Nothing Works Anymore!

It seems all the things we used to do; the things that engaged customers and prospects, the things we knew would produce results, the things that drove our growth; no longer work.

All the time we invested in messaging, targeting, personalizing. All the tools we implemented to help us do these things. The structures and organizations we put in place to execute our prospecting, customer engagement, and opportunity management strategies. None of these are working the way they used to.

And our current solution to this issue—doing more, faster—is failing even faster. All the things that worked, now seem to be driving customers away.

With everyone adopting the same approaches, methods, tools, and messaging strategies. With everyone responding with more, even well designed outreaches get lost.

Doing more of what we’ve always done is insanity.  We have to reinvent our customer engagement strategies.  As Jon Miller suggests, we need to develop new playbooks!

Before I go further, let me restate the previous point.  Our current playbooks are no longer working, we have to develop new playbooks.  But the basic principles of selling, the basic principles of engaging prospects and customers still apply.  They are, perhaps, more important than they have ever been, because they provide the foundation that enables us to reinvent what we do and how we engage our customers.

Just as we have had to develop new playbooks in the past, our opportunity is to learn from what we’ve done before, identify what is changing, develop strategies to address customers in ways most meaningful to them and which enable us to achieve our growth and revenue goals.

Some things we need to think about:

1.  We need to abandon our current silo based structures of marketing, sales, customer support; adopting an integrated customer engagement organization.  The old structures were based on an old model of customer engagement where there were clear lines of delineation in creating awareness/driving demand, engaging the customer in their buying process, supporting customers in their implementation.  These are integrated and intertwined through the entire life of working with a customer.    We acquire new customers, retain, and grow them, creating customers for life.   We expand our footprint in each customer, finding new opportunities to grow our relationships.  Whether we call in a Revenue organization or something else, the labels are unimportant.   The old functions of marketing, sales, customer support are no longer useful structures in our customer engagement strategies.
2. We need to build our engagement strategies on a principle that the primary engagement will be digital engagement, with appropriate human interventions designed into the process.  This shifts the focus or our human interventions from primarily product/solution focus to a business focus.  Significant selling time will be freed up since we no longer have to spend a lot of time educating our customers about our products.
3. We need to expand our thinking from focusing only on our customers buying queries, or inciting customers to buy, or even inciting our customers to change.  We need to start inciting customers to search.  Getting customers to think, what’s happening in their markets, functions, professions, what’s new, what’s changing, what are new opportunities, what are threats, and through this inciting them to search is critical to beginning an engagement process.  Before customer even begin to think about changing, which always precedes buying, they will always search.  The result of that search will incite them to change.
4. We need to rethink our content strategies (in all forms–email/phone/text/web/social), recognizing that content and information are overly abundant.  Abundance causes people to not pay attention or not care.  What becomes important is not the abundance of content, helping the customer make sense of what they find, focusing on that most important to them now. 
5. We have to recognize that customers will be questioning the accuracy/validity of all digital content, becoming increasingly skeptical of everything they see.  While this as always been somewhat of an issue (exaggerating capabilities), with the advent of AI sourced content, accuracy and validity of all content is a major issue.  How do we help the customer develop confidence that what they see is accurate and relevant?
6. Perhaps summarizing the three previous points, with the overwhelming abundance of content, content is no longer “king.”  What is scarce for the customer is no longer information, but other things.  We need to focus on that which is scarce to the customer in our engagement strategies.   People value and pay attention to that which is scarce.  Identifying these things and focusing on them seem to be key to the new playbook for selling.
7. Among the things scarce to customers is, time to understand major shifts/changes in their markets/customers.  Ability to diagnose their internal operations, identifying the need to change (particularly when things seem OK).  A lot of what seems scarce revolves around Confidence.  Confidence in their ability to identify and characterize their problems/opportunities.  Confidence in their ability to align diverse agendas/priorities within their own organizations, managing consensus through that process.  Confidence that any decision they make is more likely to be right–both for themselves and for their organization.  Building confidence through directly addressing their FOMU/FOFU.
8. We need to recognize that a highly structured, prescriptive selling process is no longer relevant to our customers’ buying challenges.  We have to equip our people to be more nimble and adaptable in both responding to how our customers want to buy and how we help them effectively and efficiently navigate their buying process.  This will require new skills with our sales people.  They will need to become orchestrators, project managers in helping customers succeed.
9. Many of our playbooks have focused on automating as much as possible, removing the humanity from the selling process.  We have undervalued relationships, we have undervalued deep understanding, caring, and people to people connection.  This “humanity” has become scarce, caring has become scarce, we need to reinject these into our engagement strategies.
10. We have to recognize that a large number of transactional selling engagements can and must be automated.  It’s more efficient and effective for our customers, it’s more efficient and effective for sellers.  This will free up resources to focus on those things that are important to customers and drive our growth.  A key issue will be, “Can current sales talent be refocused, trained, and led to make this transformation?”  It’s a particularly interesting challenge, since much of sales management does not have this experience, either.
11. We need to recognize that all conversations begin with a business requirement/possibility, not a solution/product need.  We need to engage our customers in rethinking their business, how they work, how they  improve, where there might be new opportunities.  We need to engage them in the language and issues they use in their business.
12. We need to shift our strategies from focusing only on helping the customer buy.  We have to expand them to helping the customer recognize new possibilities, provoking them to change.  These always precede a buying opportunity.  What does this mean to our engagement strategies?  What does this mean to our organization, talent, processes, programs, for engaging customers.
13. We need to recognize the increasing importance of ecosystems.  Many of the things we and our customers face require skills, capabilities, and resources outside what we and our customers can do ourselves.  What are the processes by which we work together to help customers and each partner achieve goals?
14. We need to rethink our organizational structures, talent needs.  Integrating what has traditionally been marketing, sales, customer support roles into a more dynamic integrated set of teams to engage our customers will be critical to engaging our customers.  Adapting our selling processes, redefining workflows, metrics, comp plans to more effectively align with our customers new buying processes is critical.  Little in our traditional approaches will survive.
15. We need to recognize the loss we incur with the ever increasing turnover and attrition in our organizations.  This turnover has an impact of millions per person in lost productivity and lost opportunity.  We need to create organizations where people feel valued, heard, and see a future.  These things drive the engagement of our people, which in turn drives customer engagement.  Stated differently, customer engagement is a direct function of employee engagement.  Ignoring either adversely impacts our growth and success.
16. Value creation always matters, but we think about value too narrowly.  We still think of value that is created by our products/solutions.  It’s probably not dissimilar to the alternatives customers consider.  We need to focus on the value we create in helping the customer through their problem solving/change management process.  Are we helping them better understand the issues?  Are we helping them manage the process within their organization?  Are we helping them assess the risks?  Are we helping them make sense of what they face?  Are we helping them in gaining confidence in the decisions they make?
17. We need to align our thinking/actions more effectively with the customer.  We focus on our selling process, or the customer buying process.  Customers are solving a problem, addressing an opportunity, implementing a change.  Doing this involves more than selecting something to buy.  We need to align what we do in the context of the customers’ broader initiatives.  Even if we are just addressing a part of the change initiatives, we have to position that in the context of the job the customer is trying to do.
18. Optimizing our efficiency misses the crucial opportunity.  Helping the customer optimize their work effort and what they are trying to achieve, helps us optimize what we do.  Stated differently, helping our customers getting more done in less time enables us to get more done in less time.

I’ll stop here.

What have I missed?  What would you add?

Most of this is not new, high performing sellers do more of these things, more consistently, than others.