Yesterday I talked a little bit about the coming Inside Sales revolution, and the impact it will ultimately have on sales organizations, sales culture, and the companies that rely on them.
And I realized that there’s a much larger comparison that can be made between Hollywood and the current sales industry.
Like many sales managers, Hollywood likes to think of itself as “innovative,” “pushing boundaries” and “creating something” where there wasn’t something there before.
And like many “old guard” sales managers, Hollywood is deluding itself.
The fact is, 2010 Hollywood rarely creates new intellectual properties anymore.
They’re GREAT at seeing a niche and filling it. But due to a culture of risk aversion, they no longer create the niche.
Give them a space to fill and Hollywood will dump a GDP’s worth of effort into it; just don’t expect them to create the space itself.
That’s now the job of independent film crews. The novelists. The comic book creators. Japanese anime. Original cable television series.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule—The Matrix, Avatar, and the Pixar movies immediately come to mind—but if you look back at all of the summer blockbusters for the last 15 years, how many of them were based on existing intellectual properties? The Batman films by Christopher Nolan. Spiderman. The Bond franchise. X-Men. Terminator Salvation. Sherlock Holmes. Iron Man. Mission Impossible.
So why does this matter?
It matters because just like Hollywood, the old guard of sales and marketing are stuck in the same cycle.
There are exceptions, but upper-crust sales and marketing managers are still largely holdovers from the Willy Loman, “Death of a Salesman” era. Face-to-face selling and closing. Be on site. Outside sales practices.
To the sales “old guard,” inside sales was grunt work, desk jockeys with “no real sales skills” whose sole purpose was to supply good leads to the “real” (read: “Outside”) sales people.
(The apex of this paradigm, incidentally, was captured brilliantly in David Mamet’s play and subsequent film, Glengarry Glen Ross.)
And it worked pretty well, all the way up until somewhere between 1999 and yesterday.
Oh sure, some of the old guard pay lip service to technology. They see the “convenience” of gadgets, and an iPhone or iPad sure looks great too, even if it’s used as little more than a glorified phone + rolodex.
But they’re not innovating sales, marketing, or lead response processes with technology.
In some ways, they may even feel that the “new guard” Inside Sales rep is something of a fraud—little more than a techno-whiz using gadgets and the Internet to make life “easier,” when everyone knows that “real” sales is done face-to-face.
Like Hollywood, “Old Guard” sales and marketing has too much invested in the status quo. They report too high up the food chain, and have too many other supposedly “big picture” problems to embrace the changes that will define the sales industry a decade from now.
3 Comments
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LOVE this post Steve. Forget automation….pick up the freakin’ phone people and have a conversation with your buyers. It is okay…they know you are not an avatar!
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Steve: Thxs for this thought provoking post. Agree w/you that many sales + marketing managers aren’t achieving process innovations w/the help of technology. IMO, it’s not because their luddites. It’s because they lack some of the fundamental process performance data with which to trigger + test technology enabled innovations. Filling this info gap requires data which maps people’s activities to the sales/marketing process + discloses the impacts their activities are having on buyers’ progressions towards sale. Once it’s clear what these connections are, the risk of technology innovations is reduced + the value’s much clearer. Until then, there’s a risk of confusing slow adoption of game-changing technologies with a buyer reluctance to innovate. They’ll innovate, but only when it’s clear the investment’s worth it in terms of process performance. Without such data, innovation evangelism will only get so far. Trust this adds some value. – John
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Very interesting perspectives so far.
@John,
There’s some truth to that assessment. Making connections between performance data and the technology would probably speed innovation considerably, but it also begs the question: How do you bridge the gap without data, until you implement something that provides the right performance data? Chicken or the egg?
As far as them being “Luddites,” you’re right that most of them don’t openly shy away from new technologies, but in my experience working in corporate development for five years, I also didn’t run across a lot of management teams that were asking the right questions. In working with 350+ companies, only some of them had a clear, end-to-end vision of the way their sales and marketing processes connected to technology. Many didn’t understand how to connect the metrics of marketing to their technology use, they didn’t grasp the ways in which their current systems could be better leveraged to make new technology processes better. In many cases they were just coming around to replacing old manual data systems with digital ones, but they weren’t using tools at their disposal to LINK the processes and technology holistically. Quickbooks is much easier and faster than a paper ledger; Excel is way better than hand-drawn chart matrices, and Word is way better than ruled 3-hole punch paper–but getting them to see how data could flow from process end-to-ends was a big, big change for a lot of them.
Part of the problem too is that IT departments have to cover a lot of ground these days, and sales departments are usually the last in the loop to be an IT priority–and so it self perpetuates the cycle. Sales’ technology needs are generally perceived to be “light” compared to other departments, and so technology development isn’t focused on in sales as much as it is in manufacturing, distribution, and administration.
