INDUSTRY POWERED LEARNING. STOP SELLING. START EDUCATING. WIN…
By: Nitin Pradhan
Tags: Marketing, Small Business, Startup, Sales, Business

The Pre-COVID Dilemma:

Even before the COVID crisis hit in the sales world, the sellers and buyers played a vicious cat and mouse game. The sellers pushed online ads, users block them. Sellers placed TV ads, viewers skip them. Sellers send marketing emails, receivers moved them to junk folders. Sellers made sales phone calls, receivers hanged upon them. You get the point. But the important question was WHY?

In a buyer-seller relationship, the buyer is in full control, yet even today, most corporate sales programs are developed by sellers for sellers, are unimaginative, interruptive, and frankly unwelcome by large buyers like me.

It was increasingly difficult to secure face to face corporate sales meetings pre-COVID. And when you met your prospect with much difficulty, 9 out of 10 sales calls would be a total waste of time.

Selling as we know it was dying. Now in the upcoming post COVID world, selling as we know it is dead!

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” — John Mazwell

Traditional Selling has Stopped Working!

The Post-COVID Horror:

The post-COVID world is digital, remote, touchless, and ruthless. Gone are the client meetings, flashy events, group demos, and late-night dinners with prospects. The buyers we deal with don’t want to meet the sellers face-to-face.

“God knows where the salesperson has been before, and what strain of COVID he is carrying, I am done with physical meetings with sellers” One large buyer told me.

This is now. What will be the future? Our models suggest that the digital culture is here to stay, at least in part, as it is safer, cheaper, fairly effective, and now even piloted by both buyers and sellers. The big question is how will the companies, their CEOs, Chief Revenue Officers (CRO’s), and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s) adapt to the new normal?

“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow

About Me, the Buyer!

My name is Nitin Pradhan, and I was a first-term Obama administration appointee and the federal CIO for the US Department of Transportation (US DOT) where I provided technology leadership, vision, strategy, policy, and oversight for US DOT’s more than $3.5 billion annual IT investment portfolio — the 6th largest in the federal government.

As a recovering CIO/CTO, the offices I led bought billions of dollars worth of technology products and services. I have had every kind of sales pitch, presentations, pricing, agreements, and negotiations thrown at me. And through these hundreds (if not thousands) of sales pitches and the subsequent buying patterns, I learned what works and what does not. We took all this knowledge and created a “buyer-centric” Corporate and Government Sales Accelerator Program and the Industry Powered Learning Masterprogram for companies in the B2B and B2G sectors. Our approach was relevant and impactful pre-COVID, now it has become an absolute necessity.

This article provides some key insights, to start building the capacity, capability, efficiency, and effectiveness of your sales organization to survive and grow in the post-COVID world.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

What Do Buyers Want?

How Buyers Perceive Sellers! Photo Credit: Pixybay

Buyers want sellers to stop constantly nagging, harassing, and interrupting them. Instead, they want sellers to focus on delivering “value,” even before selling any product or service!

Buyers want to learn about new research, developments, innovations, transformations, and business models in their industry and marketplace. They want this knowledge in a non-sales, video-based, micro-learning format, 24X7, on-demand, and free.

These are not cheap webinars or fireside chats designed to capture email addresses to spam the buyers later or badly recorded videos posted on YouTube probably appearing next to a “dancing cat.” Nor are these the series of typical two minutes sales pitches on sellers’ websites that are delivered sub-optimally across the world. There is a lot of free “sales” information available on the Internet. But what about valued, actionable knowledge for free through an independent, neutral, third-party that buyers can trust? That is completely missing for the buyers. So buyers subscribe to “neutral” research and advisory firms providing market research, market analysis, and product reviews. Unfortunately, as buyers, we have found that this information is mostly outdated, inaccurate, and costly to procure, leave alone the fact that it is presented in textual format when the whole world has moved to video format.

“What differentiates sellers today is their ability to bring fresh ideas.” — Jill Konrath

What Do Sellers Want?

