EP38: Why CEO‘s Need to be Selling

 

(aka: The Problem Is Making Your Numbers)

Running your sales program with a conversation-first approach delivers needed information to you. Naturally, this is important to your sales department. After all, utilizing a conversation at the beginning of the sales process tells your sales team almost automatically if it’s worthwhile to have another conversation.

 

So, why should a CEO be selling when he has salespeople to do that job? Because there’s important information a savvy CEO can glean from having conversations with prospects. Information about how things are changing for prospective companies due to competition or demand for their products, about new leadership within their companies, and about the adjustments prospective buyers have had to make to meet the challenges of impactful events — like this pandemic. In these preliminary conversations, a CEO can truly keep his finger on the pulse of prospective buyers and detect how his own company’s product, service, or even sales message might need to be changed to better meet buyers’ needs.

 

In this podcast, Chris will also explain his take on a different result that has surfaced due to the pandemic. He begins with, “There’s a bad, bad disease in our economy, and it’s called commuting.” Listen while Chris expounds on his conclusion that the massive collapse of the commute economy is real — and that the effects of it have huge economic value.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (00:35):

So you have this issue that has to be solved, but it's very rare that the company's issue of staying in business is actually tied tightly to individual rep's need to make the number. Where that came from was as a way of assessing performance within the territory that had been granted, is actually a way to buy the territory. That is, if I make my number this year or exceed my number, then I get the territory for next year and I get a bigger number. Why do I get a bigger number? It's assumed it's easier to grow a territory than it is to [crosstalk 00:01:09].

So it was actually a purchasing mechanism where this independent business person called the sales rep, purchases the territory in addition to enough compensation for their own business to stay alive, and they do it through "performance" by making the number. So there's an agreement that this territory is worth selling to you if you bring this much revenue. 

Then maybe in clever schemes, some of it has to come from this product and some from this product, then you put all these cool features in the comp plan, so to speak, but none of those features actually have to do with solving real customer problems. The assumption is, the product solves the problem and caveat emptor, buyer beware. Buyer beware doesn't work very well in the B2B world where the buyer is increasingly less expert than the seller because products are increasingly complex and interdependent. So the buyer must truly be able to trust the seller. And when the seller corrupts out and says, "I'd rather make the number then tell the truth," problems happen. And they are problems, not for the seller, they're problems for the business, the buying business and the selling business. The seller might make out, the person might make out.

It's one of those things that as sales management and as business management,