There is a crisis in selling. Let me be more specific. Today there is a crisis in selling anything that’s not sold over the Internet. Internet sales are doing terrific, and are projected to continue their double-digit growth for at least the next four years . It’s the rest of selling—the traditional type of selling—where there is a crisis. And it’s not just because Internet sales are gobbling up more of the retail sales pie to the detriment of brick-and-mortar stores at an increasing rate. The impact of the Internet on sales of all kinds goes deeper than that.
The Internet has completely changed the relationship between buyers and sellers, irrevocably and forever. Buyers are much more educated than they used to be about the things they are considering for purchase, and sellers are scrambling to keep up with them. Here are some statistics that illustrate the extent of the problem:
• Today, as much as 70% of a buyer’s purchasing decision process can be completed before he or she even talks to a salesperson
• Forty-one percent of salespeople feel that their inability to effectively communicate value to the customer is a main cause for them not meeting their sales quotas
• Forty percent of salespeople believe improvements are needed to help them better understand the customer’s buying process
• In certain business-to-business (B2B) sales environments, only 30 percent of sales cycles end with the buyer actually making a decision to buy anything from anyone
How did we get into this situation where salespeople are struggling to maintain their relevance? Is it simply collateral damage from the rapid development of the Internet and the Web? Or is there something else going on?
As you will learn more about later in this book, Lean Thinking is a set of principles derived by distilling more than over 60 years of wildly successful applications of innovative Lean approaches to revolutionize the automobile and other manufacturing industries and, more recently, services. One of the many lessons Lean Thinking teaches is to always search for the root cause of problems instead of stopping at the superficial level which is merely a symptom of the issues.
What then is the root cause of the issues we are facing today in sales? The Internet has definitely driven a change in the relationship of buyers and sellers, but that’s only because the relationship between buyers and sellers was already broken and ripe for an alternative. Traditional selling simply got too expensive. Not for the companies that salespeople work for—although that is an issue as well—but for buyers. The cost for a customer to engage with a salesperson—as measured by the required investment of time and effort—primed the marketplace to be open to and ready for an alternative. There just hasn’t been a good substitute to obtain much of the value that traditional salespeople provided—until now.
But even that is a symptom and not the root cause of the problem. Rather, the deeper cause lies within the belief system about what salespeople should do and how they should do it. These limiting beliefs have been solidly rooted in a state of mind that can best be classified as 20th Century industrial thinking. 20th Century industrial selling puts the salesperson in the center of the selling universe and underemphasizes the process that salespeople follow.
There really hasn’t been any significant shift in the focus of selling methodologies for more than 50 years. Billions of dollars are being spent annually on sales training worldwide, despite the fact that salespeople may retain as little 13% of what they learn in a sales training, after just 30 days. Much less investment has been made—and attention paid—to the processes that enable salespeople to do what they do.
This focus, on improving the skills and capabilities of individual salespeople as the means to greater sales, has all but run out of gas. It is based on very similar thinking as that which led to increased investment in industrial automation and other technologies in manufacturing over the past 30 years. However, those investments proved not to be the answer to increasing growth and profits. The U.S. and European auto manufacturing industry demonstrated that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
What can be done to turn the tide for professional salespeople and the organizations that depend on their success? Should companies simply give up their traditional salesforces and sell everything over the Internet?
That is not a realistic option for the vast majority of companies that currently have traditional salesforces. First of all, many companies provide products and services that are simply too complex, expensive, risky, or strategic for the customer to buy them over the Internet. Second, we have to remember that less than five percent of U.S. GDP, for example, comes from e-commerce sales.
So, for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of goods and services out there will still be bought and sold in more traditional ways that involve professional salespeople. Still, unless those salespeople, and particularly the organizations they work for, change the way they view the role of selling and correspondingly modify their behaviors with buyers, salespeople will become increasingly ineffective and unproductive—and therefore more expensive—leading to a forced obsolescence.
Fortunately, Lean Thinking can provide the light to lead executives, sales managers, and salespeople out of the current sales darkness. This book will make the case that the right focus for sales organizations concerned about these issues today should be on improving the process of selling, not just the skills of sellers. The changing landscape of buyers is not something we should expect sellers to deal with completely on their own. It’s unrealistic to expect that additional training of individual salespeople will allow each of them to singlehandedly address the macro changes that the Internet has wrought upon the sales environment. There is ample evidence that excellent, motivated people working within a substandard process, or one that is out of step with the times, can at best provide less-than-excellent products and services.
The Internet has affected every consumer and the way every company does business more than any other technological innovation in our lifetimes. A systemic response is the only viable and appropriate one to address such a global and pervasive change in the environment. This means that the entire system and all the processes that support and guide salespeople must adapt to respond appropriately to this new reality.
If you are going to improve a process from a system perspective, there is no better set of proven practices and methodologies than those that have been encapsulated under the term Lean Thinking and applied successfully to a variety of industries in forms known as Lean Manufacturing, Lean Health Care Delivery, and many others. I believe Lean Thinking is the best tool that organizations have available to them today to pull out the roots of the 20th Century industrial selling mentality, which is the root cause of our current dilemma in sales.