Anyone entering into selling immediately sees the obsession we have with numbers. We are focused on hitting our revenue goals, not just by the end of the year, but quarterly and monthly.
Recognizing revenue is a trailing metric, we become obsessed with things that tell us whether we will achieve those goals. We become obsessed with forecasts, pipelines, and their health. And that drives us to look at our prospecting and activity metrics. How many emails, how many calls, how many meetings, how many demos how many proposals, how many bathroom breaks……….
And the gurus reinforce and intensify this. They create revenue models, bow ties, and related models reducing selling to a math equation.
As a result, we have been distracted by the numbers. Our focus is purely on the numbers. And every performance issue is addressed by running the numbers setting new goals; more emails, more calls, more meetings, more demos, more activity.
For the past 5-7 years, we have seen the numbers don’t seem to be working. Customers don’t want to talk to us, because we don’t talk to them about what they care about. Despite ramping up the numbers, increasingly we are not achieving our goals. Win rates plummet, % making quota plummet, retention rates declining, sales cycles lengthening, deal size decreasing. On the customer side, we see increasing No Decision Made. For those that make a decision, we see increases in decision regret. And we see customers actively looking to other places to help them navigate their buying process.
AI has swooped in, offering us the potential to “solve this problem.” And we are using these tools to…….ramp up the numbers even more. The marginal cost of doubling activity through AI is virtually $0.
But something becomes very clear. The Numbers Game doesn’t seem to be working!
What’s happening here? If selling is a numbers game, and the numbers aren’t working, what’s wrong?
Maybe there’s something more than the numbers. Maybe there’s something more than playing the math equations. Maybe the customer reactions to our numbers game is giving us the clue there may be something we are missing in our obsession about numbers.
What if we started thinking of selling as a human game?
What if we started thinking of, where do our customers struggle in their problem solving/buying process?
They don’t struggle for lack of information, number of meetings/communications, number of demos—-all the things that drive our numbers.
They struggle because they, as a team, are tasked with solving a problem in which they have little experience and expertise. They don’t know how do define the problem. They don’t know how do determine the root causes. They may not see the problem in what they are doing today and why they need to change. They don’t know who in the organization the problem impacts and should be involved in solving it. They don’t know the risks–of doing nothing or doing the wrong thing. They don’t know what management support they need. They struggle in developing their confidence to address the problem. They struggle aligning differences in the team to achieve consensus.
Then there is another level that underlies these business focused challenges. Each individual involved in the process has personal goals and objectives. They may have fears about what it means to them and their jobs, they may have aspirations to grow, learn, be promoted, they may just want to simplify things making it easier for them to get through the day/week.
Then there’s another challenge. As our customers look at their business decisions, as they look at their personal goals and aspirations, they change their minds. They shift their priorities. People leave the team, new people join the team. They don’t move logically along a path but wander.
But there’s more. Each person involved in the process has a different behavioral style, so how we engage each person has to be tailored to the individual. It’s not just, “What do people in this role want to hear,” it’s “What do people in this role with this behavioral style want to hear?” People in the same roles at the same company may have different behavioral styles–so we have to engage them very differently.
As we look at these business and personal factors, we recognize the human factor underlying everything we and our customer do.
The human factor doesn’t fit our concepts of managing to the numbers.
The human factor underlies and drives everything that drives our numbers. But if we only manage to the numbers, we are missing the most important things that influence the numbers.
We need to ask ourselves a number of questions:
- Do our people have enough business and financial acumen to talk to our customers about the things they care about? Do they talk about the customers problems rather than focusing on pitching products?
- Do our people recognize their success is dependent on the customer’s success? Do they care about the customer success?
- Are they are they curious about the customer? Do they have the ability to figure things out helping the customer navigate the process?
- Are they curious about their own performance and how they get better? Are they constantly seeking to improve?
- Are we providing the tools, training, programs, processes they need to help them perform at the highest levels?
- Are we providing the coaching and development to help them maximize both their current performance and their potential contributions?
- As we incorporate AI into our strategies, are we identifying the things that AI can’t do, making sure our people can do those things. Through this we maximize the power of these technologies.
I’ll stop here. By this time, I hope you are getting the message. We don’t solve our numbers problems by focusing on the numbers. We solve our numbers problems by getting under the numbers and what’s driving them. And as we drill down, we discover nothing has changed about selling at it’s core.
Selling is a human game!
Afterword: Here is the AI discussion of this article. It’s divided into 3 segments, all are good. But if you want the first segment gives a good overview, it’s about 5:30. Enjoy
Leave a Reply