Is your sales model obsolete?

Yesterday's topic in Leadership MasterClass was hiring and recruiting. It always gets a laugh in our management training when we talk about the candidate who claims to have 20 years of selling experience, but on further inspection and questioning, you find that they only have one year of experience that they have repeated 20 times. The not-so-funny truth is that a failure to evolve, adapt and change with the times leads to irrelevance.

If there is one thing we've always known, which was punctuated again this year at CES, change is constant. To stay relevant and effective, we must change too. Conceptually, what we learned just five years ago may still be accurate, but tactically, it is out of date.

Frank V. Cespedes is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the author of many books. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Cespedes says today's coherent sales model has three core components:

Customer selection criteria. In short, are you calling the right clients? Time spent with the wrong targets increases cost of sales, prolongs the process and is built around quantity, not quality.

Clarity about your customers and their buying process. Customers differ dramatically in what they want from a product and how they respond to marketing initiatives. Knowing the differences is crucial because it's your responsibility to adapt to the market; it's not the market's responsibility to adapt to your sales model.

The go-to-market economics and metrics. As we shared in a sales tip earlier this week, salespeople spend less than a third of their time selling. Cespedes posits that this presents a tremendous opportunity to adjust the sales model to put the reps where they have the most impact.

In his book, Sales Management That Works – How to sell in a world that never stops changing, Cespedes likens the sales model to perishable goods:

Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer expectations lose an advantage.

  When was the last time you seriously looked at how you are doing things? What's working and what's not working? As a manager, what are the obstacles to even more excellent team performance? Chances are it's in one of those three areas.

We have another Leadership MasterClass starting later this year. If you're interested in collaborating with other leaders navigating massive and constant change, we'd love to have you participate. Send a quick note to Kim Johnson, VP of professional development, and we can share all the details. Reach her at kjohnson@rab.com

Are you past your freshness date? Something to ponder this weekend.

Happy Friday!

Jeff Schmidt is the SVP of Professional Development. You can reach him at Jeff.Schmidt@rab.com. You can all so connect with him on X and LinkedIn.