigns to rich content programs and nurturing is important.  It recognizes something important, that customers want to learn, they want to be educated.  These programs enable us to develop “relationships” with customers and nurture them up to the point of their deciding they need to take action and start a buying process.

In our nurturing programs, we design them to have the customer take different actions through the program that help us gauge their level of interest, their urgency, and their readiness to buy.

This is important and needs to be the cornerstone of our marketing programs.  But there is a problem with this–it requires a customer to have an interest–to want to learn–to want to consider a change, to be thinking about their needs.  Not necessarily to do something today, but to be thinking, “perhaps we need to change at some point in the future, I should start learning and looking around now.”  In essence, nurturing works best when the customer raises their hand.

But what happens when the customer should be raising their hand, but isn’t?  What about the case where the customer is so busy just surviving day to day?  What about the customer that isn’t looking to learn, that isn’t thinking about the future, who isn’t thinking about how they might improve their business?

They may never be a part of our nurturing programs because they don’t recognize the need to be nurtured.  They may be part of our programs, but they aren’t taking the actions they should be taking—but aren’t.

Pull is an important part of developing the customer need, knowledge and enabling us to enter a buying cycle when decide they need to buy.  But I think push is still critical.  But it’s push in a very different sense.  It’s helping the customer recognize that they need to change.  It’s helping them understand they are missing an opportunity.  It’s helping them understand that them see new ways of running their business or function.

Sales people must bring ideas to their cusotmers!  Sales people must provoke and challenge their customers.  Sales people must create the reasons for customers to raise their hands, to say–I need to do something now–entering into a buying process.  Alternatively, to say–that’s something I need to start looking into.  I might want to do something later.

I get concerned as I start to see the sales pendulum swinging to “pull” oriented sales strategies.  I think exclusively relying on pull–which I see many organizations seriously considering is irresponsible.  It’s not because we “aren’t” driving our sales growth as aggressively as possible–though that is irresponsible.  But it’s really irresponsible because we see that our customers are missing opportunities to grow and improve and we aren’t taking action to help them understand this.  It’s irresponsible because our customers often look to their sales people for ideas–to understand things that are happening in their markets, best practices for their functions, how to be more efficient.

We have to help our customers understand new opportunities–if we are truly customer focused, value based, trusted advisors, we need to get them to raise their hands.  Our nurturing programs may not do this.

Creating great value for the customer, developing meaningful relationships requires a careful balance of push and pull.  They can’t exist by themselves–we can’t have push only strategies, nor can we have pull only strategies.  We have to purposefully execute both.

Take a look at the two pictures below (courtesy of RapidRepair.com).  In one sense they are exactly the same.  Both are pictures of the Apple iPhone 4s.  One shows the iPhone as a set of parts and pieces.  The other shows an assembled iPhone 4S.

You know the next question, “What’t the difference between those pictures?”  The obvious answer is that only one works. It’s the assembled iPhone.

A lot of organizations are similar.  When I talk to them, they have all the pieces/parts.  They have a sales process, they have hired the right people, they have a good organizational structure, they have a compensation plan, they have training, they have demand generation programs, they have marketing and nurturing programs, they have CRM and other Sales 2.0 tools.  They have everything—all the pieces parts, but somehow things aren’t working. 

Having all the pieces/parts does not give you a working system or a high performing organization.  The missing element is those pieces parts aren’t assembled and working together.  See each part is dependent on the other parts to perform its function.  If they aren’t assembled and working together, the organizational goals can never be achieved.

The problem gets worse, in many organizations there are parts that are missing.  Or there may be incompatible or the wrong parts.  You can’t even put these together, the organization can never achieve it’s goals.

To many organization are not achieving their goals because of these issues.  The most difficult organizations are those that think they have all the pieces/parts, and keep focusing on these pieces, rather than looking at how they fit together and work as a whole.  I see sales organizations with a sales process—but it’s not used.  Managers don’t use it in doing opportunity and pipeline reviews, sales people don’t use it to help improve their effectiveness, it’s not integrated into the CRM system or other tools.

Organizations implement sales training, but it’s not integrated with the other pieces parts.  Marketing works on demand generation, developing content, nurturing customers, but aren’t producing sales qualified leads.  Customer service isn’t aligned with the commitments sales has made to the customers or the overall customer experience strategies.

Smart executives come to me, saying “We’ve done everything, we have all the different components, why aren’t things working?”  The answer becomes obvious when you think of it just like the two pictures of the iPhone above.  The parts don’t produce results on their own, they have to be assembled and working as a system to produce results.

We break up what we do into components and parts.  It’s the only way we can manage complexity and solve problems.  We have to design each part to perform it’s function ideally.  But we have to go further, we have to make sure each part complements and works optimally with the others, then we have to put all the parts together and make them work as a whole.

We have to manage all of these over time–if a part fails or breaks, we have to replace it.  If our sales process is failing, we have to fix it, because without it, the other elements won’t work effectively and we will fail to achieve our goals.  If we’ve hired the wrong people, we have to correct that for the same reasons.

The pieces/important.  If we are missing some, things don’t work (or don’t work well).  If we have the wrong ones, things don’t work.  We have to have all the right pieces.  But we can’t stop there, we have to assemble them and have them working efficiently together.  We also have to be using them.  Having a sales process and not using it is just as bad as not having one.  Likewise, not using your CRM system is the equivalent of not having one–actually worse, you’ve paid a lot of money for it.

