I posed a few questions to a group of top-performing sales people yesterday. Their CEO wanted to get “closer to their customer,” so they started implementing a few sales “process” changes to make that happen. One thing I know is that salespeople who are performing, don’t take process change well, and most don’t like sitting in a class to learn how management intends to enforce and report on progress.
The first question I asked was, “How many people have kids?” a few raised their hands. Out of you, “how many have kids in school?” After a couple of more questions, I got to the crux of my questioning, and had narrowed it down to the preferred nut spread on lunch sandwiches: Skippy or Nutella. After a couple of minutes, I had this on the board:
I let that sit for about an hour.
I then asked them to think about the last time they went to a restaurant for dinner, and bought up after-dinner beverages. Remember this was for salespeople, so for the sake of this blog post, I removed the alcohol related beverages. I narrowed the gap between tea and coffee. After a couple of minutes of chatting and questioning I had this diagram on the board:
With both on the board, I asked about preferred coffee flavors. I was not surprised, but lucky that hazelnut decaf came up, “hazelnet” went on the board, in the middle of the two. It looked something like this:
Discussions ensued; we talked about other examples from “cheddar” cheese to “black” shoes. It’s funny, every time I tie taxonomy and controlled vocabulary(CV) to their own shopping habits, you can see the light bulbs going off, the key is to tie it to how they sell. This approach allows them to walk in their client’s shoes, and gives them an understanding of the value to their buyers. To accomplish that, we talked about commonality of language across their product lines and daily activities, and how CV reduces ambiguity by having common names for functions, process and activities. We agreed on the benefits of common document names, meeting outcomes, status updates and product deliverables. They understood that they could save time with better search, repeatable and reusable content and having more time by eliminating one-off reports, but important to them was reducing ambiguity to clearly differentiate their solution.
Every salesperson I know wants to do two things: sell more and save time. A controlled vocabulary for sales is one way to accomplish both.
