Creating the Vision

In the summer of 2003 I took a vacation on the Caribbean island of Tobago. There beside a waterfall in the rainforest I met a brilliant salesman. Within minutes he had converted me from negative sceptic to enthusiastic purchaser of his wares – carved bamboo trinkets.

The young man in the forest was a gifted, 'natural' salesperson. He instinctively knew how to ask the right questions and explain the benefits of his goods in terms that meant something to me. With me he created a 'vision' of what my life would be like if I were to buy what he had to offer – in my case, how a carved bamboo pencil-holder perched upon my office desk would remind me of my holiday in Tobago. Functional and emotional.

The young man did not carve the bamboo himself. He was a reseller, a 'distribution partner' selling other people's products. Are your sales channels as good at 'creating the vision' with your end customers?

High-technology products and services are not so simple, so even skilled salespeople will need help – from you – to understand how to create this vision. Yet so many companies still seem to rely on the innate or learned skills of the salesforce to sell their products or services. This is, after all, what they are paid to do – isn't it?

How many of the salespeople in your sales channels are truly successful at selling your products? Do you really know? If you sell through partners it can be particularly difficult to discover how capable the individuals selling your products really are.

From time-to-time there will be an initiative to improve sales levels through channels, initiated either by you or one of your partners. This traditionally will involve one or a combination of two approaches:

• increased marketing spend
• more sales training

Although both approaches may bring significant short-term benefits, neither will have a long-lasting effect – for the simple reason that this is what everyone does. You, your competitors, new entrants to the market. Any advantage gained through a marketing or co-marketing campaign will be lost as soon as your competitors respond in kind. Sales training improves the selling skills and product knowledge of individual salespeople, but any effect on sales volumes is notoriously transitory – affected by high staff turnover, rapidly changing market conditions and modifications to product and service specifications (both yours and your competitors').

Marketing spend and sales training are necessary, but they are "tickets to the game", things you have to do to be in business. Neither is going to give you a sustainable competitive edge unless you can afford to consistently spend more and do more than your competitors.

So what can you do with your sales channels that will make you stand out from the crowd, will have a long-lasting effect, and is relatively straightforward to achieve?

Well, let's return to our salesperson in the forest. What you would ideally like is a salesforce out in the marketplace selling your products and services, all of whom had the capability and sufficient understanding to be able to 'create the vision' in your end customers' minds of what life would be like if they bought your particular offerings. They would fully appreciate end customers' business issues, know how the features and benefits of your products could address these issues, have a good understanding of how these compared with what competitors were offering, and be able to articulate all this in a way that customers could readily empathise with. Backed up with case studies of how other customers had benefited and specific examples of how your products and services could really make a difference, each salesperson would be excellently prepared and would have the confidence to 'create the vision'.

And they would enjoy doing it, discovering that your products and services are a pleasure to sell! Your company's profile would be raised in your sales channels. You will have created a 'demand' for your offerings within the salesforce itself. And what is most important – you will have built a competitive advantage that is sustainable, because it is founded on the unique combination of features and benefits that come with your products and services.

If you could achieve all this within a short space of time, and with a relatively small amount of effort on your part, what would that be worth?

So the next time your CEO, or your distributors or your shareholders say: "We must spend more on marketing. We must do some more sales training." pause for thought. Question whether simply throwing more money and time at your sales channels is really going to make a lasting difference. Ask instead: "What can I do to improve the quality and relevance of the information I am putting in the hands of the salespeople?" In other words, try spending some money on 'marketing to your salesforce'. Give them the guidance, evidence and hard data they need to be able to 'create the vision' in your end customers' minds – and make selling your products as straightforward and enjoyable as selling bamboo pencil-holders in the forests of Tobago!

Partnering Points on Creating the Vision

• Before you can tell others how to create the vision, you have to understand how to do it yourself. Have you really sat down with your colleagues – from sales, marketing and engineering – to truly understand what your products and services can do for your customers?
• All sales training is based on a sales methodology. It teaches the generic skills that every salesperson has to have. But you need to supplement this with specific information about the products and services that you want the salesperson to sell.
• It is important to deliver the information in a format and medium that salespeople find accessible and useful. This usually means that you cannot rely on your 'usual people' to produce the material. Writing for salespeople and giving them exactly the right information is a difficult task.
• Don't try to boil the ocean. Select a strategically important or new product first, try the new approach and measure its effectiveness. Then move on to apply the approach to the rest of the portfolio.

• Don't think that your salespeople simply need more information. Giving them more of what you already produce will have a negative effect. What salespeople need is the right amount of the right type of information. In other words, what will enable them to 'create the vision'.

Through an associate agreement Istaris Business Services offers access to the highly successful Strategic Sales Program, which takes clients through a rapid knowledge-gathering exercise, delivering a powerful and effective Sales Guide within a matter of weeks.

In the hands of your distribution partners this can have an immediate effect. Genuine quotes include: "This is the best sales support material you have ever produced.", and "Why haven't you done anything like this before?". The Sales Guide captures all the information that a salesperson needs to be able to 'create the vision', and sets it out in a format that salespeople appreciate and read.

Companies that have successfully used the Sales Guide to empower their sales channels include Compaq (now part of HP), LogicaCMG, Advantica (formerly BG Technology) and Nortel Networks.

To learn more about the Strategic Sales Program, click here.

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