The current buzz around Situational Awareness and Agile Sales is a result of the industry finally recognizing a truth we have always known in our gut: one size does not fit all in enterprise sales. (What? No Don, say it ain’t so!) Failure to adapt and respond to changing buyer needs or new insights gained during the sales campaign results in underperformance of a sales team. Whether consciously or intuitively top performing sellers understand that each sales opportunity and every person that they engage with is unique in some way. They are masters at quickly assessing the nuances of a given buying scenario and reaching for the right tool for the task at hand.
Historically companies have selected a single sales methodology and rolled it out to the entire sales organization despite the fact that it most likely would not work for everyone. A comprehensive Solution Selling approach is overkill for a more transactional Telesales team. Challenging and disrupting a buyer’s thinking works in certain scenarios, but can be seen as confusing, irrelevant, or down-right irritating in others where buyers are aware of and open to new solutions. Competing purely on unique feature sets or pricing strategies may miss the mark completely in a complex sale and either lose the deal or leave money on the table. Issues with adoption of these expensive programs are legendary, and forcing compliance with a process that doesn’t fit the sales situation is complete lunacy. Good reps take away the valuable “nuggets” from any new program that they see as useful, but they also reject the idea of trying to use the hammer when they clearly understand that what they need is a set of wrenches.
The reality is that most B2B organizations face multiple buying scenarios. Identifying a set of drivers or defining characteristics allows these scenarios to be grouped into broad “buckets” that the sales team typically encounters. Sales and Marketing teams can then develop suggested strategies, sales plays, collateral and tools targeted to each use case. This new, scenario-based framework and asset library becomes the basis for training sellers to extend their discovery work to include diagnosing what situation they are facing and selecting the strategy and tools most likely to lead to a win. Much like surgeons adapting to the condition of an individual patient or a quarterback reading the defense and calling audible plays on the field, sellers are able to develop the situational awareness skills to improve their results across a wide range of opportunity types.
Embracing and succeeding with this agile sales approach also requires understanding that reps need to be applying these skills not just early in a pursuit, but on a continuous basis. Every touchpoint with a buyer yields insights that may impact next steps. As individual buyer preferences and profiles are understood new ways of engaging them may be required. Changes in competitive landscape can dictate a shift in which tactics should be deployed. Agile Development and Project Management best practices include the daily Scrum meeting, where all stakeholders huddle to share information, challenges and roadblocks and agree on shifting priorities and resources to best address the current situation. Sales teams need to do the same and avoid becoming complacent once they have selected a strategy. They must stay in an “always on” mode of listening, learning, and adapting to shifting conditions. The military term VUCA applies equally as well to the complex sale as it does the battlefield: Volatility, Uncertainty, Chaos and Ambiguity are the norm, and how quickly reps assess and adapt to new information is the key to improving their odds of winning.
When you step back this all seems intuitively obvious, almost to the point of being cliche. Of course one size does not fit all, of course the right answer is “it depends”. So What? The fact is that this elegantly simple concept disrupts long entrenched approaches to optimizing sales performance. Looking through the lens of the buying scenario brings new design and organizing principles to how sales playbooks are developed, how assets are organized, what skills are required for different sales roles, and how teams are enabled and trained. It also has a major ripple effect on the sales support ecosystem including marketing, pre-sales SME’s and consultants, operations, finance and legal, even custom engineering teams. Being truly agile at the enterprise level means rethinking the turnaround times and service level agreements to support the team in the field. It is not enough for the sales team to gain mastery of situational awareness and agile response. As new insights are gained there will be real time needs for support to address the changing conditions, mitigate risk, and continuously out maneuver the competition to secure the business. The time has come to stop trying to drive in screws with our trusty old hammers. Is your team up for the challenge?