Matt on Marketing

Originally published in Geekwire

There’s nothing wrong with that trashy novel you’ve tucked away for the vacation, long weekend, or mere sunny afternoon in the backyard. But with Memorial Day Weekend fast approaching, you can also use the long summer days ahead to catch up on some important reading that will help your business.

Below are ten summer reading recommendations for leaders and entrepreneurs – especially those who start, run or work with early-stage businesses.

Some of these recommendations have a distinct technology bent, but they’ve collectively been chosen to give leaders and entrepreneurs a focused but well-rounded set of ideas and inspiration to continue driving innovation and growth well past the summer months across all facets of the business.

Without further ado:

Do More, Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup: Written in the form of short essays by entrepreneurs who have been where you are, this quick read from the co-founders of TechStars is organized to tackle the biggest challenges start-ups face – hiring, product development velocity, customer service and more. It’s the kind of book you can read front to back, or pick and choose the categories and topics you’re most interested in.

Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World: If you know what you’re looking for, you can identify and take action on a prospect or customer’s interest, intent or needs by simply watching what they do online – what they say, how they respond, where they are, how others interact with them, and so on. This excellent book provides specific examples of what to look for, and how to translate that into an actionable plan for your business. If nothing else, it will change how you approach and derive value from the social networks your customers and prospects are engaged in every day (with or without you).

The Truth About Managing People: Similar format to Do More, Faster – short essays with meaningful, practical advice. One of the best books on managing people I’ve read, both for its direct value and accessibility. The majority of entrepreneurs are smart product people but not always great at the round corners of hiring, motivating and driving focus among their workforce (direct, virtual and otherwise). This book offers a number of suggestions you’ll be able to put to immediate use.

Content Rules: How To Create Killer Content That Engages Customers & Ignites Your Business: I believe this could be the single most important marketing book start-up executives read this year. The marketing currency right now is all about content. Everything else is a conduit, a channel or an accelerant to good content. This book is a blueprint for not only how to create good content, but how to leverage it to drive authenticity, trust and preference for your products and services.

The eMyth Revisited: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It: You may have heard of Michael Gerber, but never read his stuff. He’s one of the foremost small business gurus in the world, and this book more than any has helped me frame the early-stage growth of my own business. It’s about building a business based on your vision, but growing that business so that you spend your time working on the business, not in the business. This is a critical leap for many founders and entrepreneurs, and will stunt growth for those who can’t create a business that can scale with their leadership but not their day-to-day execution.

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do To Increase The Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm: Early-stage and fast-growth companies have a lot in common. They’re moving quickly, have too many competing priorities, and constantly need to drive greater focus, process and execution across all functions. This book offers both a strategic blueprint as well as several tactical tools to better manage the growth of your business. The “daily huddle” and “one-page strategic plan” concepts are worth reading the book alone.

Scientific Advertising: This book was written 90 years ago, but it’s still one of the most relevant books in print about how to connect with and drive action from prospective customers. I encourage entrepreneurs to read this not as a marketing book, but as a set of integrated product development recommendations. Bake these concepts into your product, into the way you drive users through the experience, and I guarantee you’ll have something that organically creates far greater conversion and monetization.

Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service: A couple of guys started a deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their approach to customer service is summarized in this short book. Each chapter is highly relevant to how we should treat customers in any context, and particularly online. A deli has the advantage of looking the customer in the eye for most interactions. Online, we have far fewer tools and emotive touch points to leverage. Strong customer service skills are more important now than ever, to drive both loyalty and differentiation. The guys with the deli can teach us a lot.

That stack of magazines you’ve been building (and ignoring): OK, it’s not a book. But you get them and keep them there for a reason. You know there’s hidden value in those pages. You know there are new ideas, things you want to check out, inspiration from fellow entrepreneurs. The trick is to not get intimidated by the stack. You do not have to read each magazine cover to cover, or even flip through the whole thing. I recommend a scan and rip approach to moving through the stack quickly, and separating out the shorter stack of content that’s most relevant, and that you want to take action on in shorter order.

Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves: Marketing doesn’t happen after the product. It doesn’t happen separate from the product. The best marketing is the product. This short book talks about why that’s important, what it really means, and how you can go about integrating product and marketing more meaningfully and permanently in your organization.

What’s missing from this list? What’s on your reading list this summer? Share your comments and additions below!

Remind yourself constantly that there’s a big difference.

What you do is solve customer problems. That’s a benefit, an outcome, that your customer wants, needs and/or desires.

How you do it is what they pay for. A product or service that delivers the result or outcome.

It’s natural for us to confuse the two, and the primary reason is our point of view. Ask an employee “what do we do” and you’ll likely hear them explain their job, or the product they’ve built, or the service they deliver. But they’re likely going to describe it from their point of view, or the company’s point of view.

This isn’t what you do; it’s how you do it.

What you really do needs to always be defined and communicated from the customer’s point of view. They may not understand or value how you do it. But if they want, need or desire what you do (the outcome you create for them), then they’re serious buyers.

Don’t sell the drill. Sell the hole.

This manifests itself in networking situations as well. When someone asks you “so what do you do”, don’t describe your job. Answer as if they’ve asked “what do you do for your customers?”

When customers complained about or criticized you 20 years ago, they mostly did so in private, or at least only in front of limited audiences. Today, they have a voice to the world on their own. And worse, they can voice these concerns and criticisms right on your own social channels.

While this is frustrating, unless you want to shut those channels down, it’s the new reality of corporate communications. Here are several strategies for engaging your critics online:

1. Take the high road
Don’t get into a back-and-forth, you’ll at best look petty and will likely make the issue a far bigger deal (and be noticed by far more people). Instead, take the high road and work to address and resolve the customer or critic’s issue directly. If they’re truly acting irrational or inappropriate, your other customers and followers will likely see this for what it’s worth as well.

2. Get your customers, fans and evangelists to respond
The very best response to critics doesn’t come from you directly – it comes from the critic’s direct peers who, in a similar situation, think very differently. Be ready for those inevitable critiques by knowing which customers, fans and evangelists are most likely to come to your aid when needed. That way, you can call on them when needed for a swift and successful response.

3. Correct errors, not opinions
If the criticism is inaccurate, feel free to correct it. But be sure to differentiate between fact and opinion. If it’s an opinion you disagree with, use one of the two response options above.

4. Don’t let legal edit your responses
It’s critical that you sound like a human being. Don’t use legalese or corporate speak if and when you respond. Work with your legal department beforehand (before these specific issues come up) to set some general guidelines about how to response, what issues to definitely not get into, etc. This is especially important for publicly-traded companies

5. Don’t take it personally
You have to develop thick skin, especially as you grow and become more successful. Competitors will be envious, and customers will expect more from you. Executives listed on the company Web site could also come directly under fire, even if they aren’t or weren’t directly involved in the dispute or issue in question. Sometimes, those executives will take critiques too personally and want to react rashly. Keep it professional, and try not to take it so personally. Easier said than done.

6. Take it seriously (when needed)
Make sure you understand any issues underlying the compliant, and take them seriously when necessary. Addressing (or ignoring) a superficial issue may leave unattended a bigger, recurring problem that will only make that superficial issue come up again, from another angle.

7. Ignore it
Sometimes, the right thing to do – and the hardest thing to do – is ignore the complaint or critique. It feels awful right now, but it will go away. And you’ll be happy you didn’t respond and/or make it a bigger issue in a couple days when it’s basically behind you.

My business is now three and a half years old. What started with a guy and a laptop now has eight employees and is growing.

I’ve learned a ton along the way, and still learn every day. Here are ten things I now know and respect about starting and running a business.

1. You are never “ready”
Three things in my life I never would have done if I’d have waited until I was “ready”: get married, have kids, start a business. You’re never really ready, you just have to build enough of a plan and confidence (rational or not) to step off the cliff and give it a try.