Sellers want to sell more with reduced sales cost to make more revenues and profits! What the seller really needs is increasing the capacity, capability, efficiency, and effectiveness of their sales ecosystem. While many have managed to automate marketing with CRM and other systems, making sales calls, the most important and costly sales function is still a manual activity. This is a major bottleneck.

Today’s products and services are complex, requiring qualified technical sales teams. These don’t come cheap nor are they readily available. This leads to a shortage of salespersons, territory coverage, and lowering of quality and consistency of sales pitches — which the buyers, anyway hate as they are sales focused. So, what is the solution?

Today, where I live in Washington DC, a good quality sales director salaries range anywhere from $150–250k a year, add to it the pre-sales technical support, office infrastructures, distributors and resellers commissions, travel and entertainment and high growth companies are now looking at 40–45% of total sales revenues as cost of selling. Shockingly high! This number has to come down for companies to earn healthy profits. How do you do it?

We do it by what we call is the digitization of the business development process discussed below!

“Change before you have to.” — Jack Welch

Trend 1. Focusing on Strategic Selling!

Strategic Selling is a Puzzle! Photo Credit: Pixybay

If you are a CEO, CRO, or a CMO, ask yourself this important question — is my sales program operating strategically or tactically? In an ideal world, the strategy will come before tactics. Unfortunately, most will find that their sales teams are totally tactically driven. You will know if you are tactical if your sales program is constantly focused on the nitty-gritty of sales closing, is coming under stress for meeting revenue targets, or potentially has a high churn of salespersons. Therefore, talking with seasoned executives of startups and mid-size companies we came up with a list of strategic selling “objectives” they would like to focus on for their companies in the post-COVID world. We then crafted a digital program that will address these objectives:

Create Demand: How will you develop the US and global markets by creating new demand in the post-COVID world? Educate Markets: How will you inform and educate your marketplace at scale in the US and globally without being face-to-face? Customer Acquisition: How will you lower the cost and time of customer acquisition to a minimum? Sell Complicated Products: How will you sell a complicated or elaborate product or service, touch-less? Cover Large Territory: How will you cover a large territory for selling with insufficient salespersons, digitally? Secure Educated Leads: How will you find sales leads and filtered prospects based on (educated) buyers’ interest? Support Sales Team: How will you want to support your sales team and build an ecosystem that reduces their frustration? Institutional Knowledge: How will you want to hedge against your top salespersons leaving the team with knowledge and relationships? Build Company Image: How will you build a brand name, image, trust, and reputation for your company and products with buyers?

“ A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.” Lee Bolman.

Trend 2. Optimizing the Sales Pitch!

Second, as part of our Industry Powered Learning Masterprogram, we critique sales pitches and demos for companies to make them “buyer-centric.” We find there are typically three issues with most sales pitches:

Quality of the Sales Pitch: This is the degree of excellence of the knowledge transfer happening from the seller to the buyer, which will motivate the buyer to take relevant actions towards buying a product or service. Clarity of the Sales Pitch: This is the quality of being coherent and intelligible to the buyer, whereby the buyer is intrigued, motivated, and enabled to take relevant actions towards buying a product or service. Consistency of the Sales Pitch: This is the conformity in the delivery of sales pitches to the buyer, where the buyer’s understanding of the seller’s product or service is similar or identical through different salespersons or techniques.

While the seller is pitching the product for the 100th time, the buyer is typically hearing the pitch for the first time. Give the buyer the time and space to absorb the knowledge at their own pace. You can’t do this well face to face. You need new mechanisms to achieve this.

As a buyer, my experience has been that most sales pitches do not rate high on any of these above three criteria. In fact with the experiments we have done with different salespersons from the same company selling the same product or service, with the same pitch-deck, the delivery was sometimes so different that it was difficult for us to comprehend if the same company product was being pitched! It is not that one sales pitch was substantially better or worse than the other, but that they many times had elements of “genius’ that needed to be consolidated and “lows’ that needed to be eliminated completely.

