Many years ago there was a legend from a big well known technology provider called Digital (old boys should remember, young guys, well, check Wikipedia). The legend said that on sales “missions” the engineers would never have a glimps of the customer before the deal was done. This enabled the sales rep to sell his dreams, collect the order and… run away hoping never to see the customer again in the office or for that matter in a dark ally as well. When the deal was done and the project was started the engineers walked in, looked at the product that was sold, then looked at their own “creation” and felt sick to their stomachs. “Where is that ******* sales guy” they muttered – nowhere in sight. Those days are long gone.
These days when we sales guys walk into our customer meetings, we are armed with an endless array of sales documentation detailing features and specs, demos, brochures and nearly every dreamed, paper worthy, description of the product we are selling. Obviously the selling leeway is much narrower thus creating a huge “trust” between sales teams and their product/R&D colleagues. The trust is in the real understanding “the product really does what it says on the cover”. Well experience shows that, over selling by sales reps is usually (not always) coupled with under delivery by the product teams, so we are selling today the n+4 version of the product which will be available in 18-24 months time… this is a recipe for disaster.
One of the biggest holes in knowledge amongst sales staff is what really is there under the hood of the product and how to sell its current benefits. Too many times we are lectured by R&D about features 16, 17 & 18 whilst only the product people really know that they have barely got past feature 9… and that a deliverable product at any stage is only available 6 month from now…
Let me share with you some real life examples, which I am sure are not unique:
The company’s executives are pushing the sales team to deliver POs (purchase orders) at short notices. “We have a great product, just what our target customer needs and we are 9 months ahead of our competition” say the headlines. So the sales crusaders set off to the sunset to sell, armed with the “knowledge” that all is in place.
So a few months of work and here we come back with an agreement with a large multi-national customer operating in multiple countries – big opportunity, the one we were all expecting. Easy, we say, all we need to do is to give a product to each country for testing and a few weeks later, come back in to sign up the customer… We (Sales) are counting our sales bonuses and the management is leaking info to the investors – “the big one is being reeled in”. What happens next is the tragedy of misalignment between sales and product people… “the Product is late”, they say and we should wait “just a few more weeks”. Anger builds but we are seasoned professionals, we can set expectations with the customers and get over this unforeseen delay. Then come more delays, and yet more. The end is quite obvious; from a great opportunity, a commercial disaster is born. The characteristics of the disaster are many but could be summed up simply through lack of transparency and coordination between sales, marketing and engineering which causes chasms in product and sales understandings. The same chasms that were illustrated for Digital at the beginning of this entry.
In the next few entries we will examine how such chasms should be bridged in order to create an effective selling organization which not surprisingly starts not in the sales team but rather in the R&D, engineering and product side of the house.
Stay posted, more to come.
Tal