How to Localize Selling Capability

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• What is Wrong with Factory-Based Selling?
• Beware of the Sales Support Treadmill
• Roadmap for Localizing Selling Capability
• How to Implement the Localization Roadmap

Introduction

Capital equipment market requirements and the competitive landscape are constantly changing. Capital equipment and its applications often test the limits of physics, chemistry, and material science. Buyers come from all corners of the globe. To successfully sell equipment in this environment, you need a local, culturally sensitive, well-equipped, and well-trained sales team.

What is Wrong with Factory-Based Selling?

Many companies cope with capital equipment’s technical complexity and market challenges by defaulting to a factory-based selling model. In this model, the field sales team’s fundamental role is to cultivate customer contacts and facilitate access for factory product experts. It is up to the factory experts, often the product managers, to qualify customers, deliver customer presentations, configure solutions, and field product questions.

However, a factory-based selling model does not scale, and it results in weak customer relationships. Consider these issues:

• If the only way to win a sale is by the product expert touching it, the capacity of this expert becomes the fundamental limit on revenue growth.
• Since you have reduced the local sales team to a conduit for factory-based experts, they have little to contribute to the customer relationship. As a result, their relationships remain shallow.
• Product experts who spend all their time on sales support leave no time to develop selling tools or plan for long-term competitive advantage.
• A competitor with a stronger local presence can easily out-hustle you by operating in real time while your salesperson waits for a response from the factory expert four time zones away.
• Factory experts often assess sales situations incorrectly since they are unlikely to be sensitive to the nuances of the customer’s local culture, organizational dynamics, native language, and business practices.

When a company relies on factory-based selling, the factory experts get a lot of attention and recognition, sometimes from senior executives. This can be addictive. As a result, factory experts often shoulder some of the responsibility for perpetuating the dependency on factory-based selling.

Beware of the Sales Support Treadmill

As a product manager, if you parachute in to make a sales presentation to a prospect, know that what you are doing is not marketing. You are a marketing guy selling. If you consume most of your time with one-prospect-at-a-time sales support, you are stuck on the sales support treadmill.

Why are you neglecting your real product marketing work?

Your first instinct might be, “I don’t have time because I’m always doing sales support.” Consider that it might be the other way around. Sales support consumes you because you have not done the marketing work. Signs that this is the case include:

• Most of your customer visits are for tactical sales support.
• Routine specification responses require your help.
• Every product presentation is custom created by you for a specific customer.
• The best presentations are on your laptop.
• Salespeople constantly call you with questions about the standard product.
• You cannot remember the last time you conducted a formal sales training session.

When you have not deployed the capability to substantiate your value proposition, a salesperson will always drag the product expert in to support the selling effort. He has no choice.

Now imagine if:

• Your sales materials articulated a compelling value proposition with the data and case studies to prove it.
• Your sales materials addressed all the key questions, objections, and issues that prospects are likely to raise in the sales process.
• Your product specification answered ninety percent of line items in a prospect’s request for a proposal.
• Access to those sales presentations and support materials was easy for the salesperson.
• You had a turnkey, demo process in place that confirms your value proposition.
• Your sales force could generate equipment quotations.
• You had a robust and continual sales training program.

If the above were true for your product line, you can bet that the level of tactical support the sales team needed from you would fall dramatically. You must get your marketing infrastructure in place to step off the sales support treadmill.

However, if you have determined that you are stuck on the treadmill, do not reach for that emergency stop button. You have made yourself a critical part of the order-closing machine. If you stop supporting sales cold turkey, orders could come to a grinding halt. Fixing this situation will require you to shift from doing sales support to enabling others. To do this, follow these three steps:

1. Figure out which sales support activity is creating the biggest demand on your time.
2. Define and execute a project to fix it.
3. Go back to number one.

These projects might include developing specification documents, presentations, data sets, value models, training programs, and quoting tools. Include anything that would enable the sales team to get the support they need without pulling the top product expert directly into the sales process.

At first, you will struggle to find the time to work on these marketing infrastructure improvements. However, each time you go through the three steps, you will reduce your time on the sales support treadmill. This frees up more time to develop and deploy more enabling capability.

We cannot ignore that the “urgent” can overwhelm the “important.” So, implement a management and control system to ensure that you make continuous improvements.

