When you think of animals, do you think of them as “bad”? Is a lion a bad animal? Is a camel a bad animal? The answer is no. Animals aren’t “bad,” but they can fail to thrive if you put them in the wrong environment. Put the camel in the rainforest, and it probably won’t work. Put the lion in the Sahara, and it probably won’t thrive.
The same holds true when you try to put a salesforce that is accustomed to selling hardware into today’s cloud technology environment. Sometimes, as many of our partners have found, that is just like putting a lion in the desert. They know that just because an individual knows how to sell hardware and other tangible items at the IT level does not mean that individual is necessarily the right person with the right brain profile to sell an intangible. In today’s environment, partners should be looking at selling managed services, as I have blogged about in the past, as well as cloud. It also requires your salesforce to understand how to map a company’s process improvement and new ways of doing business around growing revenue, controlling costs, increasing cash flow, mitigating risk and maximizing asset utilization.
It can be very difficult to make the type of shift needed to thrive in this new environment, because what made you successful in the tangible sale is different in the world of the intangible sale. You have just asked your World Series-winning baseball team to play ice hockey, and they’ve shown up in their baseball uniforms with bats and spikes on their feet. Probably won’t work. It is a new game – the rules are different, the equipment is different, the way it is played is different, and where it is played is different. So what can you do to leverage the strengths of your best players in this new world?
First, you have to understand your environment. You do that by understanding the brain profiles of your sales folks. Who are the best and what are they like? You will find that they are very similar. Who isn’t making it and what are they like? Again, there will be similarities. Once you figure out what the successful person’s profile looks like, you can find others to leverage in your sales environment.
Finding the right tool can help you avoid situations we’ve all been in that waste time and cause you to lose money. For example, the “professional” interviewers, who know exactly what to say and do when they get into an interview. They can go through the motions, even though it isn’t who they really are. In fact, some are so good at play acting and going through the motions in the role that you won’t know what you have gotten yourself into as an employer for 90 to 120 days. The clock strikes midnight at the end of their legal probationary period and now you have six months to manage them out of the business.
This is not only annoying, but it can have horrific collateral damage, including 1) The expense of bringing the person on and training them; 2) The collateral damage to the end customer – the experience isn’t good and you haven’t sold anything; 3) You have to bring in someone new and start all over again. Meanwhile the clock is ticking, because your customers are either being neglected or they are not approached the way you want and your company isn’t represented in the way you want.
So, how can you ensure that you are getting a “good” animal rather than a “bad” one? You need to match up the environment you have, where you are now, where you plan to go and get the right “animal,” behaviorally speaking, who has the highest probability of success in that environment.
In my next post, I will outline how this system works and why it is imperative for your business’ success in the world of selling intangible products. A person’s brain profile will predict how well they can do, and it is the sales leader’s job to understand how to identify the right match for the environment.
