What’s wrong with these people? Sales reps I mean.
If you ask Tom Callinan of Strategy Development, the industry has changed, but some sales reps haven’t changed with it although he’s not really blaming them.
“We’ve turned our sales forces into financial sales people,” opines Callinan. “What I mean by that is most business owners and a lot of senior managers probably have 20 to 35 years in the business; when they went out and sold, you actually had to convince people to go with you. Most of the time you were a young company, you didn’t have a big customer base, so you had to steal somebody else’s customers.
“Back in the days of the Savins, the Konicas, the Minoltas, Xerox, Kodak, everybody was out there looking to steal their customers.”
And that’s what tended to happen and often.
“The reason customers would switch is number one, we weren’t as good on the leasing side and didn’t have service bundled in so there wasn’t a lot of switching costs in terms of lease out,” says Callinan. “They’d send out a check with the remaining payments and the machine and take it back. Now, both those aspects are gone. People bundle and the leasing companies won’t take the lease back.”
The other reason why customers could be easily convinced to make a change back in the day is that copiers broke all the time. “The end user blamed that on the dealer, but really it was the product, they just really didn’t work well,” adds Callinan. “After awhile the end users figured out that it doesn’t matter what vendor I have, these copiers break a lot.”
Then copiers started getting more reliable.
Once customers figured out that copiers broke a lot and it didn’t matter who they bought them from, followed by them becoming more reliable, and the leasing companies not letting the dealer term the lease out and send the equipment back along with companies starting to bundle so they had a significant financial advantage of upgrade vs. leasing, the sales rep would get this new base of customers and just go in and flood leases.
“’It’s a five year lease, it’s four years in, I can make the math work; you pay $330 a month now and for $330 I can give you a new copier; sign on the dotted line.’ What’s the sales skill there?” asks Callinan.
That was fine when hardware was flowing out the door, but as the copier industry has matured and the average selling price has declined along with a decline in units, growth is now coming from MPS, MS, and adjacent markets.
“Now all of a sudden you need sales skills, it’s not flipping anymore,” says Callinan. “Our sales professionals don’t know how to develop a business case; they’ve been selling 100 percent financial.”
And forget about going in and telling a customer, “I can save you money and increase your productivity.”
“I don’t know how you increase productivity with a copier because productivity is defined as output per something, whether it’s revenues per rep or widgets per machine in the factory, so they’re saying something that’s illogical,” argues Callinan. “It’s not, ‘tell me when your server goes down how does that affect your business? When that happens, how do you handle your customer relations issues? When your server is dead and you can’t get information to your customers, how do you handle that, how much does that cost you?’”
That’s why Callinan believes there’s a need for seminars such as Strategy Developments’ Advanced Enterprise Selling Skills, which he’s offering in February 12-13 at the Hyatt Place Orlando Airport Northwest.This course is designed to teach reps how to have intelligent business conversations with the customer.
The key is to focus on what are the goals of the relationship between the sales rep and the customer or prospect. “You need to lay it out in the first meeting and do a good discovery,” says Callinan. “Find out the business case, why they should be talking to you and how you can help them. That’s what Advanced Enterprise Selling Skills is. Teaching these folks how to go in and uncover business issues that would result in them selling their services or products.”
You can say Callinan and company are responding to a disturbing trend.
“The trend is these guys have lost their sales ability, they’ve become financial sales people,” he emphasizes once again.
