Since the earliest days of selling, our vision is to free up sellers time to sell! Ideally, we’d like them to spend 100% of their time working with prospects and customers, helping them navigate their buying processes.
But things keep creeping in, some valuable, some wastes of time. But they infringe on our dream of having sellers working 7×24 with customers. There are some necessary things–training and development to improve our ability to sell. Certain internal meetings to keep us up to date with strategies, priorities, and what’s happening with the company. Coaching–when it’s done–to help us improve our abilities to produce results in our selling efforts. Then there’s the research, preparation, follow up. There’s working with internal people, perhaps deal desks, legal, pricing and others to make sure we can deliver on our commitments. Then there’s endless time sinks of reporting, bureaucracy, keeping CRM updated, endless meaningless meetings where we tell our managers what’s going on and they tell us to do more (often thinking that passes as coaching.
The lists of things that rob sellers from time to work with customers grows.
And for years, we’ve employed all sorts of techniques to improve efficiency, to free up our time to sell. I remember in my very early years lots of time management classes (which robbed me of lots of time) to help me better organize my day and agenda. Then tools to help me be more efficient and productive, like CRM and other things. And over the last 20 years we’ve seen endless technologies aimed at freeing up our time, making us more efficient and productive. Often, all it does is shift how we spend our time, rather than truly freeing it up.
And today, the promise of AI is to take this even further, making us more efficient, enabling us to spend less time on things other than selling.
And some of this actually works! It does make us far more efficient, it does offer the potential for freeing up more time to sell.
But this produces an interesting quandary. Once we’ve actually freed up that time, do we really know how to use that to productively? Do we actually know how to maximize the impact of that increased time we have with customers?
Some years ago, we were doing a project with a huge company. Almost accidentally, we discovered the issue of “time available for selling.” This was a relatively high performing company, selling very complex, configurable solutions. It took a lot of time to develop the specific solution to be proposed to a customer.
As we looked at time available for selling, we and everyone at the client were shocked to learn it was only 9% (We defined time available for selling as preparing for meetings/engagement, meeting whether F2F, virtually, or over the phone, and the follow up to the meeting). We dug in to try and understand where the remaining 91% of their time was being spent.
It turned out the complexity of the business and a lot of other things had slowly and unintentionally robbed time from selling. With some work, we were able to help the client eliminate a lot of stuff or change the way things were done. As a result, within about 6 months we had, freed up time so that sellers had at least 40% of their time available for selling (and we were looking to find more opportunities to free up time.)
But then something interesting happened. The sellers didn’t know what to do with that time. Some actually had the reaction, “Oh shit! Now I have to spend that time with customers!” To some sellers, the time spent in meetings and internally kept them busy and was a great excuse to hide out.
And, I suspect, as we introduce this new wave of technology, if it actually does free up time for selling, we will find much of the same. Sellers won’t know how to spend that time and maximize the impact with customers.
Some will measure success by just having more meetings (in whatever form with customers) even though those may be meaningless wastes of time for both the customer and the sellers—but at least they will be busy.
We also see customers actively changing how they buy to minimize the time they spend with sellers.
So we will have this quandary, which we will have to be prepared to help our sellers address: How do we have high impact meetings that actually are helpful both to customers and sellers.
What will we talk about that produces meaning and really engages customers? How do we hold those conversations?
Since our customers can learn a huge amount about our products, digitally, we won’t have to spend as much time teaching them about our products, so what do we do?
The good news, is we can and must leverage this newly found time to engage our customers in the most difficult things they face–challenges within their business. Problems and opportunities they face, helping them think about changing, helping them make sense of what they are experiencing and guiding them through understanding it’s impact. Helping them gain support for their change initiatives, Helping them build their confidence in what they are doing and that they are doing the right thing.
But these conversations have little to do with our products and almost everything to do about the customer–as an organization and as individuals with fears, dreams, aspirations, and ambitions.
The challenges we will have, with all this newly found time is, How do we help our sellers use that time in the most impactful ways? How will we prepare them to shift their focus from pitching products to helping the customer solve their problems.
There is huge opportunity in making this shift. In work we do with clients that are already freeing up seller time and redirecting how they spend that time is showing huge increases in win rates, reductions in no decisions made, and reductions in sales cycles. But it demands new skills and new engagement strategies. It requires sellers to shift from product focused selling to business focused selling.
We will see huge amounts of time freed up, allowing our sellers more time to sell. We just have to prepare them to use that time as impactfully as possible.
Leave a Reply