2. It’s exciting and terrifying
Far more exciting than terrifying, at least for me now, but running a business has regular highs and lows. You have to get used to it and be OK with it, and keep yourself focused, humble and productive throughout.

3. Put your hard hat on every day
You are going to work. Hard. Even as the business grows and you don’t have to do all of the execution, you’ll still work hard and execute tactics daily. It doesn’t really get easier, but you get more confident and comfortable with the work required to sustain and grow what you’ve started.

4. It will not go as planned
Things will go wrong. Plans will go awry. The market will change. Customers will evolve. Your culture will emerge in an unexpected way. All of these are opportunities to root yourself in what you stand for and adjust your expectations and execution to move forward.

5. Take advantage of opportunity and serendipity
Luck is the residue of design, so smart people put themselves in a position to have more opportunity and serendipitous situations. Look for them, be open to them, and walk through the door more often.

6. Take risks & make mistakes
You’re not always going to be right, but that’s not the point (or the goal). Test things, be OK making mistakes and learning from them. Ship more often. Break some glass. Mitigate your risk and stay true to your values, but figure out what others have not.

7. Get a mentor (or 4)
These can be formal members of your board, or informal advisors who enjoy a free lunch on your dime from time to time. Surround yourself with people far smarter than you, who have been where you are or at minimum have a parallel set of experience that offers an entirely different worldview and perspective that can help you think better and make smarter decisions.

8. It’s hard to turn it off (but you have to)
You will think about work all the time. There will always be a ton more to do. Your new ideas will consume every moment you give them. But you still need to turn it off, take the evening or weekend off. Find a hobby that’s as far away from a computer screen as possible, play with your kids, distance yourself from the work. You’ll come back refreshed and more creative.

9. Relationships are everything
Your customers. Your employees. Your partners. Everything is about the relationships you create and sustain with the people around you. It’s the most important asset you have, no matter what business you are in.

10. People will hate you (so you need thick skin)
No matter what your business, you will have enemies. People who envy what you’ve done or created, people who disagree with how you do it, people who simply don’t share your worldview or values. You won’t change their mind, and it will drive you crazy if you let it. Learn from the experience, but develop and keep the thick skin and resolve necessary to fight through the adversity and do what you believe is right.

For the other entrepreneurs out there, I’m curious to hear what you agree with, what you’d add, etc.

This continues our series of front-line sales interviews, featuring quota-carrying sales reps as well as their managers and leaders (see previous interviews here, here and here). Curt Vondrasek is Vice President of Business Development at HUB International. He is responsible for driving the outbound call strategy, developing lead opportunities for specific target areas with strategically chosen producers, and creating a feeder pool for new producers.

How (and why) did you get into sales?

I had no intention of getting into sales. I graduated from college as a finance major, and wanted to get into the finance side of things. I took a job as a stock broker, and thought, great, I’m going to be selling stocks, bonds & investments. My first day on the job, they said, “here’s your phone and a phonebook, get to work, kid.”

It was a glorified inside sales job, and I was cold-calling business owners and making pitches over the phones. Quite honestly, I loved it. I had no desire to get into sales initially, but a stock broker was a sales position.

I went from there into financial planning, more of a consultative sale dealing with the entire investment portfolio. Still primarily a sales position. I eventually got a sales position with a salary, bonus and company car. The fact that I had made about 50,000 cold calls over the previous two years helped significantly.

I was in the insurance business after that, and have spent the past 15 years in sales management, managing both outside and inside sales teams.

What have you learned about sales that’s still relevant today?

I often quote to my team that I’ve made over 100,000 cold calls in my career, and probably 70,000 of those were in my first 3-4 years. It was a huge confidence boost – so many stories I can think of on why I got business via a cold call.

I’ll never forget one of those calls, when the prospect flatly said to me, “I already have six stock brokers, why should I listen to you?” Half an hour later, he agreed to another conversation and eventually turned into my largest sale. When you can make your largest sale off of a cold call, and deal with the challenges that brings you, it builds your confidence so much. The more confident you get, the more successful you will be in your career later.

