In her book The End of Competitive Advantage, Columbia Professor Rita McGrath states:

"Long term structural advantage is gone and being replaced by a series of short term transient advantages."

This means we need to do two things to survive:

• Constantly innovate.
• Get these innovations into the hands of our salespeople as soon as possible to leverage them as quickly as possible.

We’ve spoken with multiple leaders that tell us the following story:

1. We saw a competitive opportunity and developed a new product or service, acquired a new business, etc.
2. We announced our new and improved value proposition at sales kickoff.
3. Product and marketing produced playbooks and enablement took the team through rigorous sales methodology training.
4. Financial incentives were put in place.

By and large the sales team didn’t make the transition but kept selling the old value proposition and solution. 

Why is this, given the steps above taken by the organization? The #1 reason?? The confidence of the sales team. Salespeople do not want to take the risk of losing a deal or losing face having new conversations for the first time in front of a customer (even if we’re in front of them on a screen).

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We are excited to share with you our 5600blue division e-book:  Competing at The Speed of Change. Your value, competitors‘ value, customer needs and management priorities are all changing. All of this effects the “real – time” knowledge salespeople need to lead customer conversations. It’s time to take back the power we lost due to the buyer B2B digital revolution. One of our clients said recently “a quarter is now equal to a year.” Her point was that annual planning now happens each quarter due to rapid shifts in the market and company strategy. Managing this turbulent environment holds real promise for those who realize that the rules have changed and many legacy sales support solutions are not having impact. 

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A blog from Buyer/Seller Insights points out that there is bad buying just like there is bad selling. They go further to suggest that sellers who can help procurement buy better will achieve a competitive advantage. We couldn't agree more.

One of the core problems we see is that sellers don't understand the role of procurement professionals and therefore get anchored on the price conversation with buyers. Part of this misunderstanding is this: how procurement buyers articulate their role–and the reality of what their role is, are actually two different things.

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