The Sales Professional Is the Sale

What’s the most influential factor in business-to-business sales? It isn’t competitive pricing. It isn’t your product’s Six Sigma quality. It isn’t your product’s innovative features or your company’s ability to deliver a total solution. Certainly all of these influence your customer’s buying decisions, but surprisingly, none of them is the most influential factor in business-to-business is you – the sales professional.

You don’t have to take our word on this; it is business customers themselves who have placed salespeople in the top spot. Since 1988, our statistical analysis of purchasing decisions has demonstrated that the sales professional is the most important factor in determining what customers purchase, how much they pay, and how long they stick with the lucky suppliers they choose from the thousands of business-to-business sellers competing for their business. In fact, our analysis proved that salesperson effectiveness accounts for 39 percent of customer’s buying decisions and is the most important decision factor – more influential than price, quality, and the availability of a total solution.

This is a notable development in the sales world, and it represents the emergence of a new competitive advantage in the business-to-business arena. Sales professionals have become the leading influence on their customer’s buying processes – more important than the selling price, more important than the offering’s features and benefits, more important than the product and service quality. This means that the effectiveness of sales professionals themselves can be an added value to their customers and a competitive advantage for their employers. In the 1960s, media guru Marshall McLuhan declared that the medium is the message. Now, in the business world, the salesperson is the sale.

An Evolutionary Pattern of Development

When did this change happen? Our in-depth supplier evaluation interviews with more than 80,000 business customers first revealed in 1998 that in their estimation, the salesperson had ascended to the top position of influence. This did not occur overnight, though, nor has it completely eclipsed the other influencing factors in the business-to-business sale. Instead, it is an evolutionary development that has been building momentum for years.

The nature of competitive advantage in sales has always been evolutionary. That is why other factors have been more important than sales effectiveness in customer’s buying decisions in the past. Product and service quality is a good example. Quality became a primary concern of business-to-business customers in the late 1970s and 1980s as well-made and dependable Japanese and German motor cars and electronics captured market share from their American competitors. As U.S. manufacturers lost customers, they became aware of the magnitude of the costs they incurred from product defects and failures, and,
even more importantly, aware of the customer defections and lost sales that poor quality caused.

The ensuing focus on – and demand for – greater levels of quality spawned a revolution. Quality-based concepts and programs, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen, just-in-time inventory systems, the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, and ISO 9000, dominated the corporate landscape. Companies worked hard and invested significant capital in their efforts to improve the quality of their products and services. They demanded that their suppliers do the same. Suppliers and their sales forces quickly responded to these demands and began winning business by demonstrating the high quality of their offerings and guaranteeing continued quality.

As soon as product and service quality proved capable of winning business, the quality competition really heated up. Sellers strove to match and exceed the quality of their competitor’s offerings. As a result, quality levels are much higher today than they were in 1980. Six Sigma programs, whose goal is the achievement of a de facto defect rate of 3.4 per million, are now commonplace.

But what has happened to quality as a competitive advantage in sales during this time? In the years between 1980 and the widespread adoption of Six Sigma and TQM, the differentiating power and competitive advantage of product and service quality have eroded. Today, the quality of your products and services is considered a basic requirement rather than a competitive advantage. You can’t win or retain customers without high-quality products and services, but neither can you win based on quality alone. Every serious competitor is offering high quality, and customers’ standards and expectations regarding quality have risen accordingly.

In most industries, trying to gain a competitive advantage by offering a higher level of quality simply doesn’t make sense. The difference between a few defects spread over a million parts isn’t economically compelling to customers. Thus, as quality standards have risen and been matched by more and more competing suppliers, quality has lost its power as a competitive advantage.

Sales effectiveness, which is based on the competence of the salespeople and the resources and support provided by their companies, is subject to the same evolutionary forces as is quality. It has risen to the top of the customer’s influence list because demand far outstrips the supply. Today, customers need for a competent, professional salesperson has grown well beyond the ability of the current crop of salespeople to fulfill it and, all the evidence suggests, will continue to grow as far into the future as we can see.

To help understand the driving force behind this condition (and the critical and largely unfulfilled role that customers want salespeople to assume), we need only take a step back and start by acknowledging a very basic fact: The only reason a corporate customer buys anything is because his company cannot or chooses not to make or provide it for itself. If the customer’s company were making or providing it, it would have its own internal organisation to do that work and – this is the key part – it would have a manager or executive responsible for that function. That is to say, it would have someone who was accountable for ensuring that the company actually received the benefit that the product or service was designed to provide. Thus, a business customer’s decision to buy a good or a service externally is not simply a decision to purchase – it is also a decision to outsource the management of the benefit that the purchase is intended to deliver.



What does this mean for you, as someone trying to sell to that company? What we have discovered is that business customers are turning to salespeople to fulfill the role of surrogate manager. When salespeople become skilled at managing the total benefit delivered to their customers, the supply will meet the demand. At that point, sales effectiveness will decline as a competitive advantage, just as quality has. Someday, if enough salespeople and companies recognize and build their sales effectiveness, it may only count as a portion of the entry fee. But today, as we have discovered, the research reveals that fewer than one out of a thousand salespeople can perform to this level!

While the power of salesperson effectiveness to influence customers may eventually decline, there are two reasons why no salesperson or sales organisation can afford to ignore it now or in the future:

First, whether it is a full-blown competitive advantage or simply the table stakes required to enter the game, sales effectiveness will remain a critical ingredient in sales success. In the former case, it is a scarce and in-demand expertise that will help you achieve above-average sales results. In the latter case, when customers simply expect you to possess that expertise, you won’t be able to engage them without it.

Second, relatively speaking, the competitive advantage conferred by sales effectiveness has just begun to emerge. It may well retain its power to win sales for ten or fifteen years or longer, depending on how many salespeople recognise and strive to attain it, before it becomes a commonplace standard and an expectation in the customer’s eyes.

So, the bad news is that the same evolutionary pattern that brought the sales professional to the top spot in the customer’s buying decision will eventually create the same kind of competition that transformed price, quality, and features from substantial differentiation factors into the price of entry. At some point in the future, customers will demand sales professionalism as a matter of course. When that happens, some other factor, perhaps one that has not even appeared on our radar as yet, will emerge as the leading competitive advantage.

Here’s the good news, though. Given the current level of professionalism in sales, we expect that those rare salespeople who are already meeting their customer’s expectations and demands, and those who can quickly respond to them, will enjoy an extended run at the peak of their profession.






The Sales Professional Is the Sale - To learn more about this author, visit Peter Gilbert's Website.

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