Is making no change to my sales team an option in the world today?, Tim Hughes

Here at DLA Ignite we have a group training session every Monday. Apart from the obvious benefit of investing in the team and providing a culture of learning. It's the way that all of us learn and grow, as a team and individuals.

This isn't push down, the team bring to the meeting what they have learned at clients, what they have learned in the sales process. They then get to share this with the team. Social learning. We all learn from each other. Anyway, enough about our culture.

In the discussion this Monday, one of the team said that our biggest competitor was

"do nothing"

A world of constant change

You may have seen this article from McKinsey a year ago, that demonstrated that in the first three months of the global pandemic, there was ten years of transformation.

The graphic for this is below and the McKinsey research is here.

I remember when I first saw that and I thought wow!

I just spotted this in a blog by Mark Schaefer the marketing thought leader.

The McKinsey survey he mentions is here and his blog on customer experience is here.

"A McKinsey survey found that companies are three times likelier than they were before the crisis to conduct at least 80 percent of their customer interactions digitally."

You may not agree, but even if your customer interactions on digital have gone up by 50% or 20% ... what are you doing to meet this demand? What skills have you given your teams to support this?

Do you remember the pandemic last year?

Do you remember 2020, last year? All of a sudden the pandemic has pushed us into doing things that we never thought we had to do.

Here in the UK, there was panic buying in shops, people seemed to buy up all the toilet rolls they could find. My partner and I suddenly found that when we went to the shops, the things, we wanted, weren't there. So we had to find new places in which to buy them. We used to buy certain items from the supermarket and as the shelves were empty, we found that the milkman delivered them, so we switched suppliers and have not switched back.

My mother who is 83 is shielding and lives 200 miles away, we had to find ways to get her the food she needed. Luckily, she has always been big on network and was able to get the things she needed. Locally, we also needed to make sure that the vulnerable where being carried for.

Then the barbers closed, so I had to buy a shaver to cut my hair. Since then, my partner cuts my hair and I haven't gone back to the barbers. There are many examples I'm sure of where what we did and do has changed and won't go back to the way it was before.

Change is a business imperative

We had never faced anything like this before, we had to try new things. Life simply wouldn't have carried on, if we hadn't done anything different.

In business we see many a company that seem to be frozen in time, "we have done it like this for the last twenty years so it will still keep working". If I had taken that attitude in my personal life, my family wouldn't have eaten. It's that simple.

The same with the use of social media to help people sell and using digital and virtual techniques to sell. That said, we see most Business leaders sitting there and "doing nothing" and at that point they are being left behind.

What's happening out there?

Many businesses are making decisions on what they know, you cannot make a decision on what you don't know. We all know that cold calling is broken, it does not give you the returns you want and need. The answer seems to be to take that broken process and try and super charge it somehow. I'm sorry but a broken process is broken.

Leaders don't know what to do

Leaders know they need to make a change, but there are thousands, if not millions of gurus out there all the the fix. You may recall the famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld.

There are things we don't know we don't know

Initiatives are being scraped

Many of these initiatives, tactics and "silver bullet" pieces of software being procured are already out of date before they are purchased and as we talked about above, you cannot fix what is broken. This means that these initiatives are then being scrapped.

You need a strategy

It was what my first boss said to me, everytime I said I didn't know what to do with my career "you need a strategy" and she was right.

Something that gives you a strategy but isn't days and days of work especially if you don't know if this is the right or the wrong path to follow.

If you don't know what to do in social and digital with your sales team or any of your employees that we can put a strategy together for you as follows:-

60 minutes - Presentation on how the world looks today with social and digital. Educational in nature it takes you through the latest research as well as the changes that have taken place in the buying process. 45 minutes presentation with 15 minutes for questions

This would be delivered (and recorded) the week before the workshop.

Following this session we send out a questionnaire, this is about collating a “as is” position. There are a dozen or so questions - 20 minutes.

Then we would run a workshop online for 2 and half hours this is to debate and understand your “to be position” how crucial is social going to be, what are the challenges to implementing, what to call this initiative, pledges, etc

Following the workshop, we will issue you with a report and your business has a strategy on what to do in business with social and digital.

From there you can put your own plan in place, but at least you will have the facts and the understanding to decide which path to follow.

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