Social Networking: Friend or Foe

Over the last couple of months, I had the opportunity to conduct a series of sales training workshops. One of the persistent themes that I noticed in all these workshops was how much the frontline sales staff overwhelmingly feel that the product/service they sell is pretty much commoditized.

What exactly does a salesman currently do in a sales call to communicate value to the customer?

Lets not look at the value of a product or service here. Lets look at the value created in a sales call. The cost that a customer bears in meeting a sales person is his time and energy. In an increasingly fast-paced corporate world, our customer has limited resources of both, which he spends with due care. Hence, in his eyes it is a very valuable commodity.

Now what is the benefit that a sales person can possibly give this same customer of ours in a sales call? The answers which generally come across are a good value proposition, a cost-effective solution, and other such terms. Invariably though, there is too much emphasis on the cost. This is despite the fact that we know that as consumers ourselves, we do not always buy the cheapest item on the block.

Lets take a pause here and think for a minute. Rewind to a few years back, when you had to buy a car. How did you go about that purchase? You perhaps had a few cars in mind from the advertisements you saw on TV. You then went to a few showrooms, heard out a few sales guys and chances are that one particular sales person got you hooked with a few interesting features in his car. You negotiated but you did not mind paying a little more than you had budgeted for due to few features that really caught your fancy.

Now lets imagine the same scenario in 2011. How will you go about buying your car? Chances are that you will first log into the internet. You will check out the various options of all the brands, available at the click of a mouse. You also browse through all the features and product comparisons. You also have a good idea of the price ranges. Now, fully armed, you still visit the showroom. But this time, the difference is that you perhaps know more about the cars and how they compare against competitors than most of the sales people there. What is the only benefit, you think, a sales person can now give you? A better price! From being one of the factors at the point of purchase, price has truly been crowned the undisputed king in your purchase criteria.

Let us now return to our sales person who has to take his sales call. If all he can talk about in his sales call is product features, their benefits and at best, comparisons with his competitors, is there someone else who can do a better job of that? Of course there isand the answer is Google!

Can any sales person in the world compete with that? I think not!

So does that mean that Google has effectively killed the sales profession? The answer is an emphatic no. What Google has done though is to elevate the requirement of an effective sales person from being someone who communicates value to someone who creates value. People still pay a premium while buying certain products and services. But this happens only when the sales person, due to his knowledge of the industry and his offerings, brings in his expertise into play, to deliver insights to the customer that he cannot find from a Google search. An example of this is perhaps in the selling of client virtualization solutions in the IT hardware space. The same customer who often cannot be sold a PC at any kind of premium, readily shells out a hefty premium to buy these solutions. Why? Because Google may tell him the specifications of the components involved, but it cannot give him or help him with the insight of how to go about it and how it can help improve his business metrics. That is the benefit that the salesperson can bring in.

The first step towards redemption of the sales profession is for sales people to understand and acknowledge that their job is not to compete with Google. The benefit that a sales person can deliver in a sales call, has to be the insights that come from their unique knowledge of the industry and the customer situation. That is something that Google cannot compete against.

I challenge you to think about your next sales callwill you be communicating something that Google cannot?