Dynamic Guided Selling – Sooner or Later?

Those who had the opportunity to see me, Jason Hekl and Jeff Lash give the final presentation at Summit 2014 received a glimpse into what the future may hold for sales, marketing and product. If you didn’t make it to our event this year, or had to leave early, here is an opportunity to learn about a bold concept I introduced on the sales side. If you were there, please do not stop reading, as I will also provide further comments and insight on dynamic guided selling.

As a brief reminder, the concept of dynamic guided selling was created in response to indicators that tell us we are losing more and more control over the buying process every day. This loss of control means the sales process may potentially become more fluid and inconsistent. For all the sales operations leaders reading, this is the point where we all scream like that girl in the horror movies: “EEEEEEEKKKKKK!!!!”

OK, now that we got that out of our systems, let’s try to understand how we can work with this concept, not against it.

Dynamic guided selling requires sales organizations to quickly synthesize large amounts of external and internal data, rapidly deliver insights from the data to sales reps and provide dedicated sales coaching. Since I cannot predict how bad things will get, here is a Dynamic Guided Selling Preparation Kit. Please keep the following list on your desktop, office wall or as the background on your smartphone:

• Map of buying process. This allows you to quickly identify changes and provide indicators of increased inconsistency from opportunity to opportunity.
• Customer marketing. Organizations that can execute one-to-one marketing can provide the best insight to guide sales reps through unique buyer engagements.
• Change-enabled reps. The best way to overcome your fears is to better understand them. If sales reps can accept that change is constant and that they have to be able to rapidly recalculate, they can avoid panicking.
• Data analysis competencies. Those that start now to improve their data analysis capabilities will be ready when the chaos begins.
• Sales tools. It’s not who has the most tools, but who has tools that are designed for the needs of each sales role (e.g. field, inside, channel), can provide sales intelligence at the right time and are fully integrated.

For me, the thought of impending changes for sales organizations are more exciting than scary. For those who might be a little nervous, I hope that my preparation kit helps calm your nerves.