More than ever it seems, thanks to social networks and a plethora of great collaborative software solutions. Maybe the question should be “how many committees does it take to buy a light bulb?” At least the number will be smaller.

The benefits of ubiquitous conversations are undeniably clear, including shorter decision cycles. Thanks to collaborative technology, we have the ability to ask anyone, anywhere, any time, “Hey, got a minute?” Click to collaborate! How good is that? But every new solution creates new problems. When do business processes become engorged on 24/7 collaboration, and implode into a digital morass of bypassed Outlook meeting requests and defunct online communities?

I don’t know the answer. In the blink of an eye, “Let’s run this up the flagpole” has morphed into “We won’t make a decision until the team has the chance to meet . . . and meet, and meet, and meet, and meet . . .” Today that means talking with Ryan, Jennifer, Rohit, Colin, Gbenga, Prashant, Nigel, Lillian, Ohad, Chi Wei, and dozens of others in multiple time zones. The same thing happened when FAX machines were introduced. “We instantly transmit documents all over the place because we can, not because we need to.” Someday it will settle down, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. The people who sell collaborative technologies are that good.

Still, some are beginning to question the answers. In an article in The New York Times, Susan Cain writes (The Rise of the New Groupthink, January 15, 2012), “solitude is out of fashion . . . most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.” But she cites an emerging problem. “Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist . . . Solitude is a catalyst to innovation.” Apple co-Founder Steve Wozniak wrote in his memoir “I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone . . . not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Yikes! All this time, we’ve been showering salespeople and others with accolades for being team players. Thanks to Susan, I’m learning that we’ve been inhaling our own smoke. Remember the exercise that the Teamwork Facilitator de jour used to trot out at the annual sales kickoff? “Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas. Fortunately, you and six others survived. You have the following items . . . rank them in order from most important to least important for your survival. . .” For reasons that I’ll charitably describe as self-serving, the facilitator demonstrated that the answers you alone provided on the first pass were not as correct as those communally formulated with your assigned team. Score! Works every time! Payment terms are net 15 days. You know where to send the check.

And the point is . . . ? The point is, as knowledge workers, we’re more knowledgeable when collaborating than when we’re not. And, by extension, we’re assuming more effective, too. Heaven forbid if I were the only person to survive the crash. I was adamant about keeping the straight pins, which the expert survivalist considered nearly useless.

But if you’re a salesperson collaborating with buying teams, you know just how irritating all that knowledge sharing can be. And if you’re on a collaborative selling team collaborating with a collaborative buying team, multiply that irritation by five. Case in point: many years ago, my colleague and I met with a 12-person team to discuss a fairly prosaic need for a factory shop floor data collection application. Two hours later we left the plant with no consensus, and no decision. We both remarked that the meeting would have gone much more quickly had VP Steve just said, “This is what I want. Let’s do it.” If collaboration has a point of diminishing return, we found it that day.

As Susan Cain and Steve Wozniak point out, collaboration and innovation aren’t always compatible bedfellows. And with selling and innovation so closely connected, it’s counter-intuitive that collaboration has gained such prominence in buying and selling today. But it has. At what cost? As Daniel Hannan wrote in The Wall Street Journal (The Lessons of the Turnpike, January 19th, 2012), “the success of any economy depends on the velocity of commerce.” And the velocity of commerce depends on the velocity of decision making.

In a world where economic systems are interdependent and knowledge-based, there are compelling reasons to use collaborative technology, but at a certain point, less is more. It’s just hard to know when we’ve reached that spot.

Breathe a sigh of relief! We all know prospects don’t buy until they believe they have a problem, so it’s reassuring that salespeople can still play a vital role for pointing them out.

But believing a problem exists only initiates the great trifecta for buyer motivation—believe-care-act! So simple to say, but so hard to execute. Within those hyphens lurks heaps of uncertainty. For example, what happens—as it often does—when prospects don’t perceive their problems with the same clarity we do?

Well, we ask questions. We uncover customer pain, and figure out what keeps them up at night. The gorier the pain, the higher the buyer motivation! Then it’s sell! Sell! Sell! If pain exists, we’ll root it out, write it down, quantify it, monetize it, and propose a solution! Inefficiency, under-performance, old technology, obsolescence, persistent errors, under-staffing, over-staffing, customer churn. The list stretches to infinity, you just have to know where to look.

Whoa! Slow down, because there’s a problem. We’re making connected assumptions that are logically shaky.

1. The pain we see is pain that matters to our prospect.
2. Pain that matters must be reduced or eliminated.
3. There’s motivation to do things differently.

What undermines these assumptions is the truth that prospects cope with pain every day. Call it The Ties that Bind. Call it “no decision.” Call it unrequited sales love. Ties that bind enable prospects to cling to old, decrepit systems. Some prospects adapt so well that their pain is almost invisible—to them. When it comes to prospect pain, salespeople are right on top of it, but discovering the ties that bind can be much more complicated. Here’s my story:

In 1996, one of my prospects was a large Virginia-based food distributor. On my first sales call there, I observed fifty or so forklifts buzzing throughout the large central warehouse in a chaotic beehive of commerce. As forklift operators picked and moved large pallets, they manually keyed a 10-digit ID number into the mobile terminals installed on each lift truck. Ten digits, every pick, three shifts, thousands of times each day. I was aghast.

Understand that while skilled forklift operators possess amazing competencies, you’ll find keyboard data entry way down the list, after ballet and vegetarian cooking. There was huge opportunity for inventory errors. My colleague and I asked the VP of Operations why he didn’t address the problem by simply barcoding the ID number and installing scanners on each forklift terminal. “Well, that would cost us money!” he exclaimed with finality.

