Notes from Down Under
I just completed a week in Australia, first attending and participating in the “Optimising the Sales Force 2009” Conference in Melbourne.
In the span of a 50-year career in sales and sales management, I’ve been to dozens of conferences of this genre. This two-day event was among the best – if not THE BEST – conference in which I have ever participated!
I fully credit the two key organizers – Bryn Hughes and Simon Olsen – for the success of this undertaking. Speakers had been skillfully selected world-wide to comment on varying aspects of selling in today’s challenging environment. It was almost uncanny how the messages of each speaker dovetailed with each other to reinforce the notion that we are at a watershed or tipping-point in the world of selling.
All speakers agreed, as did the audience (largely of sales managers), that selling in the future will never be the same. The combination of the effects upon selling of:
- the growth of information on the Internet,
- the increase in viable competition,
- the phenomenon of the dis-assembly or re-assembly of pieces of large projects to export worldwide, and
- the advent of high-tech tools such as CRM,
are only a handful of the factors refocusing the selling function.
Delegates unanimously agreed that today’s customers or clients in a complex B2B sale are firmly in the driver’s seat, and today’s buyers are much more knowledgeable about your products – and your competitor’s products – than ever before.
Thus the first job of the salesperson is shifting from that of solely purveying product knowledge, to that of trusted advisor who treats his customer as a partner in the search for and implementation of the best solution.
It truly was a live experience of witnessing that Miller Heiman clients are not buying products per se, but rather they are buying the “solution image” of what problems these products or services will solve.
After the Melbourne conference, we continued to Sydney where we hosted over 20 Miller Heiman clients, and several top prospects, at a breakfast seminar held on beautiful Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour.
The participants reacted most positively to this notion I put forward: that managers can plan and implement how to best introduce change initiatives by thinking through how those affected will respond. The old saw is that people always resist change. That is not quite true. The fact of the matter is that people resist the chaos that usually, or often, accompanies a change initiative.
I challenged the group with the proposition that there are only three reasons why people resist change:
1. They do not understand what change is being implemented, or why;
2. They understand, but do not know how to implement the change;
3. They do not want to implement the change.
I then developed the variations on that theme – e.g.: wants to, and understands, but does not know how, or does not understand, so does not want to understand, etc.
In the afternoon, I coached the sales consultants and facilitators of Miller Heiman programs in the up-and-coming changes to the Conceptual Selling® program. I was very appreciative of their positive responses, and most impressed by the high level of understanding and keen insight shown by the Australian team.
To learn more about what your organization can do to impact results NOW, click here.
photo credit: richkidsunite, Phillie Casablanca
