We Have The Opportunity Of A Lifetime

Recently, I listened to an interview of Seth Godin by Michael Hyatt.  It’s an absolutely brilliant interview, but that’s not what I want to write about.  Seth used a phrase that I want to co-opt for this blog post.  He said, “We Have The Opportunity Of A Lifetime.”

I’m captivated by that phrase.  As sales and marketing professionals, I think we have the opportunity of a lifetime.

My friend, Dave Stein, has said sales has changed more in the past 3 years than through our entire history.  I’ve written that we are at an inflection point—being driven by the customer.

The world of buying has/is changing profoundly.  Consequently, the worlds of selling and marketing are changing profoundly!  What we are experiencing is not a temporary disruption, it is a fundamental structural change to how people buy, consequently how we sell.

I can think of nothing more exciting, yet fraught with risk.  But this is an opportunity–it’s an opportunity that has not existed for several generations of marketers and sales people.  It’s an opportunity for new leaders to emerge, and for profound shifts in the way we engage, serve, and create value in for our customers.  It’s the opportunity to invent new ways of developing and nurturing new relationships, building businesses, and creating success — with our customers, our business partners, our people, and our industries.

Sometimes, I think we confuse what is happening with the “social media effect,”  or technology.  The changes we are talking about are not really about technology or social media, though technology has helped to bring the changes about.  Globalization–global economies, global competition is changing everything.  More and different competition changes everything.  Changing buyers and buyer motivations.  Massive, overwhelming volumes of data, information, and mis-information.  Changing attitudes, shifts in spending power, and much more…..

So much of what was true, or what worked is no longer true and no longer works.

These changes have happened, the train has left the station and is picking up speed.  As sale and marketing professionals we have choices–we can ignore it, and be about as relevant as buggy whips are in modern transportation technology.  We can fight it, resisting it all the way, trying to change it.  Probably with the same result, but costing much more money.  We can think this is about technology, invest in all the latest and greatest tools, possibly achieving some level of success.

Or we can see it as an opportunity and use it as a chance to reinvent our organizations, our profession, and ourselves.  We have the opportunity to challenge all the assumptions about buying, selling, and marketing that are constraining us.

Think of the possibilities:

• We can abandon the classic marketing/sales model–basically the “marketing catches them, sales skins them model.”  What if sales engaged the customers before marketing, talking to customers about new ways to think about their businesses, then marketing nurtured that relationship, with sales getting involved later to close.  Or does sales even need to close?  We can design customer engagement processes in which marketing and sales people work nimbly together, engaging the customer in different ways.
• We can engage the customer in asking “how they want to buy, and how we can best support them.”  Some readers may laugh at this, but particularly in major accounts, we have posed this question the customers of a number of clients with overwhelming results—after all, it’s in their interests to have strong support.
• We can abandon the “dialing for dollars” cold calls, spending a little time researching, narrowing our lists, focusing on high probability customers.
• We can actually engage the customers in conversations rather than being forced to pitch!
• ….the possibilities are endless if we just think differently, perhaps changing our preconceived notions of what sales does.

This doesn’t need to be a corporate initiative—it’s one that each sales professional can undertake.  Each of us can rethink what we do, how we do it, how we create value.  Each of us can engage our customers in a different conversation.

It’s an opportunity of a lifetime–don’t miss it!