Is It Effective Selling?

Practicing customer centric selling is hard work. The real question: Is it is possible for salespeople to treat every customer alike and give their utmost effort? After all, organizations don’t consider all customers on an equal footing.

Most sales methods and sales management practices don’t talk about moderating sales efforts—instead they suggest all-or-nothing approaches. There is no question that if salespeople apply full throttle unconditionally with all of their customers, they are bound to be ineffective due to time and resource constraints.

This article does not argue against customer centric selling approaches, but merely highlights the fact that such efforts should be considered as a spectrum—better customers deserve higher efforts than others. It is simply not practical to be highly customer centric all the time.

Customer-Centric Selling: A Dual Pronged Sales Approach

Consider two fundamental ingredients in any customer relationship—trust and value proposition. Every interaction of the salesperson with the customer goes towards establishing these two aspects.

•    Trust: Relationship selling frameworks highlight the need for building customer’s trust in the salesperson. Earning customer’s trust has been always considered as a critical driver for salespeople to be successful. Experience teaches salespeople that they must gain their customer’s trust in order to overcome any objections and hurdles during the sales process.

•    Value Proposition: Solution selling focuses on meeting specific needs of the customer’s business. We are advised to dig deep, find out the real business needs and position our solution in a way that customers recognize its value—a tangible ROI and other intangible relationship factors.

These forms of selling are complementary—effective sales approaches are usually a mix of the two.  Salespeople should ask themselves two questions in their every day interactions with their customers:

•    Did I increase the level of customer’s trust with my actions today?

•    Did I further customer’s understanding of our value proposition?

Relationship Portfolios And Customer-Centricity

To devise effective marketing strategies, many organizations segment customers based on their needs and their profitability. Similarly, a segmentation based on the nature of customer relationships is required for effective tailoring of customer-centric efforts.

In a salesperson’s ‘portfolio’ of customers, for instance, four primary relationship categories can exist: (1) strong personal acquaintances, (2) organizational partners, (3) strictly business relationships, and even (4) one-off relationships. Each of these categories point to different levels of future potential of the customer.

Granted these relationships are not static, and they can move in either direction over a period of time. Regardless, there are appropriate effort levels for trust building and for committing personal and organizational resources to create a value proposition that are different for each category of relationship. There is a point of diminishing return for salesperson’s efforts with every customer that should be determined solely by category of relation with the customer.

Advantages Of The ‘Portfolio Approach’

Salespeople need to categorize their customer portfolio to tailor their selling strategies in order to be efficient and effective. My empirical research shows that this ‘adaptive range’—or the sales capability to work with a wide variety of customer relationships—boosts individual sales performances. When a sales organization fails to facilitate proper categorization it becomes difficult for sales managers to properly balance their sales force capabilities and resource allocations.

The advantages of this portfolio approach for the organization are (i) a more focused sales training program, (ii) an ability to ensure appropriate customer experience, and (iii) effectiveness in allocating resources to support sales efforts.

From a sales management perspective, this portfolio approach offers a better framework to manage individual sales capabilities compared to simple reliance on monitoring sales activities and measuring sales target achievements.

Comments (4)

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Director of Marketing
written by Catherine, March 02, 2009

How do you see this approach in terms of coordination with Marketing strategy? I think this approach has merit...

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Sales Director
written by Rimrock, March 02, 2009

The article seems to share some parallels with the idea of certain sales-people being 'hunters' and others 'farmers'. In particular the different style of relationships and the levels of customer centric behavior.

Is this how you see it ?

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VP-Biz Dev
written by Val K, March 14, 2009

I like the approach, but I think you need to take it deeper. It is more than just determining the type of sales person for a client or how they engage. I would take it down to the individual sales tool level.

I look at every offering we have and every method of sales we have (email, direct mail, seminars, tradeshows, on site account calls etc.) and determine the most cost effective methods of selling each individual offering that will not negatively impact our customer service.
In some cases email campaigns have been exceptional at driving business, letting me reallocate sales resources to other offerings needing a more personal touch.

I would like to get your thoughts.

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written by Ganesh, March 19, 2009

Val: I agree-- Your point about taking it deeper (e.g. sales tool level) needs to be further explored.

Of the many things that a salesperson can adapt, interpersonal relationship or such soft aspects are the ones which usually get less attention. At the same time, these behavioral aspects play a crucial role in establishing the relationship with buyers, often considered to be more significant than the firm level factors.

Also, my arguments call for tweaking individual selling behaviors depending on the buyer relationship and not for switching salespeople depending on the customer. I believe successful salespeople can 'adapt' to different selling situations and among the things they can adapt are the relationship aspects addressed in this article.

This article was based on a quantitative research / case study I have posted on my http://blogs.case.edu/ganesh.

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