Why you shouldn’t attend
Embracing Radical Change in the Marketplace
The hard truth
Don’t attend this breakfast if you’re looking for an affirmation of the sales status quo. Justin Roff-Marsh, the presenter, argues that the marketplace has changed dramatically since the evolution of the standard sales model and that radical change is being forced on organizations—like it or not!
Here are just some of the radical changes that Justin advocates (and sacred cows he slays) over the course of this breakfast in this comprehensive and impeccably argued treatise.
If you find these statements particularly offensive, you probably should give this event a miss!
Salespeople should be inside, not in the field.
Engineers should perform necessary field sales activities.
Only commercial relationships are truly important.
Personal relationships are more likely to be the consequence of good commercial relationships than they are to be the cause of them.
Sales performance should be mandatory, not optional.
Salespeople should be actively managed, and it should be a condition of their employment that they generate a commercially reasonable volume of new business.
The qualification of sales opportunities (or leads) destroys value.
Salespeople should be selling to your competitors’ customers—not to folks who are actively looking for a new supplier.
Salespeople should focus on selling programs, not products.
Unless a product is new and revolutionary, it should be packaged into a program of some kind (or it should be sold without salespeople).
Revenue should be the responsibility of Operations, not Sales.
Sales should focus exclusively on the pursuit of new business.
Salespeople should be paid their market value in the form of a salary.
Piece-rate pay (commissions) should be eliminated in sales, just like it has been elsewhere.
Salespeople should not prospect.
The marketing department should be responsible for replenishing salespeople’s opportunity queues daily.
The Sales Development Rep role should be eliminated.
SDRs are one of many common examples of sub-optimization in sales environments. You increase the salesperson’s win rate but you reduce the total volume of business won.
Shut down your branch offices and open (fewer) distribution centers.
It’s speed to customer that’s important (not proximity).
