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Just connected with my friend John Counsineau at Amacus and was reading one of his recent posts over at the Salesforce.com blog. Reading that post reminded me of one of John’s basic philosophies to sales and the tool he’s built to back that up (Amacus).
This basic philosophy (my version): it’s not what the sales person does that counts it’s what the buyer does.
Pretty fundamental when you think about it.
Classic example: old school cold calling. You can make hundreds of cold calls but if you get “nada” result was that time well spent? But if you only make 2 referral-based calls and get 1 meeting in the same time that’s better, right? Or how about if you make 2 referral-based calls in 10% of the time that’s even better.
It’s the buyer that accepted the meeting not the sales person. It’s what the buyer does that ultimately counts.
You can be the super-busy sales person making hundreds of calls but if the results are not there, you lose. You don’t get points for being busy only for results in the sales game.
So if it’s up to the buyer, what’s does the sales person do? They get better at getting the buyer to do what they need to succeed.
To do that sales people need a lot of skills (and some tools). That’s what this blog is about actually.
Nigel: thanks for this. Kind of you to shine a light on these issues.
For what it’s worth, the basic philosophy [my view] is that [what matters] =[what buyer does]+[in response to what the seller does]. Until we clarify how selling practices are affecting buyer engagement [and how the buyers we’re engaging with are affecting margins on deals won] the guesswork of how to improve sales productivity is going to continue. IMO, that guesswork is needlessly expensive. Auto-analytics, done right, can eliminate the expense by eliminating the guesswork. – John