With my team, I have a standard line. It doesn’t matter what sales job you go into – unless your mom & dad own the company, you’re not going to get a bunch of golden leads handed to you. You have to prospect – whether that’s cold emailing or cold calling or some version of that, everyone has to build their book of business in that manner.

I tell my team, the skills we’re going to teach you here, you’ll be able to use forever to be successful.

Given all of that, how has sales changed?

Technology has come so far in the last 15 years, and it’s altered our approach for a couple of reasons. One, because of technology today you can take advantage of other ways to get ahold of prospects – email, Twitter, LinkedIn, writing a blog, and so forth.

I also know that prospects are going to investigate you if they’re serious. They will look you up, and you have the ability to control what they find. It’s important to present yourself well.

Prospects also have higher expectations when you contact them. Because there’s information about them and their company on the Web, they expect you to do research before you call. Fifteen years ago, they may have entertained basic questions about them and their company. They’re not as tolerant of that now.

How has sales management changed?

You have to understand your own leadership style. If you can find a candidate profile that fits your own personality style or those you know are easier for you to work with, that should be the first place you look and hire from. It’s easier said than done, but it’s worth working towards and has been a huge key for me.

Fifteen years ago, no news from your manager was good news. If your boss didn’t talk to you, you assumed things were OK. I now spend a lot of time communicating with my team. We have a team sales meeting every morning from 8:30 to 9:00, and it’s a great way for them to know what’s going on. We celebrate successes, and I do a lot of management by walking around. I walk the floor, talk 1:1 to reps, and with the younger generation in particular they want to hear a lot of praise & recognition. Older generations, they want that too, but respect is important to them.

Sales operations may very well be THE most important and unsung hero for sales teams big and small, inside and field, direct and channel. They often do thankless jobs with minimal resources, and when done well they can have a significant, more-than-material impact on your sales team’s efficiency and success.

Here are eight specific ways sales operations can impact sales productivity:

1. Active CRM ownership and optimization
Sales leadership should be actively involved in defining the sales process, including lead & opportunity stages, but sales ops should have active ownership of building, maintaining and improving how well that process is operated in the company’s CRM system. This includes ensuring that the right CRM system is chosen in the first place, customized to the way the company’s customer wants to buy, and optimized so that front-line sales personnel and their managers spend as little time in the system as possible (maximizing their time in front of customers and prospects).

2. Tools integration
This goes beyond choosing the right tools to support the sales process (more on that later). For most sales teams, the value and benefit of a great sales tool can be negated (or worse) if the sales team has to take precious time to operate multiple tools at once without integration. Separate windows, double-entry of data and incomplete data are just some of the problems inherent in buying tools without considering proper integration. Sales ops should own tool integration, and the resources to integrate new tools should be included in the cost of buying those tools in the first place.

3. Better reporting & dashboards
For reporting, the front-line reps, managers and sales leadership are the customers of the sales operations staff. Accordingly, sales ops should own and actively manage different versions of reporting and dashboards for each group to improve their visibility to what’s working, what needs improvement, and where everyone’s time and attention should be spent to maximize sales pipeline output. Significant time can be put into creating reports to begin with (ideally so that they’re fast and easy to use ongoing), but sales ops should also assume time will be needed to maintain and improve dashboards over time. As the business changes (new products, new sales structures, etc.), reporting needs to keep up to stay relevant and useful.

4. Process improvement
This is more than tools. What does it take to process an order? What steps, what paperwork, what’s required of the customer, of the sales rep, of the manager? Where does the process typically break down, and could certain process stages be improved, sped up or eliminated? How much time does it take for a rep to get back on the phone with another customer (after recording the conversation and status, finding the next prospect to call, etc.)? Process may be boring, but it’s the foundation on which successful, streamlined sales organizations are built.

