Everyone in sales wants to sell right? Sales though, is just the desired outcome of effective persuasion. Robert Cialdini, Emeritus Professor at Arizona State University wrote his seminal book ‘Influence’ on the role of the psychology of persuasion.
Having spent pretty much my entire career in a very technical industry I have seen first hand why traditional kit vendors excel at managing customers in the middle tiers of technology and operations - and why the consultants dominate the board room. To borrow from a political euphemism, ‘it’s the market stupid’.
If you work in telecoms, then think back to the early 90’s. Think back to the days of the first 2G networks and ask yourself which business disciplines made the mobile revolution happen - technology and operations. And for sure, we owed the technologists a lot over the subsequent 20 years. If you were in sales and didn’t know your 3G from a bacon sandwich then the chances were you wouldn’t have had much influence in a lot of meetings; but as Bob Dylan once famously sang, ‘the times they are a-changin’’. This is certainly true for winning sales engagement strategies in telecoms, although it sometimes does not feel like the industry has made much progress weaning itself off the ‘crack equivalent’ of techno-centric selling. The reasons for this reluctant change to business conversations are both blindingly obvious and understandable. Like ardent smokers who have all been told to quit, the telco vendor industry which has grown up on a diet of Moore’s law and erlangs, can’t quite accept that banging on about feeds and speeds is bad for sales success. Intuitively sales leadership knows it, but the shift to a different dialogue is much harder than it seemed. And shift it must.
But if you’re no longer going to bludgeon your customer exclusively with techno babble then are you prepared to develop a dialogue that firmly demonstrates how your solutions support your customer’s strategy? And do you really understand your customer’s business and what is driving it anyway? And I’m not talking about being able to reel off the headlines of their 4 strategic pillars. Oh, no. You’re going to have to do better than that…
And why the need for a change in dialogue anyway? You can take your chances and bet the farm on your technical advantage if you like, but you know the truth: every year selling gets harder and single digit growth doesn’t keep you in a job for ever.
Let’s take another look at how the telecoms industry has evolved over the last 20 years. It will shed some light on why sales approaches must change if winning is the objective. We’ll do a whistle-stop tour of the highs and the lows. 2G, phones the size of bricks carried around in suitcases by stockbrokers: mobile telecoms was a niche proposition for the wealthy built by geeks who wanted to see if they could. Most people were so mindblown you could make a phone call without wires that technologists were elevated to superstar status. When the subscriber numbers expanded beyond the ultra- rich to mere mortals, these same techies became gods. If your second language wasn’t in telecommunications engineering you didn’t exist. MBA? Forget it - this was the age of the PhD. Over the next 15 to 20 years technologists came to occupy the upper echelons of most mobile network operators and vendors alike and the accepted exchange between these parties was, yes, you guessed it - technological.
But change was coming. The stratospheric rise in subscriber numbers began to tail off and the industry founded on technical innovation was ironically under attack from technical innovation. Let’s just say that the FANGs were nipping at the profit margins and blood was being drawn. The mobile operators started to replace the senior technical vanguard with business executives with experience in adding up numbers, and other mystical measures like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), ARPU and NPV. Around the boardroom table, technology investment decisions became more and more rooted in what business the new tech would enable. The book of blank cheques for the fanciest mousetrap was looking decidedly skinny.
This issue became increasingly more extreme as the industry moved from 3G to 4G. Subscriber penetration levels were already anywhere between 90 and 110% and attracted to the early margins, competition between operators was fierce. This competition served to suppress profitability which started to stress the business model. An industry heavily addicted to the promises of ever greater speeds and universal coverage lurched forward through subsequent spectrum auctions and technology investments and before long many of the mobile operators were choking under mounting levels of crippling debt.
As I point out, the need to focus more on business and strategy was identified earlier by the mobile operators. The vendor community on the other hand was far slower to match this change of focus with different sales conversations. Of course it was not that good old tech conversations couldn’t happen anymore, it was just that these conversations took place lower down the organisation. As a consequence, vendor influence started to wane at the CxO level as increasingly their need for good strategic advice shifted to consultancies and those vendors able to ‘talk business’.
It didn’t need to be that way…and it’s still not too late for tech vendors to rebalance their customer conversations. But it is now quite a transformational process but get it right and significant advantage can be gained.