Business Development Culture

Taking Sales Culture Beyond the Sales Team

Alex Moyle

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780749481919
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749481926
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Adopt a sales-orientated approach to your business and facilitate the same attitude throughout your company's culture, by ensuring the objective of generating business profit is embraced by the entire organization - not just the sales team - to achieve long term growth.

Business Development Culture defines how to facilitate a sales-oriented perspective throughout a company culture, enabling it to sell more on an ongoing and consistent basis. Highly practical in its approach, this book empowers readers to break away from the frustrations of missed opportunities and lost leads, and to escape the repetitive 'feast and famine' sales patterns. Providing direct guidance on the implementation of an immersive business development culture, this book will ensure that the wider objective of generating business profit is embraced by the entire organization, not just the sales team.

Easily tailored to maximize current processes, this book features numerous tools and market-tested insights to support leaders in adapting their approach at both team and strategy levels. This invaluable guidance is supporting by impactful interviews from across the industry.

Insightful, practical and directly relevant, it is an essential read to achieve stable, consistent growth, and ultimately, long-term profits.

PART ONE

Adapting to change is the new normal

Like it or not, change is happening or will happen across every industry sector. Some markets have already witnessed wholesale disruption, courtesy of the digital revolution. Some are at the early stages of disruption and a few are still relatively unscathed. What is for sure is that change is happening or going to happen for every business in every sector and it will keep happening. The impact of globalization, technology, lower barriers to entry and changes to how people buy services is challenging every firm’s business model. This means that businesses now need to do business differently. And in two years’ time, the rules may have all changed again. Change is the new constant, which presents certain challenges for organizations.

The question for every company is this: How do we adapt what we do to thrive in a fast-changing world, rather than survive or, at worst, simply disappear?

This is not a new question for business leaders to ask. However, what is new is the pace of change and the fact that it is now constant.

This speed of change causes two challenges in particular. Firstly, there are market-based challenges. These challenges are typically driven by customer demands, such as what they want to buy and the way they want to buy it (wanting to conduct personal banking without visiting a branch, being able to order a cab at 11.30pm without having to call around a number of firms…). New or existing competitors will often redesign services to meet customer demand, which then gives them a competitive advantage (an example of this is the creation of online share trading platforms to create a lower cost delivery model over traditional stockbrokers). The economic environment will influence not only what people are willing to buy but also their ability to pay the ‘traditional’ price paid – their ‘real’ demand.

The second area of challenge is around the core culture of an organization. Core culture-based challenges are the issues associated with how an organization’s people, processes and leadership are able to adapt the way they operate to meet customer demand. The heart of the challenge for most leaders is overcoming the ‘friction’ of moving from their current culture (‘we have always done it this way’), to a culture that is ready to meet customer demands.

There are so many preconceived notions about what sales involves and how it makes people feel, that changing it involves a cultural shift away from the initiative-led approach that companies traditionally take.

This section of the book focuses on understanding the market and cultural challenges companies are facing.

01

The challenges of a changing market

Industries such as retail and manufacturing have had to be agile and adaptable in order to survive the erosion of margins from automation, globalization and other forces for decades now. Other sectors have had it easier, but those days are over. The drivers of commoditization, globalization, automation, reintermediation (Uber enabling users to get a taxi from wherever they are) and disintermediation (companies selling direct from websites) are now omnipresent. Even professional services firms, relatively insulated from these forces of change up until recently, are now feeling the pinch.

So why has it taken so long for professional services to face disruption on the scale of other sectors? Because the intrinsic ‘value’ of a service is built on four pillars of value and disruption of those pillars has been slow. But now that the disruption has started, the speed of change has escalated rapidly.

Before we go any further, let’s establish what the four pillars of value are:

1. Knowledge: I know how to do things you do not.
2. Application: I know how to apply my knowledge to your specific situation.
3. Peace of mind: My service gives you the reassurance you need that the right thing has been done at the right time.
4. Inertia against change: My clients know me and trust me so they will not leave me.

But these pillars have now been shaken for a number of reasons.

Value of knowledge

The Internet has democratized knowledge and how we buy products and services. Can you remember the last time you went into a travel agent to pick up brochures and book a holiday? No, neither can I. If I did go to a travel agent, I would already know more about where I want to go and the hotels I am interested in than the travel agent I am speaking to. I would have done my research via the Internet before my visit.

It is this accessibility of knowledge that is changing how people and organizations buy services. It has also demystified what a lot of industries offer. Historically, many roles within the B2B services sector (ie professional services) have been shrouded in mystery. For example, the stockbroker: ‘Let me tell you which shares to buy.’ Or the recruiter: ‘I have a network of people I know.’ Or the lawyer: ‘Let me tell you what the law says.’ Or the marketer: ‘I can generate you leads.’

The Internet provides much of this information and, what’s more, it’s free. I no longer need to pay my accountant to find out if an expense is allowable as I can look it up myself. I no longer need to ask a stockbroker for share tips when I can do my own research. And I no longer need to use a recruiter when I have a network of my own that I can leverage. And it’s not just me that can do all this. Look back a few years when CFOs had to pay their accountants to come in and explain the impact of new accounting standards. Fast forward to the present day and now the same accounting firm has probably produced a free white paper and ‘how to guide’. Accountancy firms are now giving their knowledge away for free because that’s what the market demands.

While some of us might think knowledge still has value, in terms of this first pillar, the ubiquitous stream of content marketing material (how to guides, tip sheets, white papers, social media platforms…) demonstrates that professional service companies are increasingly willing to share their knowledge for free.

Try it out

1. Exercise: Pick a leadership, sales, marketing or training challenge you currently have. Type into any search engine ‘How do I solve <insert challenge>’ and see what response you get. You’d be surprised by how much you get for free.
2. Exercise: Pick a problem that you typically solve for your customers. Type into any search engine ‘How do I solve <insert problem>’ and see how much your customers can get for free. Then look to see how many of your competitors are giving away knowledge.

This increased access to knowledge has had a huge impact on the way that we now buy goods and services. Our purchasing habits are now based around what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT or ZeeMOT). Google’s premise is that in the days before the Internet, when we had a need for a product or a service, we would visit a few shops. This was the first moment of truth. Our second moment of truth came when we assessed the ‘experience’ after we had bought the product or service. In today’s marketplace, Google’s research shows that before we even interact with an organization we have probably ‘googled’ them and researched them. And this behaviour isn’t that new: back in 2011 Google found that ‘79 per cent of shoppers used mobile to help with shopping’, as evidenced in the 2011 ebook ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth.¹

What this shows is that there has been a fundamental change in how we buy products and services. It has taken many professional services leaders a long time to realize that this also applies to their customers. Some leaders haven’t even realized it yet. Despite the fact that many professional services leaders are digitally savvy in how they research and buy things, they have not realized that their customers are doing the same about their service.

Think for a moment about how you would approach buying some sales training for your team. You would probably do the following:

• Email friends or colleagues and ask for recommendations.
• Type into Google ‘Sales training for <insert job function>’. You will then see what different providers are offering.
• Type a post into LinkedIn: ‘Can anyone recommend a good sales trainer for <insert job function>?’ You will get many suggestions from those you are conn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to business development culture
• PART ONE Adapting to change is the new normal
• PART TWO Building a customer focus into your team
• PART THREE Aligning company and personal goals
• PART FOUR Creating a mutually productive work environment
• Conclusion – a quick recap
• Index
• Backcover