5. Best practice collection, inventory and sharing
This responsibility normally falls to the sales managers, but sales ops can quickly create systems and processes for proactively capturing, organizing and making available a variety of sales best practices – from prospecting to messaging, follow-up advice, presentations and more. Sales ops should work actively with management to create the optimal systems, storage options and communication frequency with the sales floor. But this is a focus area most sales organizations either lack or spend little time managing. Sales ops can be a hero and visible driver of improvement by putting a little extra time into this one.

6. Vendor filter, triage and selection
You get calls constantly from vendors who have the “perfect” solution to make your sales team more successful. Sales ops may be the most appropriate component of the team to map prospective vendors against the company’s current and future/intended sales process, identifying functional holes, obstacles or choke points in the process and funnel and both identifying and vetting prospective vendors against what will have the most impact on sales productivity and results.

7. Comfortability with customers directly
Does your sales operations team speak with customers regularly? I’m constantly surprised at how many sales ops teams either don’t have regular contact with customers and prospects, or (worse) lack the skills to effectively communicate with customers when they do. Sales ops should understand the customer and their environment as well as the sales team, and should be proactive in addressing “operational” issues such as contracts, procurement, onboarding issues and more. Yes, the sales rep can do most or all of this. But, as a member of the rep and company’s team, sales ops can more proactively manage these operational issues and allow the rep to get back to selling.

8. Ownership of templates & collateral inventory, consistency, access
In most organizations, document management is a constant issue. There are too many sales support documents and customer-facing collateral pieces to choose from. Version control is a problem. And do you really want your reps spending 20 minutes looking for the New England health care case study? Sales ops can own management and organization of the collateral and template library, either in a shared-access drive or right within the CRM system. This means active management – pulling out old documents, working with sales reps and their managers to constantly improve accessability and speed of use, etc.

Would love to hear what I’m missing here. What does your sales operation team do that materially impacts your productivity? If you’re in sales operations, what’s missing from this list that your team delivers?

This is a lesson we all know by now, but it bears repeating and remembering from time to time as we’re all guilty of bending and/or breaking the rule on occasion.

We can’t be everything to everybody. And it’s difficult to turn away from revenue opportunities seemingly within our grasp.

But we’ve seen time and time again companies that narrow their focus and position themselves as THE market leader for a specific subcategory or genre end up accelerating their revenue, growth and sales – even though they’ve in fact decreased their proactive, addressable market.

Take the company behind this van, for example. They likely have the skills and infrastructure to move anybody – families, students, offices, etc. But they’ve decidedly focused themselves on a much smaller portion of the moving market.

Sure, seniors looking to downsize could hire any moving company. But why not hire the company that specializes in your specific move?

Shrink your market, go where others aren’t, narrow your focus. Easier said than done, but it works.

It’s one thing if you take the bus or the train or other mass transportation (carpools count) where you can do your own thing. I used to love my 105-minute daily commute for a few different reasons.

But if you drive yourself (and only yourself) back and forth to work every day, you likely spend a lot of time listening to yourself, staring blankly through the windshield, and at best enjoying musicians or professional talkers entertain you from the radio.

But with a little foresight and preparation, there are at least a few things you could do during that commute time to make it more productive. Here are five:

1. Have a call list ready
Which calls you do you need to return? Who haven’t you caught up with in a long time? Consider the time zone of whomever you’re calling, and use a hands-free device where required. But the list of people you could call is extensive. A colleague with feedback on a project or a new idea. A friend who just got a promotion. Someone in your network you haven’t connected with in far too long (this could be a daily list).

Have a few emails that need returned? Make a call instead. I bet you have a far more productive, valuable conversation and exchange than what would have been delivered with a short email when you finally arrive at your destination.

2. Call your mother
Or your father. Or your sister. Or your kids. Being productive isn’t all about business. Our lives get so crazy, it’s easy to get sucked into work and neglect (or push to another time) the people who matter most to us. I promise they won’t be upset because you always seem to be calling from your car. The fact that you’re calling more often trumps that.

