However, many things have changed in recent years – particularly due to digital technology – and a real shift in model is underway, which is significantly changing the commercial organization of companies. With a major impact: salespeople will have to switch to 'collaborative' mode!
1- The end of the unique sales representative-customer relationship
Quite a few things have changed in recent years that call into question traditional business models.
Firstly, technology has broken through, and buyers have regained the balance of power they were missing: total control over the buying process.
As we have already seen in several of our articles (The selling salesperson is dead, long live the advising salesperson and Are your sales strategies behind the times?), the core of the decision-making and purchasing process now bypasses the salesperson, occurring via the internet, social networks, and peer reviews.
Alongside this fundamental evolution in purchasing behavior, companies and their sales representatives are increasingly confronted with obstacles of various kinds:
– Customer volatility
– Lengthening sales cycles
– Decrease in average selling prices
– Difficulty contacting decision-makers due to interests and availability
– Increased acquisition cost compared to customer retention cost
Moreover, many products/services are now perceived as "commodities" under the influence of the multiplicity of suppliers: the best quality at the lowest cost has become the norm and therefore seems in the short term the only survival option, although intrinsically unsustainable in the medium/long term.
What is the impact of this shift on the organization and business models?
2- « Everyone is a Salesperson »
The first impact is that these upheavals mark the end of the unique commercial-client link.
To put it a bit simplistically, before the changes mentioned, the sales "go-to-market" strategy essentially consisted of asking "what size bait should we use?" to win customers and build loyalty.
Typically, we segmented clients by profile and type of sales contact: telemarketing for small clients, field sales for mid-market (SMEs) and key account managers for national and larger clients. This system made sense when the salesperson was the only point of contact with the supplier.
Today, as we have seen, a customer completes most (57%) of their purchasing journey without a salesperson. They only contact the salesperson two-thirds of the way through their journey, after having defined their need quietly from their office and in a much more objective way than with a salesperson who is necessarily both judge and jury.
In terms of sales organization, the approach of initiating the relationship when the salesperson captures the prospect's interest no longer corresponds to reality.
From now on, the relationship that a prospect or client has with a company is triggered well before (and sometimes even outside of) any contact with the salesperson.
The company's primary ambassadors are often discussion forums, comparison and review sites, the supplier's official website, and/or its official social media pages.
If the customer completes their entire purchasing journey online, the efficiency of your logistics service, the clarity of your order tracking, and the simplicity of your after-sales service procedures will do even more for customer loyalty than the relationships established by your sales representatives…!
Today, all employees of a company play an important role in the customer's perception of its brand! This means that they must all be "customer-centric" and that they must be aware of their role and their mission towards the customer.
However, what is always obvious to the salesperson (to "pamper" their customers) is not necessarily so for professions further removed from direct contact with the customer, such as logistics.
Hence the fundamental change represented by entering the era of « Everyone is a salesperson »: it implies a real evolution of the sales organization model to bring different professions to work closely together, primarily: marketing, sales, and customer service.
3- Towards a new sales organization model.
As a result of these changes, companies are shifting from traditional customer profile/salesperson type segmentation to a sales organization built around the customer journey and its successive stages across different channels.
Now that the sales representative has lost their role as the sole point of entry for the prospect/client, the other functions will have to assume a determining role: namely, collecting customer data and generating their "engagement" before passing the baton to the sales representatives responsible for sealing the deal.
The traditional approach is vertical, siloed, and sequential: emailing from marketing, follow-up from an outsourced sales force, meetings conducted by salespeople, and analysis of the campaign's conversion rate by marketing and sales.
The new commercial approach, transverse and integrated, requires a distribution of tasks throughout the customer journey: a visit to the supplier's website leads to a proposal for content in exchange for obtaining the email, which may generate registration for a newsletter, the proposal of a technical webinar, a visit from a sales representative, the sharing of a white paper, the invitation to a customer event, and perhaps, in fine a meeting with the sales representative.
The marketing approach has transformed to evolve towards Inbound Marketing, and this means that the allocation of commercial resources has changed: a large part of the decision and purchase cycle is processed through a marketing response and no longer a commercial response.
However, in the current revolution, marketing has taken the lead over sales, hence a significant source of performance that needs to be exploited: using the leads transmitted and the information collected at the right time and constructively to progressively refine the sales tactics and therefore the conversion rates.
4- Collaboration: The Core of Digital Transformation
Furthermore, new business and marketing models must now address the following challenges, and the internal organization must adapt in terms of skills and resources:
- Making the act of purchasing simple and easy:
Information and processes must be available anytime, anywhere, and in any mode. Of course, as B2C companies have long understood, all channels must be connected, and the experience must be seamless from one moment of the buying experience to the next.
From the very beginning of the purchasing process, interactions should allow the buyer to precisely define their needs so that the supplier can provide the most personalized response possible and accurately meet their expectations.
- Deliver value to the customer in a different way
Today, virtual tools (online video, 3D animation, augmented reality, etc.) are gradually replacing the salesperson's arguments or face-to-face demonstrations.
Due to the level of autonomy buyers have in understanding products, BtoB sales representatives must provide "Consulting" support in the reflection and construction of the client's project.
- Better understand customers through a collaborative approach
The involvement of non-sales teams (customer service, after-sales service, technical teams in charge of deploying the solution, etc.) and the sharing of information via a 360° CRM tool around customers will allow you to collect rich data on the customer's journey.
Reconciling marketing, sales, and customer service is therefore a key challenge for BtoB company performance.
This reconciliation involves a better definition of each person's contribution to the customer journey and increased information sharing from lead detection to after-sales service.
And how do you perceive these changes in your business? Have you modified your internal organization and the distribution of sales efforts?
