Thought Leader Interview
Anneke Seley was the twelfth employee at Oracle, the designer of Oracle Direct, the company’s revolutionary inside sales operation, and one of four people recognized as an early innovator in Oracle’s Innovation Showcase. She is currently the CEO and founder of Phone Works, a sales strategy and implementation consultancy that has helped over 350 large and small businesses across industries increase sales productivity and results.
Phone Works specializes in building or restructuring sales teams to achieve predictable, measurable, and sustainable sales growth through innovative approaches to sales strategy, people, process and technology and alignment of marketing and phone, Web and field sales. Anneke is the coauthor of the bestselling book on the new culture of selling, Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. She continues to share ideas and proven new trends on her blog at www.sales20book.com. Anneke was recently named one of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals’ (AA-ISP) 2010 Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals.
Denis Pombriant: I think of selling like an arms race, one side gets a new idea or tool and the other side catches up. It’s not one sided by any means either. Recent advances in the Internet and social media seem to have given an advantage to the customer. What would you say is the state of selling today? Are sales people effective enough? Are we losing opportunities we could win? Are customers happy with their newfound status, if it indeed exists?
Anneke Seley: Well, look at the data. If you follow CSO Insights, Aberdeen, anybody that’s studying sales effectiveness the numbers tell the story and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Also, from my perspective (of doing consulting work with companies), once you get inside and look under the covers even of the best performing companies, there’s still a lot that can be done to improve the experience of the customer and the sales rep. Last but not least, we’re all consumers and we all know from having buying experiences ourselves that not all sales people are doing everything perfectly. So, yes, the opportunity is large to improve the state of selling in my opinion.
DP: It seems though, that every generation we have the same issue. We say sales could be better, we’re only closing a small percentage of our forecast, everybody is not making quota on and on and on. What is it about selling that makes it seem like we never make improvement?
AS: Well, I think many business processes suffer from the same—it can always be better—problem, and if we’re the type of people who are always looking to improve, that’s just going to be the way we look at the issue. Selling is a combination of art and science and we’ve been focused in the last decades on the art, the relationship. But today we’re looking at sales with a process and metrics or science orientation with new technologies—the 2.0 class of technologies—and it enables a new kind of thinking, and a new opportunity for people to think about sales in a different manner.
DP: If the business process we call selling is broken, and I think, based on your book, you’d agree, what parts are broken or which parts of the process need a rethink?
AS: It’s depends on the company really but fundamentally there are three different areas of focus that we look at as consultants and that I look at personally. The first is the whole sales structure, organization and strategy: that’s where organization and alignment come in. Sometimes we think very traditionally about selling and even the most forward looking companies expect a person in every city with a field sales office with a lot of customer visits and relationship building but there’s a whole different way of looking at sales—from the buyer’s perspective. It sounds like the same old thing but people buy differently today given the Internet and new technologies and it’s imperative that we change our thinking when we structure our sales forces because a lot more of the sales process can be done online or by phone than what most companies put into place.
There’s also a huge opportunity to bring sales and marketing closer together. In the past the functions haven’t been that close or integrated but new technologies can help with that alignment. There’s also a science orientation around selling today with process and metrics, predictability and repeatability—elements that have been missing from many companies’ sales thinking.
And last consider the people we tend to hire in sales. I think the profile of the people we hire has been shifting as we incorporate processes, metrics and technologies into the sales process. The job is no longer appropriate for people who are not willing or able to sell in a new way.
The other thing I’ll say about the people side is that traditionally a salesperson had his or her territory and it was his or hers alone. But in today’s selling environment it’s very common to have a team selling approach where you have various channels all touching the customer providing different experiences at different times to enable the customer to buy in different ways.
DP: Sort of bathing the customer in attention?
AS: You’ve got it!
DP: So, is what you’ve just described the essence of Sales 2.0?
AS: Yes. The essence of Sales 2.0 is making the sales and buying process more effective and more efficient for each side, the selling side and the buying side.
DP: Does the present economy favor certain approaches to selling? Many budgets have not recovered so how does an organization maintain or improve sales results in this situation?
AS: Certainly the economy has forced us to look at costs and the sales function can be very expensive. The traditional way of selling—Sales 1.0—is a high touch, face to face, rolodex driven, art driven kind of strategy. But a lot of the buying process now occurs before the sales person even knows the customer exists. So a lot of companies are using the economy to drive the rethinking of their sales models. A lot of companies are looking at inside sales, phone and web sales for particular kinds of customers or to sell particular kinds of products or to sell to existing customers. There are all kinds of opportunities to sell to customers without incurring very large costs—and by the way, environmental impact.
DP: That’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. What happens when fuel is $4. $6 or $8 per gallon? You’re not going to be driving or flying as much to get in front of customers so what are you going to do to get in front of them?