3. Brainstorm something
At any given time, you have plenty of things to think about. I’m not talking about emails to return or documents to review or presentations to write. I’m talking about things that simply need more of your active thinking. A new campaign direction. A new feature. The contents of a blog post like this one. Taking the next step really means dedicating time to thinking through the options and getting a few down on paper to clarity and operationalize the next step.

The next time you get in the car, take with you a few of these ideas or concepts to brainstorm. I often keep these items in a specific category of my Tasks list, and print them out when I know I’ll have some time (while watching a ball game at home, for example). But if you do the same thing in the car, you can use a voice recorder (on your smart phone, or even a separate digital recorder) to capture your ideas and transcribe them later.

4. Find some good podcasts
There are still a ton of great podcasts being produced on a regular basis, on every topic imaginable. Think of them like “listening to blog posts”, especially if you prioritize topics you’d otherwise want to read in a blog or newsletter or trade magazine.

I’d encourage you to listen with that same voice recorder handy, as the podcast content will occasionally give you ideas you want to follow up on.

5. Capture your random ideas
I’ve written many times about my love for Dail2Do and similar tools that make it easy to capture ideas when pen and paper are either less convenient or dangerous. Sometimes, the best way to be more productive during your commute is to literally think about nothing.

Let your brain go where it wants to go, and be ready to capture some of your best insights, ideas and tasks for later.

Curious to hear what else you do while driving to make better use of the time.

Most marketers think of content and channel as the same thing. But they’re really very different. And the more you manage them as different, the more exponential your value from them will be together.

Email marketers tend to create content specifically for their campaigns and newsletters. The social media team creates their own content strategy in a silo, independent of the rest of the organization.

Some of the email service providers today are offering social media features, but unfortunately many of those features are simply links to archived emails and newsletters sent to social networks. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but one channel promoting another misses the point.

For some reason, we’ve either been trained or made a habit of tying content to channel. But especially in today’s marketing environment – where content is so vitally important to building and managing current and prospective customer relationships – your content strategy needs to exist separately from the channels you use.

Several reasons for this. First, great content is great content. If you know your customer and audience well enough, the content is independent of its delivery mechanism. Plus, you will want that content distributed to and impacting as many prospects and customers as possible, independent of which channel they happen to be paying attention to on any given day or at any given moment.

Second, the most successful marketing organizations in the world today actively repurpose great, core content in a variety of formats and channels. A webinar, for example, becomes a video, an on-demand lead generation offer, a white paper, a series of blog posts and more. If content was developed specific to one of those channels, you’d lose the opportunity to drive value with it across the other channels.

It all starts with your customer – who they are, what they care about, what they’re thinking about and working on right now. Traditionally, marketers work on the next steps (content and channel) at the same time. But if you build your content first – filtered by customer priorities and independent of channel – I think you’ll find more flexibility, usability, leverage and performance across whatever customer-centric channels you choose next.

This continues our series of front-line sales interviews, featuring quota-carrying sales reps as well as their managers and leaders (see previous interviews here, here and here). In this interview, David Brock – who has spent his career working in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments – shares insights from more than 35 years watching sales evolve (or not).

How (and why) did you get into sales?

I was actually trained as a physicist, and always thought I was going into science and research. Immediately after college I went to a start-up but it flamed out badly. I realized there was more to business than just cool technology, so I got an MBA and went to the “dark side,” which at the time meant I was going to sell large mainframe computers to banks in New York City for IBM.

It was a big change from from math and science to straight selling for one of the biggest, most powerful sales companies in the world. That was in the late 70’s, so the IT industry was going through huge transformations at the time – from mainframe computers into the PC revolution. It was an interesting time for sure.

What did you learn at IBM that’s still relevant today?

I was blessed that IBM was and is one of the premier sales organizations in the world. A lot of what I learned is still hot and top of mind today. The real bulk of our training was learning our customer’s business and learning to create value for their business. While they weren’t calling it “solution selling” or “value-based” or anything like that, all the basic principles of what the customer was doing and how to improve their business was engrained from my very first day in sales.

