Each month we go in-depth into topics discussed in one of the Master B2B Boardrooms, our monthly roundtables for B2B eCommerce executives.
What we heard in the Boardrooms:
This month we heard Boardroom members talking about how to make the sales team a partner in digital transformation.
Certainly, the push-and-pull of eCommerce and sales teams is an evergreen topic for B2B eCommerce practitioners, so it wasn’t the first time Boardroom members have brought this up. But one change this month was that the discussions focused on ways to have sales help the digital and eCommerce teams LEAD the transformation, rather than ways to get sales on board after the transformation work has already begun.
Why that matters:
As one practitioner told us, people don’t change unless they’re in growth mode or in crisis mode. And you don’t want to wait until you’re in crisis mode to try to change the hearts and minds of others.
And many companies have said that they tried the most obvious thing – paying commissions on online sales – but with limited success in terms of making sales an agent of change throughout the organization.
Several practitioners mentioned that the root of some of the traditional trouble between the groups stems from confusion over the definition of what “digital” and “eCommerce” entail. In some companies, it just refers to tools used to place orders that are completed online. In others, “eCommerce” encompasses the customer service tools, and order tracking technology. Sometimes there’s little overlap with traditional sales functions, and sometimes sales may believe that the eCommerce team is trying to take over what has historically been a sales responsibility.
To have any hope of alignment you need to start the journey to digital transformation by agreeing on the definitions of what is and is not part of the eCommerce team (and what functions will remain squarely with sales).
What to do about it:
Boardroom members shared several ideas for how to get sales onboard earlier in the eCommerce journey:
– Tie new initiatives to existing successful initiatives, rather than treating those new digital initiatives like they exist in a vacuum. Include sales leadership from day 1, both in terms of setting strategy, hiring team members, and ensuring that any benefits of the new digital initiatives are reflect in the sales P&L. In other words, sales should be brought in even before the initial strategy sessions.
– We heard that many organizations don’t have centralized sales leadership – different sales groups report to different regional managers. This makes it extremely challenging to gain alignment early, because so many people needed to buy in. As one member asked, “How do I get 20 different sales teams on board when their immediate response was ‘we already tried this and it didn’t work.’” When you work in a company with distributed sales leadership, try a ground-up approach where you work at getting buy-in from the sales people closest to the customer. Hold roundtables and do interviews with these salespeople and take their input seriously. In the best situation, they’ll bring in customers for you to interview to ensure you’re hearing directly from the buyer.
– Ask people if they want to be part of a Proof of Concept phase – there are often people who want to be seen as cutting edge in an organization. They can become the face of the project internally, especially if they’re well-respected top performers. As one member said, “Find your freak.”
– Fear drives salespeople, and the biggest fear is the “fear of the unknown.” They’re afraid to ask questions because they don’t want people to think they don’t understand it. Plus, salespeople can be very guarded about anything that touches their customers, especially if they’re larger accounts. The second biggest fear – and this is especially true for sales leadership – is the fear that any new initiatives will affect them making their numbers (and their pocketbooks). When speaking with sales, ask yourself: what is the person I’m talking to most afraid of? If you are in a company that has a history of reversing decisions (“we tried Salesforce but we went back to Excel”), this will make it incredibly difficult to make change, because no one will believe it’s a real change. It’s imperative to find out what the sales team fears, and address those fears from the planning stages.
– “Articulate the why.” You have to think about selling the project internally. Ask yourself: How do I define the value proposition of this project? Since sales leadership is concerned about hitting their revenue and operating income numbers, the value proposition could be that investing heavily in digital will allow them to get into new business in a way that they couldn’t do just using in-person sales. So eCommerce is really about creating channel expansion opportunities, which completely aligns with how sales thinks about the world. Start with their fears, then find the value propositions that will address the fears.
