Strong customer relationships are possible if you master new skills

Once a long time ago, salespeople in enterprise software were lionized within their companies for being ‘closers’: people who knew how to seal a deal and to make it stick. Often those deals were largely transactional in nature and sometimes, in highly successful software organizations during boom times, sales staff could even be categorized as glorified ‘order-takers’. SaaS changed all that and today, matters are changing again as sales and marketing automation, AI and Machine Learning create new opportunities. We are entering the age of the more rounded, even intellectual, salesperson. And that’s a win-win for vendors and for customers.

Why the big change?

One big change came with the age of SaaS and cloud. In the days of on-premises software, vendors had a strong negotiating position. If their product was a de facto standard for a particular task or industry sector, or embedded into a customer’s core IT systems it made it difficult to justify migrating away.

Today, the buyer has a world of knowledge at their fingertips. It’s easy to see reviews, forums and even to talk to CIOs in the same industry. We live in a Subscription Economy and, in the age of open APIs and a cultural bias against custom code, so it’s easier than ever to move on from an underperforming supplier. That means on the vendor side we must do more to delight customers, from the initial pitch to deployment, throughout the lifecycle of the product, and on to renewals and upgrades.

Get that right and customers become much more invested in vendor relationships, sharing insights, passing on community tips and, hopefully, making positive comments about their experiences. It is why customer churn has become such an important measure of sales teams as much as customer acquisition targets or expanding wallet share. This is driving a clear change in enterprise software sales efforts.

Intellect + Empathy = New Sales Success

I’ve remarked before that I believe salespeople need to have a greater emotional quotient than ever before, empathizing with customers, understanding their pains and opportunities, and generally acting as a true business partner. We still want them to win deals of course, but they can’t just be deal closers.

So, what do they need to have in their skill sets?

• Be widely read: They must possess knowledge of the verticals and geographic markets they sell into… and even better if they have worked in that domain. They must know their own products too: they’re not expected to be pre-sales engineers, but they should possess a strong understanding of what their products and services do and don’t provide
• Be interested in learning. Technology moves quickly and it’s important to keep up and tune in to what IT and businesses are saying. Today, a salesperson should understand the impacts of regulatory change, sustainability, geopolitical turmoil and how globalization is reconfiguring the world. It is also important to understand where and why there is demand for innovation, why partnering and co-curation are succeeding, what products are in demand and what channels to market are hot
• Embrace consultative selling. Those who can share insights and open the doors to colleagues with expertise (think of ‘cloud economists’ who can help build ROI cases for customers). Indeed, those who focus on the hard sell are often becoming deterrents to sales success because they annoy prospects and customers
• Lean on automation. The traditional pitch email is becoming endangered now that Generative AI can free up the dull and time-consuming part of that task. Sales and marketing technologies are making it easier to ‘know’ customers even before we meet them so they should be set to work, albeit appropriately and respectfully
• Master virtual relationship building. The need for an ability to withstand weeks on the road, blasting up and down motorways to meet clients, is going too. Post-Covid, face-to-face is still important but it’s not everything. We need to use the new conferencing and collaboration tools when they offer greater efficiency for ourselves and, more importantly, for customers
• Make marketing your best friend. The new salesperson must work closer than ever with marketers who can profile customers and their individual shifting needs, especially now that account-based marketing is mainstream. They must continue to work hard in the aftermath of deals because customer satisfaction and case-study referenceability are everything.

Sales automation is real. Few customers want to schmooze, and salespeople need to ‘box clever’ to succeed. The dinosaurs are exiting this sector and, as vendors, we need to offer work that is interesting and challenging in new ways, rather than just incentivizing on blunt targets and goals. It’s a challenging dynamic, as change always is, but if we treat the customer needs as our true north, the future is better for all of us.

About Johan Reventberg, Chief Revenue Officer, Unit4

Johan Reventberg is chief revenue officer of operational and planning cloud software company Unit4. He also serves as a non-executive board member and family representative for Kockska Stiftelserna, a group of foundations that support the arts, medical research and elderly housing funding.

About Unit4

Unit4's next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions power many of the world's mid-market organizations, bringing together the capabilities of Financials, Procurement, Project Management, HR, and FP&A to share real-time information, and deliver greater insights to help organizations become more effective. By combining our mid-market expertise with a relentless focus on people, we've built flexible solutions to meet customers’ unique and changing needs. Unit4 serves more than 5,100 customers globally across a number of sectors including professional services, nonprofit and public sector, with customers including Southampton City Council, Metro Vancouver, Buro Happold, Devoteam, Save the Children International, Global Green Growth Institute and Oxfam America. For further information visit www.unit4.com.

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