I actually went to a banking school as part of my training. There were 3-4 IBMers there, and tons of bankers there learning the practice of banking. The thing that was really informative for me, outside of selling, was how to be focused on the customer and focused on their business and what they did, and how I could apply my solutions to what they need to do better.

That kind of thinking still pervades and drives selling today. It hasn’t diminished in importance, and has actually become more important than when I first started selling.

Given all of that, how has sales changed?

Everything has changed and nothing has changed. Sometimes I feel like I’m Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, living the same situation over and over.

Solution-focused selling is still around. The Challenger Sale is what we call it today, among other things.

The idea that you need to connect with customers about their business hasn’t changed at all. That’s what we as salespeople are supposed to do for our customers. It goes way back to the very first salespeople, I guess. What has changed is that the role of the salesperson has changed profoundly based on the way customers buy. The traditional role where the salesperson had a job to educate customers about solutions is no longer as important. We still have to do some education, but customers are researching and pre-screening things on their own right now. They’re self-educating. There’s great danger in that, because of how much inaccurate information is on the Web.

Many sales organizations are getting this wrong, in that the quality of what the customer learns through Web research is based on the quality of their questions. They may be asking the wrong questions. Today, one of the big challenges we face is that the customer thinks they can get all the right information on the Web, and shorten their engagement with sales. Research tells us that 70% of buyers don’t want to engage salespeople until the end of the process. That’s a real challenge in terms of our value proposition in the sales & buying process.

It’s even more difficult to go in and correct customer impressions and guide them in how to buy. But in complex B2B sales, customers really don’t know how to buy. The ability for the salesperson to get in and really provide the right insight, education and facilitation to help the customer understand what they should be buying is really critical. It hasn’t changed, but the challenge is higher now.

I believe that today salespeople have to engage in the sales process much earlier than before. In many cases, when it’s done right, the buyer might hear from the salesperson before they hear from marketing, which is different from what we’re used to in “traditional” sales and marketing environments.

Traditionally, we qualify customers based on the business problem they want to solve, whether they have funding, and so on. Today, what salespeople have to do is go in and say, “hey, there’s an opportunity to run your business more effectively, grow your market share, grow your presence. There are things you might want to be looking at, and here’s how I can help you.”

Salespeople have to get engaged very early on and driving awareness around the need. Customers are looking for ideas and insights

They’re so busy fighting the alligators; they forget to drain the swamp.

The basic process of being customer-oriented hasn’t changed, but the timing of when we engage and the methods of how we engage have changed profoundly.

How has sales management changed?

Look at the front-line sales manager, who manages individual contributors. Their role is to maximize the productivity and effectiveness of their people, to achieve their full potential. In some senses, that job hasn’t changed. We have to be involved in coaching, have to be involved in developing the people, reviewing the business and make sure we get the people the resources and support they need. There are some great, powerful tools that help today’s sales manager do that job better, with better insight into performance to allow the manager to see things earlier than they might have seen previously.

Still, we have the challenge – more so than ever before – of all the things that can distract us from our primary job of coaching our people. Technology is an aid and an escape. We can hide behind our CRM system, our dashboards and reports. We can misuse those things.

We have the capability of creating crap at the speed of light, so technology is a double-edged sword. For managers and sales professionals, technology can enhance our means of accomplishing things or take us down the tubes faster than ever before.

The most under-served person in sales is the first-line sales manager. They have the toughest job in the sales organization, because they bridge between individual contributor and the company.

The second level is the sales executive. One of their most important roles is to understand the sales deployment strategy, and what’s the most important route to market.

There are so many more combinations and permutations of routes to market than have existed in the past. Deciding the optimal path and how to maximize your footprint in the market, what channels do we select, how do we steer certain customers to the more appropriate channels and so on. The whole complexity of the overall organizational deployment – there are many more options and greater complexity in managing those options.