The drive for efficiency and the pitfalls of automation
The last few years has seen the meteoric rise of sales technology solutions, each claiming to be the one you need to transform the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team.
From CRM to ABM to demand gen to sales enablement platforms, the market is awash with tools that are all supposed to have transformed our lives.
In reality however, once deployed they frequently only bring marginal gains, not night and day differences.
At Sales Engine we are in the privileged position of working with customers across Europe and the US who are deploying these various platforms in different ways and to differing effect, so we’ve seen first-hand what works and what is really just smoke and mirrors.
But before we leap into the conclusions we’ve come to, let’s take a step back and look at how we got to where we are today.
Understanding the journey of enlightenment that the sales industry has gone on is crucial to ensuring that we take the right next steps and make the most of the tools that we have at our disposal.
My personal sales career started in the very early nineties, but interestingly the methodologies we were trained in back then (SPIN and Miller Heiman mainly) could be traced back to the late seventies. There was also a heavy influence at the time from the Xerox Professional Selling Skills ideas pioneered in the sixties. So I think it’s fair to say that the pace of change within sales methodologies hadn’t exactly been rapid.
And when it came to written content, it was basic and typically used to confirm or reiterate what had already been said; essentially you produced it if you had to rather then it acting as a core component of the sales engagement process.
And surprisingly this was pretty much the case all the way through the nineties and noughties, as what we saw was simply further refinement (and even just light re-naming!) of tried and trusted consultative selling approaches. It wasn’t until the Challenger Sale came along in 2012 that we saw any real new developments in methodologies that truly reflected the change in buyer behaviour that was being driven by access to information.
Repositioning the salesperson as a challenger of received wisdom also drove a requirement for new content to back them up.
Marketing and insights teams needed to arm salespeople with materials they could use much earlier in the sale, to provoke discussion and convince stakeholders, rather than simply confirming generally accepted facts. What this all means is that we’ve had in excess of 40 years of constant honing and refinement of the methodologies and how we teach salespeople to adopt and use them to good effect.
Set against this extensive history it’s clear that the plethora of sales effectiveness and sales enablement tools we now have are in their infancy. As a market we’re all still learning how to get the best from the opportunities they present us with, as well as how to integrate those capabilities into the sales approaches we’ve honed for four decades.
A lot of the sales tools have morphed from solutions that began life in the marketing tech stack, which means the deep understanding and skills needed to harness their capabilities can often lie outside of sales teams.
A number of the sales enablement tools grew out of quite specialist areas like ABM, or lead tracking, but as their functionality has grown they have ended up being presented to sales teams for automation and efficiency gains, with some grand claims about how they can benefit the sales process.
The first victim of this will be the content – brains are no longer as engaged, as the ‘machine’ now owns the content. The production process becomes more efficient but the quality of the outcome is at an all-time low.
Sales leaders acknowledging, understanding and then obsessing over content is the key to ensuring that this doesn’t happen.
As we see it, when it comes to content the big difference between a marketing approach and a sales approach is summarised as the difference between personalisation and tailoring.
The tools that serve marketing so well are set-up to deliver on the one-to-many and one-to-few basis, which typically takes 95% generic content and personalises it with the prospect name and maybe a few industry-specific elements to make it feel targeted.
This of course isn’t the fault of the tech itself, it’s all down to the people using it. As with any other profession, there are good and bad habits within sales teams.
The best salespeople have always known that working hard to tailor content to a specific opportunity or customer will generate the best results.
The problems that can arise from introducing these kinds of enablement or effectiveness platforms into sales teams is the temptation to let the tech do the heavy lifting for you. This makes the production process much more efficient, but it comes at the cost of quality – and inevitably, results.
And this is where we think there is a risk that the wheels can fall off. In the drive for efficiency and the dazzle of technology, the balance of content automation is being tipped too far.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re huge fans of tools and technology that enhance the sales process. Nothing gets us more excited than the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and dive into a shiny new piece of tech, to see how our customers could leverage it for competitive advantage. But the way we see these tools being sold and implemented all too often focuses on mapping the existing sales process, training the users, and importing the various bits of existing supporting collateral to ensure that when sales first visit the new tool they are met with some familiar content and can get up and running quickly.
What is being missed, sometimes almost completely, is that ultimately all of these tools are only as good as the content that is contained within them.
So, whether it is a sales enablement platform like Seismic or Highspot, an ABM platform like Folloze, an L&D platform like Brainshark or a content creation tool like Turtl, their ultimate success and impact will be determined at least as much by the content that is put into them, as it will by how well they are integrated into a sales process and how well users are trained to use them.
Irrespective of the tool, a large slice of the gains you can make will come about by re-thinking the content that your sales teams access through it.
Loading in your existing presentations and traditionally structured documents and collateral will massively reduce these gains. It’s like being given access to Lewis Hamilton’s championship winning Mercedes, then swapping the wheels for those off your road car; you’ve immediately compromised the performance by using the wrong parts.