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” — Peter Drucker

Trend 3. Making Self Directed Buying Possible

Stop Selling. Start Educating! Photo Credit: Pixybay

According to Forrester, anywhere from 66–90% of a customer’s journey is self-directed. Which means mostly the buyers find you the seller!

The only way to achieve what both buyers and sellers want is to ensure that the buyers take the initiative on their own to learn about the seller and contact them — because the buyers want to and not because they are forced to by the seller! It is time to embrace permission-based microlearning technology and automation and digitize the entire sales pitch process and deliver it in a way that corporate and government buyers actually want to actively engage with.

We developed such a market development and demand generation program which includes proven methodology, tools, techniques, and a technology platform to do this. Together, with the seller we precision target and educate their corporate and government buyers digitally, on the company’s new business models, innovations, and disruptions happening as a result of their transformative products, platforms, and services, free of charge to the buyers using our sophisticated, video-based, neutral, non-sales platform.

Digital sales pitch automation is the key. Delivering it in a self-learning format via a neutral platform is essential!

We do this for our client companies and deliver such consolidated, quality pitch through digital, micro-learning, 24X7 to prospective buyers on behalf of our clients making sure to not let the buyer feel that the process is sales driven.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” — Tom Fishburne

Trend 4: Industry Powered Learning!

The key to smart business development is market development (the creation of new markets) and not sales development (the selling to existing markets). Most companies, unfortunately, focus their sales effort on sales development because it is easier to identify and sell to such markets. However, such existing markets are typically tapped out or have heavy competition for penetration. Creating new markets is difficult but more rewarding.

Take the example of a large LiDAR company we are currently discussing our market development program with. Their existing market is defense and transportation. But that is where all other LiDAR companies are focusing their sales dollars. There is probably potential to sell LiDAR to all kinds of industries like Agriculture, Biology and conservation, Geology and soil science, Atmosphere, Law enforcement, Mining, Physics and astronomy, Robotics, Spaceflight, Wind farm optimization, and Solar photovoltaic deployment optimization. But doing this is costly, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. So, companies don’t do it. Our digital, microlearning based market development approach does wonders here. We design our program with three novel approaches combined into one:

Designed By Buyers for Sellers: In the critical buyer-seller relationship, the buyer is the most powerful one. Yet, most sales programs don’t address the buyer’s perspective. We decided to do it in a buyer-centric way. Building a Winning Ecosystem: Successful selling is a team sport. The winner has a strong supportive ecosystem. We learned early on how to help companies build a winning sales ecosystem for high growth. Digital Pitch Automation: Today’s post-COVID winning sales teams are digital and highly automated. If you are not considering deploying the digital sales pitch technology for market development your sales strategy is tactical.

Our goal is to help our client businesses and their sales teams create an automated, digital, affordable, scalable, and impactful marketing, sales, and market development “pitch” for securing national or international customers. This approach is based on the ALITCB model (Awareness, Learning, Influence, Trust, Champions, and Buying) “edusales” process developed by ScaleUP USA.

Additionally, the Industry Powered Learning Masterprogram is also capable of enhancing the client’s partner ecosystem as well as building a startup accelerator program around its products or services. This program is based on the latest buyer-driven marketing approach which enables our client companies to do their market development, prospecting, qualifying, and community building through a digital, comprehensive, educational pitch to produce what we call is “filtered and educated leads.” The program can be targeted at federal, state, and local governments, large corporations, small and mid-size businesses, as well as the startup ecosystem for buyer awareness, education, and training in the US or globally and addresses the nine strategic objectives mentioned in step 1.

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” — Vince Lombardi.

About the Author:

Nitin Pradhan is the former award-winning CIO of the US Department of Transportation, and a first-term Obama Appointee; He is the current CEO of Launch Dream and leads their ScaleUP USA — Digital Business Growth Accelerator Initiative and is also the Managing Partner of GOVonomy, innovation as a service for governments and government contractors. He is also a Mentor at Mach 37, the nation’s top Cyber Accelerator, Z-nation Labs (India), and on the External Advisory Board of Accenture. Business and Government leaders can connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.