Across my work and client load over the last year, I see a trend that effects sales force productivity. Because of reduced budgets and increased financial scrutiny, customers across the board involve economic buyers in their decision making process—people like procurement officers, CFOs, and executive directors. For sales forces that focus on the product, this is a death trap. Economic buyers don’t really care about product features, and reps who are not prepared to talk about anything but features will seriously underperform.
Sales leadership needs to support field personnel in making a transition to selling to economic buyers. This is not easy. Often the company doesn’t know what economic buyers want, nor do they know how to find it. Once you do find out, most reps won’t naturally have the skills, and they need to be retrained on this particular type of sales interaction. Quite honestly, this is where outside consultants come in and can be very useful.
Filed under: Sales Force Effectiveness