AS: That’s right. Your customer often is not local to you. They could be in a different country, a different continent. It’s just not feasible to visit them for every stage of the sales cycle, for every product.
DP: This is all good advice for forward thinking vendors. Do you have more?
AS: I’d say besides getting out of traditional thinking of having to visit the customer at every stage, the way we structure our sales organizations with inside and outside being very distinct, is outdated. I think that phone and web selling is not just for inside selling, though typically an inside sales group is more likely to adopt a process and technology driven type of selling. Phone and web selling skills are now imperative for field sales people too. In a lot of cloud computing companies today we see a hybrid model involving a sales team that does maybe 90% of their selling using the phone and online tools. When it’s required and the customer really needs it, you can still go visit them but it’s certainly not the first thing that comes to mind because of the philosophy and orientation of the buying company, they just don’t need that kind of physical presence.
DP: So, you’re seeing companies using alternate channels to good effect even with traditional sales people?
AS: Absolutely. The role is changing. There’s not always an inside sales group and an outside sales group, it’s more of a hybrid inside and outside rep.
DP: One thing I like about your book, Sales 2.0, is its emphasis on alignment and segmentation as well as choosing the best sales channels. How does a company get started on all of that? How does a Sales 1.x company get started?
AS: That’s the hard part, getting away from the action oriented, implementation and execution mode which is so comfortable for us today because we’re so busy that we don’t have time to think. It really takes stepping back and examining your sales and marketing strategy. Often we get called in to provide an outsider’s perspective. Companies want to know how their approaches compare with companies that are doing really well and what they could be doing differently. Companies can make a concerted effort to take a look at the business and find opportunities to reduce costs, improve revenue or improve the experience for the customer.
DP: I suppose everyone has areas where they can improve?
AS: Yes, and also asking your customers what’s working for them and what isn’t in terms of the sales process is also a good idea that many of us don’t make time for.
DP: Seems like everyone is afraid to talk to the customer about anything but the product.
AS: I think we play out roles. There’s a script and whether it’s verbatim or not, we sort of lose our humanity in a way, instead of having a conversation with the customer and being natural.
DP: Let’s talk about social media. How important is social media in successful selling today?
AS: Personally, I can’t imagine selling without it because there’s so much information there. For people who engage in social media, it’s to your disadvantage not to know what a customer is Tweeting or blogging or putting on their Linked-in profile. So I can’t understand why a sales person wouldn’t take advantage of something they could know. People often don’t know how to add social media to their sales process and it’s being experimented with randomly by individual sales reps at this moment so the opportunity as I see it is to integrate social media into the whole sales process to make the process more repeatable. Then we’ll better understand how social media impacts the customer experience and the sales cycle.
DP: Now, are the social tools available today the best we can expect for selling or are there better ways to “socialize” selling in your opinion?
AS: We need better tools and tools that are better integrated with the fundamental tools that sales people use. What I’m getting at is if we understand how to use social media and how to measure activities and if the results of activities are within the CRM system, I think that would go a long way towards managers accepting that their reps use social media in the sales process and reps taking that extra step. So there are tools like ISell, FirstRain and InsideView that integrate social intelligence and other kinds of business intelligence into the CRM record. But what I would like, for example, is for the system to not only track calls and emails, but also Linked-In invitations. For different types of customers we can begin to see how using social tools—it could be Twitter, or Facebook or other things too—help to improve the experience or accelerate it.
DP: Ok, last question. What advice would you give to a vendor that is, let’s say, stuck in a Sales 1.x paradigm if that vendor knows it needs to do something different but doesn’t know where to begin?
AS: I think it’s important to realize that you don’t have to change your whole sales organization over night—that’s a recipe for disaster. It makes sense to start with one or two reps who are forward thinking, who are interested in improving their performance and trying something new. Start with a few reps taking a new approach—whether it’s new tools or using social media to make a message more personal or something else within the philosophy of Sales 2.0. You can try it for a time and compare the results of those reps with the rest of your sales team and see if it really makes sense for your people and your customers.
Right now, we see many of our customers who want to try inside sales or a phone and web approach to their customers but there’s some skepticism on the part of their sales manager or their CEO or the board because it can be very disruptive. It may require hiring different kinds of people, putting systems in place and defining processes and asking your customers to do business differently with you.
In our consulting business we see companies wanting us to do pilot programs and we’re bringing in our own systems and our own people—very senior people with a history of success who know how to use CRM. Within a pretty short time we can show them what their pipeline would look like with that kind of approach and a particular marketing effort. Those small steps make change a little less risky and less onerous are making sense. I think a lot of us in sales are selling against the status quo right now because many people don’t want to spend the money or take the effort to do something different.
DP: Well, that’s a lot to think about. Good stuff, thanks for your time.
AS: Any time.