• Do you have all the pieces?
• Do you have the right pieces?
• Have you put them together so they work together efficiently and effectively?

All three are critical to maximizing performance.  Without them, it’s virtually impossible to achieve our goals.

(Thanks to RapidRepair.com for letting me use these pictures)

There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull.  I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels.  It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process.  Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided.  Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a need.

There are a lot of important changes that enable us to engage customers in different and more impactful ways.  However, with all that said, I remain an unabashed proponent of the sales person’s obligation to Push!  I don’t believe sales can afford to be Pulled–in fact it’s irresponsible to be Pull only.

The problem is sales people (and businesses) have always gotten the notion of Pushing wrong.  It’s always been focused on the wrong thing:  What’s our elevator pitch?  Let’s go pitch our product!  I need to get this order now!  It’s been almost exclusively focused on the sales person, the sales person’s goals and the sales person’s company.  It should be clear why customers react so poorly to this, it’s not about them.

Push is important, it’s the obligation of sales people–but it must be correctly focused.  It has to be about the customer.  It has to be focused on them and what they can achieve.  It’s the obligation of the sales person to help their customers think differently about their businesses, to discover new opportunities, to discover opportunities to improve–operations, customer satisfaction, quality. profitability, reduce risk, or whatever.  Customers are sometimes buried in the day to day, losing perspective about opportunities to grow their businesses.  Often, as prisoners of their own experiences, they don’t realize that they might try something new, there might be a different or better way that improves their results.

Whether it’s called “Challenging,” “Provocative,” “Solutions Oriented,” or “Customer Focused,”  top sales people bring new ideas and opportunities to their customer.  They create a vision and engage their customers in owning the vision.

Push doesn’t stop there, it continues through the buying process, helping the customer engage the right people, structure their process, and make a decision.  Great sales people help the customer keep focused on the goals they are trying to achieve.  As the buying decision stretches out–as it often does, the great sales person pushes the customer–helping them realize the lost opportunities and opportunity costs of delaying the decision and implementation.  The objective is not the order, but helping the customer achieve their goals on as aggressive a schedule as possible.

Push is critical, push is important–but only if it is focused on the customer and pushing them to achieve their goals.

But Pull plays an important role in supporting Push.  Pull is a measure of customer ownership  and engagement in the opportunity, and the business result.  If the sales person has done the right job in Pushing, all of a sudden the customer starts to Pull.  They embrace the initiative, they get actively engaged in the opportunity and in owning the results.

Great sales people look for their customer to Pull as a result of their appropriate Pushing.  By itself, Pushing can be slow, but if the sales person can get the customer engaged in Pulling as well, the entire process gets accelerated.

A Pull only strategy is the kiss of death for sales people.  However powerful our customer nurturing and development programs, if we wait for the customer to Pull, we are in a seriously disadvantaged position.  The customer has already done their research and arrived at some decisions.  They have evaluated alternatives (correctly or incorrectly) and narrowed alternatives to a short list.  At this point the value the sales person can create is seriously constrained–primarily to responding to the customer need.  At this point, too often, the difference between alternatives is very small–often leaving the key differentiator to be price.

Pull is bad for the customer, as well.  It puts too much responsibility on them.  They probably can never be a knowledgeable in solutions as the people who build those solutions.  While there is a wealth of information in the web, the customer in their research may emerge informed, but not well informed.  They may emerge mis-informed.  Pull is even worse from another perpective–it puts the onus of recognizing opportunities on them–they may miss opportunities, or be late in recognizing them.  Customers get great value from others making them aware, challenging them, Pushing them.

Push and Pull, artfully combined is the winning formula for the customer and for sales.  They work well with each other, but to my mind, it all starts with a little Push.

What do you think?

Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas.  They are driven for improvement and innovation.  But too often, our efforts are stymied.  It’s hard to improve or innovate.  Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places.

When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?”  Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!”  Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.”

When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel:  “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.”  There are dozens of examples of this–the start up that has a completely different take on things, the game changer that was never on anyone’w radar.  The Amazon’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s and others.  It’s a dismal but too accurate observation–but we can do something about this.

Benchmarking our competition, looking within our industries is an important element of our business, sales and marketing strategies.  We have to have competitive practices, we have to understnad the critical issues in our markets.  But at the same time, it limits us.  We restrict ourselves to the familiar, to the known, to our experience base.  We become prisoners of our own experience, blind to what is happening outside our worlds.

The good news, our competitors and our customers do the same things!  They are also blinded and limited.  This creates a tremendous opportunity — both to outcompete and outperform our competitors, and to bring ideas and innovation and value to our customers.

If we just started looking in non-traditional places–the web and social media may be one of those new places for us to hang out.  Different industries, different regions, different cultures, different business models all give us new ideas.  The ideas we may be looking at could be old and stale in their own industries or regions—but they could represent great innovation in our own.

Innovation doesn’t need to be tough, it just means looking in different places, exposing yourself to new ideas.  If you live in a B2B world–look at retail and B2C.  If you live in a box/product solution world, look at services, subscriptions, knowledge based industries.  If you live in high tech, look at high fashion.  If you are a Boomer meet some X, Y, Z’s (and vice versa).  Expose yourself to different things–different art, different music, different people, different ideas.

You could learn a lot.  You might find ideas that twisted, tweaked, artfully adapted could have great applicability for you and your customers.  They could set you apart from everyone else.  You might also get a chance to see your new competitors–perhaps before they become competitors.  That opens a whole new realm of possiblities.

Are you looking for innovation innovation and ideas in the right places?