For example, if you had a routine of quarterly sales training events, you could use these events as deadlines for each incremental improvement in your marketing infrastructure. You could then build a continuous improvement process around this deadline, like the one shown in Figure 61.

Roadmap for Localizing Selling Capability

Your goal is to put as much selling capability as close to the customer as possible. You want those working day-to-day in the same time zone and the same culture as your customers to execute the bulk of the selling process. By localizing product and application expertise, you will enable the sales force to become a valuable resource for your customers. The sales team that can answer a customer’s question in real time rather than say, “I’ll ask the factory and get back to you tomorrow” is the sales team that will have robust customer relationships.

You will probably never design the factory completely out of the selling process. Management will always play a role in conveying resource commitments, and product management will support most future product discussions. However, you can localize much of the sales support process, including the ability to:

• Position products within each account or region.
• Configure the products to meet specific customer needs.
• Design successful demonstrations.
• Tailor standard sales kit materials to the sales situation.
• Give product presentations.
• Draft standard specification responses.
• Generate product quotations.
• Review product performance data with prospects.
• Handle objections.
• Assess the competition.

Getting to a point where you do not need a handful of factory-based experts to support the items above directly can take a long time. To be candid, it may never happen—like the elusive zero-defects quality objective. You are always getting closer but never quite get there. Continuous improvement needs to be your operating mode.

Product management’s responsibility is to drive constant progress toward localizing selling capability. All capital equipment companies start with a heavy reliance on factory-based experts to execute the sales process. However, the best ones localize selling capability over time. The roadmap in Figure 62 describes three phases capital equipment companies typically go through to localize their selling capability.

In the first phase, the emphasis is on creating the sales kit that you will ultimately deploy to local sales teams. It is here that your mindset shifts from developing a selling tool that addresses a single sales opportunity to a robust sales toolkit that supports a variety of selling situations. No longer are the latest and greatest presentations living somewhere on the product expert’s laptop. In this phase, you subject your selling materials to a higher quality standard, peer reviews, rounds of editing, and field testing. Then you post them in a central repository for others to use. You are institutionalizing the knowledge of the product expert in preparation to transfer it to the field.

In the second phase, you are creating the first new set of product experts outside of product management to support the sales process. Often this is a factory-based organization called regional marketing, technical sales support, or the like. You organize them to reflect the topography of your market. For example, you might organize this group by geographic region or product application. Their charter is to provide first-level technical sales support. Product management arms them with the tools developed in phase one so they can carry a significant portion of the technical sales support load. As a result, product managers spend less time on the sales support treadmill. Since these new product experts focus on specific customer groups, they also advance the cause of developing deeper customer relationships.

By the time you get to phase three, the regional marketing team’s ability to provide technical sales support is almost indistinguishable from that of the product manager. Here, the team’s focus shifts from doer to enabler, and they emphasize developing local selling capability. The goal is to hire and develop local resources that can execute most of the selling cycle without relying on direct contact from factory experts. As the company grows, most new investments in marketing and technical selling capability shift to the local teams, as opposed to expanding the factory organization.

This sales capability localization approach is like a franchise business model. With a franchise, headquarters develops the processes, infrastructure, and tools to enable the franchisees to sell their products in their local markets. Headquarters spends more time working on the problem of creating sustainable demand than on individual transactions. Also, as the franchise grows, it adds most of the new resources at the franchisee, not the franchisor, level. The franchise business model creates a highly capable distribution channel for great products. While not a perfect metaphor for capital equipment distribution, the concept applies.

How to Implement the Localization Roadmap

For steady progress localizing selling capability, follow these three steps.

1. Determine where you stand against the localization roadmap.
2. Define, plan, and execute the next most important steps to become more localized.
3. Go back to step one and repeat for continuous improvement.

Developing self-sufficient local selling capability can require an arsenal of product and applications specialists in each local market. This is not practical for a small equipment company. However, if you do not improve local selling capability, your company will remain small. Even if you never fully localize your selling capability, there is tremendous value in making consistent and persistent progress. Your local sales teams will develop stronger, multi-dimensional customer relationships, and your product experts will have more time to develop and implement product strategies that create a sustained competitive advantage.