Gaining Instant Advisor Status
Since the original principles of Sales 1.0 were laid down many things have changed, but the dominant trend is the increasing scarcity of time and the challenges this scarcity presents for sales teams in getting the attention of decision makers.

The news gets worse: many of the founding principles of some of the leading Sales 1.0 approaches depend on “consultative” up front time investments by the client before a compelling “solution” can be articulated to justify further attention.  It is not that decision makers will not invest time in working with you; it is just that they must understand why they should make the investment sooner than these approaches allow.  The evolution to Sales 2.0 is focused on reaching “advisor” status faster, in fact, almost instantly.  The key is to be relevant from the first conversation.

Three time investments no one has time to make:

The Customer:
A “good” sales call in the Sales 1.0 context begins with a rep, a pad of paper, and open ended questions.  The vector of the conversation is basically, “Tell me about your business…”  The questioning is general and the paper slowly fills up with a profile of the client.  The objective of the Sales 1.0 rep is to listen intently, demonstrate empathy for the client, learn something out of the conversation against which to position his/her solution, and inspire interest on the part of the prospect.

From a Sales 1.0 paradigm a good rep is a good listener, focused on the customer, and providing solutions.  The process is supposed to feel consultative.  The problem is that “consultants” bring something to conversations other than products: sales reps just bring products.  Consultants bring experience, expertise; they know something about the problems in advance, and how people can address them.  Granted, it is the aspiration of Sales 1.0 to be truly consultative, and senior Sales 1.0 reps often attain the necessary experience and even expertise to deliver against the aspiration.  Unfortunately most customers are not seeing those senior reps, they are seeing a new rep thrown into the field with skills but no knowledge: dependent on the client to educate them on the business, its processes, and its challenges.

The Company:
The focus is on finding good Sales 1.0 reps.  We look to recruiters, assessments, and resumes with relevant experience to improve the chances of picking a winner.

In B2B complex sales environments most managers will say it takes at least a year to learn the product and how to position it.  With typical sales cycles of 6 months their companies do not see a return on a new rep until well into the second year.

These ramp-up times are extended because they are dependent on the rep gathering the necessary experience to be able to talk intelligently to decision makers.  To have intelligent conversations with executives the rep must be able to talk about the client’s business, and in the Sales 1.0 world they learn about client businesses through the repeated experience of sales calls with executives.

In a world where time is scarce companies just cannot afford to wait one to two years to ramp-up their sales reps.

The Sales Rep:
All of the above issues get significantly worse if you are hiring new reps from generation “Y”.  The velocity of their world is too fast for Sales 1.0 style learning.  They dislike states of ignorance, they want to contribute, and they want to contribute right now.  Their energy is high and burns bright.  They are not well suited to long apprenticeships, and do not like failure or rejection.

Sales has always been a high turnover profession, but it will get even worse for those companies that try to ask the next generation of sales people to walk through one and two year learning cycles.

The Perfect Storm
This growing time scarcity puts pressure on all three sides of the sales environment: customer, company and rep.  One of the innovation opportunities of Sales 2.0 is to relieve this time pressure in a single stroke: document the experiential learning of senior sales executives and bring it into your rep on-boarding and training programs.

The challenge with this advice for most people is where to begin?  How do you create a framework and context to make the documentation relevant and useful?  Let’s face it, simply asking a senior sales rep what makes him successful will not work, few can articulate it.  Even if they could the result would likely be too anecdotal to be useful as a training tool.

Customers, contrary to popular belief, are often pretty bad at providing generalized advice too.  They will tell you if you are doing a bad job, sometimes they will say you are doing a good job.  In the former they will be quite specific, but it will usually revolve around customer service which is relevant but hardly differentiating.  For the latter it really just means you are not causing them any real pain right now.

The missing ingredient in both conversations is a context and framework for the questions that will contribute to the organizations sales dialogue.

It Is About How Work Gets Done, Not What Products Do
A definition of Work: People enabled by processes producing measurable outcomes.

In the business to business sale the trick is to understand what the processes are in your prospect’s business before you arrive: how do they do it now, and what are the typical outcomes?  From this perspective the question becomes simple: what are the consequences in the business results of how these processes work today and the root causes of these consequences?

When you speak with your senior sales reps, focus on the status quo.  What are the bad things that will be happening in a target account that they are looking for in their sales conversations with decision makers?  What are the key indicators, why do they matter, and how will they be affecting the business results of the organization?  Try to have this conversation without ever mentioning your product or service.  Document the answers to these questions, and then go ask your customers if you have successfully changed their processes and results in the expected way.  If yes ask how and why things improved: if not now is the chance to get it right.

Armed with this relevant information about how the client performs work it is possible to create a sales dialogue anchored in the reality of the clients business today: not your product features.  It now becomes possible to guide even new rep sales conversations to quickly engage the client around business process discussions and their impact on business results.  Rather than a general shotgun questioning approach searching for something of interest, the opening conversation can quickly probe against existing processes and verify the client is experiencing the anticipated consequences.  The questions will be far more relevant to the executive then a general profiling discussion “about their business”, and given solid evidence of the consequences even new reps can position solutions and their impact quickly.

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