Martin Dove, Vice President of Subscription Sales Research at the Technology Services Industry Association, shares a critical hurdle in the transformation of sales into an outcome-based function with Ecosystems CEO, Chad Quinn.
- The Problem: Many organizations are baffled when they spend large amounts of capital to equip salespeople with the skills, tools, and motivation they need to realign sales targets with customer outcomes, only to watch these salespeople’s behavior fail to change when they return to the field. Dove credits this to the lack of recruitment of ground-floor managers operating on the same framework, which makes it difficult for the salespeople they oversee to justify new outcome-based practices. Their weekly evaluations still ask, “How big is the sale, and when will you close?” instead of “How big of an impact did you make?”
- The Solution: A successful shift to outcome-based selling must have top-down and bottom-up elements. Initially, salespeople must receive support when refocusing their work in the field. Additionally, sales leaders and managers must believe in the value of outcome-based sales and effectively communicate its terms and purpose. Only then will businesses have the means to reinforce the transformation to outcome-based selling
Learn more about how your business can benefit from Outcome-based selling and the shortcomings of older methods by reading Eco’s post on the Current State of Value Selling.
