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Change Management In Sales: The Seven Trends
As with almost all markets of trade and commerce there are immense changes presently taking place in sales. As covered on many sales training courses, conventional sales are losing significance and/or have new work emphases, the new media are opening formerly unidentified routes of sales, and the sales department is not exempt from new management techniques such as total quality and lean management.
Streamlining management will lead to more de-centralisation and individual responsibility.
In the course of lean management, the quantity of hierarchy levels is condensed in many companies.
As a result of this, for many sales people is a de-personalisation of management. They report to their company via laptop computer and modem, instead of having daily or weekly contact with the area sales manager.
Starting from home, instead of beginning their sales route from work, means taking on a great deal more personal accountability for planning and managing their own work.
On balance: the sales person becomes a sole agent. In order to counteract the isolation, some companies have already organised a regular information exchange in the form of fortnightly group meetings.
The evaluation of sales performance has to be fundamentally improved.
Simple gauges such as turnover or cover contribution are no longer sufficient. self-sufficient sales people are naturally less supervised and as a result benefit from receiving good sales training. Any corporation choosing revenue and cover contribution as assessment criteria are oblivious of the extent to which the sales person is exhausting their area potential, how many new customers they visit, how intensively they push new products etc.
Tip: Questioning your customers on a regular basis about their happiness with the sales person is one opportunity of assessing the performance of your sales team in future.
Due to information technology replacing previous specialist knowledge, a qualification divide is opening up in sales.
In the area of High Qualification Selling the person is becoming more and more important in the sales process, but the significance of information technology remains the same. An example is the progressive evolution from mechanics to electronics in the mechanical engineering industry, requiring highly qualified sales engineers.
In Low Qualification Selling, on the other hand, information technology is becoming increasingly imperative and the people are being slowly replaced. This development is at present underway in banking where information technology (statement printers, cash machines, home banking, tele banking etc) is replacing people. On balance: caution must be exercised when categorising products: not every high-tech product ‘automatically’ requires High Qualification Selling.
It is increasingly known that customers often buy goods such as personal computers from discount stores without any advice.
The transition from price selling to value selling, is one of the greatest challenges for sales
As well as products, gradually more service has to be sold. Selling value is a true art form.
According to Professor Simon, this is the most contemporary and explosive trend. If companies such as Vulkan-Werft remain competitive in spite of full order books, it is because they offer cut prices. List prices still rise annually, but the prices left after deducting discounts and special conditions are still lower. Some companies are going in the opposed direction in that they are lifting their discounts and going over to a net price policy.
The tightrope walk between personal and automated sales continues.
It is enormously difficult to preserve the balance between sales department costs on the one hand and customer relations on the other.
Unquestionably, the costs of personal sales have increased in the last few years and will continue to rise. Information technology, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly cheap. The more intensively a company automates its contact with customers, however, the more nameless, interchangeable and loose it’s affiliation with customers become.
On balance: A customer builds up a close, even possibly friendly relationship with a bank employee over the years. This is doubtful to happen with a cash machine. With anonymous business relations there is the great danger that customers will compare price and performance and buy for that reason.
The sales department has to think much more in terms of net product and contribute to overcoming the distance obstruction.
Closeness to the customer, customer relations and customer satisfaction are becoming progressively more important. According to Professor Simon, “The customers voice must be vehemently imprinted into the company!”
The sales person becomes a coordinating manager in that they unite employees from research and development, logistics, customer care etc with (potential) customers.
On balance: Particularly successful companies will differentiate themselves in future through a high degree of marketing professionalism and a higher degree of closeness to their customers. 28% of customers change supplier for price reasons, 19% are disappointed with product quality. 53% of all customers change supplier due to the poor quality of service and weaknesses in customer contact.
The outsourcing of sales activities will increase.
An ever-increasing number of industrial and trading companies exclude their sales department as an independent corporate area in order to boost efficiency. This development offers a great opportunity to entrepreneurial types where an effective, skilled sales force has received good sales training can win further business.