Swat! He deflected our pithy question as reflexively as brushing off an annoying mosquito. In a rare moment, I was absolutely speechless. My reaction can only be compared to that of Barbara Walters when she recently asked Herman Cain what role he would like in government. There’s more to the story, but based on its trajectory, you can predict the rest. And you’re correct.

I know. You’ve already thought about how you would extract yourself from the situation. You probably figured out how you would avoid it in the first place. Fair enough. But I will submit that I was looking for opportunity in the wrong place altogether. My product-as-solution zeal blinded me to the fact that the VP of Operations had little pain, and he had nothing to run from. He was . . . unmotivated. Yet, he had a gigantic vulnerability he didn’t perceive, and one that would not have bubbled up from my pain-oriented questions.

Why? Never mind the error-prone, fat-fingered data entry. Inventory accuracy was not his problem. He had a dedicated staff of highly experienced accounting personnel who knew every systemic idiosyncrasy down to the last, tiny detail, and the company adapted their processes to manage their data entry errors. Frequent errors, frequently caught! “Pain? What pain? I love my job! Life is good!” Little wonder the VP found my scanners expensive.

What was the vulnerability lurking in the shadows? Janelle in Accounting couldn’t take a day off, because if she did, Mike in Shipping would likely promise to deliver inventory he didn’t have. And finding more Janelle’s, if you’ll pardon my jargon, doesn’t scale. So to any VP of operations in a slow-growth business, things would probably stay hunky dory until the day after Janelle’s retirement party, following the speech thanking her for 25 years of uninterrupted, error-free service.

No wonder businesses today call employees Human Talent. The same kindness oozes into the annual report, in crisp black and white: “Our greatest asset is our people!” Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a reason for that! RIF’d, outsourced, and often misunderstood, human talent still does one thing remarkably well: cope with operational pain. Ties that bind, thanks to tacit knowledge, Excel spreadsheets, patience, and thick skin. And this is why many times prospects say, “no thanks—we’re perfectly happy with what we already have.”

Find the pain, make the sale. But not always, we now know. Another immutable sales truism, shattered. Fortunately, physicist Eli Goldratt, originator of the Theory of Constraints, offered a useful pair of operational questions in his book, The Goal:

1. What is the limitation that the proposed solution diminishes?
2. How does the organization currently compensate for, or deal with the limitation?

That’s not necessarily an exercise in pain discovery. And by diving deep into those questions, salespeople can uncover opportunities that might not keep decision makers up at night, but are no less important. Drill baby, drill!

Goldratt believed that while every organization faces limitations, it’s best to concentrate on ones that are strategically consequential. Still, all limitations have workarounds, and some are pain-free or, as we say in IT, “good enough.” Other workarounds are a cobbled together befuddlement of people and processes that can’t be jettisoned fast enough. So, more than “find the pain,” beyond “find the limitations,” the discovery challenge remains the same: how strong are the ties that bind?—because they’re there, and they matter.

For salespeople, identifying opportunities to fix errors and inefficiencies that our products solve becomes easier with time. That’s not necessarily a good thing. As I learned, knee-jerk diagnosis doesn’t always create a pathway to a sale.

Understanding limitations and the strength of ties that bind can be fruitful for identifying opportunities and important prospect risks. As my accounting professor said, “in financial terms, we look at every initiative the same way: if an acquisition returns more value to the company than the status quo, we make the purchase. If it doesn’t, we don’t.”

I agree. Solution provider is trampled and worn out—you only have to look. The term yielded 16.1 million results on Google. It’s hokey and meaningless. I’ll go even further. It might not be totally . . . honest. Why? Well, name any solution—whether technology innovation, mechanical invention, political initiative, or education policy—that didn’t create new problems. I couldn’t either. The marketing speil, solution provider, only tells half the story.

The difficulty for vendors is that the equally-lopsided term problem provider sends prospects screaming in the opposite direction, and the more honest solution-and-problem provider, sounds risky, and is too clunky to work online, let alone anywhere. At best, by touting their companies as solution providers, marketers fail to differentiate. Think soft tofu, if you eat it, and go blander than that. At worst, the description invites skepticism and distrust, because there’s no such thing as a company or product that provides solutions without providing problems.

Salespeople, of course, aren’t encouraged to complete the solution-problem circuit, at least in front of prospects. Can you imagine opening a sales presentation with “here’s what you’ll solve, and here are some new challenges you’ll have to contend with . . .”? Or including a slide in your PowerPoint deck titled, “New Problems Our Solution Creates”? It’s not in our blood. Besides, you would get tired if you had to wink, or cross your fingers under the table every time you said “we’re a solution provider.”

“What’s the point?” you ask. “We still provide a solution. Give me a better term.” Fair enough. I don’t have one—at least one that doesn’t add five or so more words, and a comma or two, and who needs that? Tweets still can’t exceed 140 characters.

So for now, Steven, I’m afraid we’re stuck. Unless marketers and salespeople can come up with an equally powerful, next-generation term that matches solution provider for its all-encompassing, warm-fuzzy, profound vagueness, buyers will continue to wonder what’s down the road once a solution-provider’s solution is purchased, installed, and used.

And we’ll have to save the second half of the story—problems—for post-purchase product ratings, blogs, and other social media.

A Marine Medal of Honor recipient, Sgt. Dakota Meyer, wrote that in an email quoted in The Wall Street Journal (Decorated Marine Sues Contractor, November 29, 2011).

If you’re following this story, you already know that Sgt. Meyer is suing his former employer, BAE Systems, alleging that they “retaliated against him after he raised objections about BAE’s alleged decision to sell high-tech sniper scopes to the Pakistani military. He says his supervisor at BAE effectively blocked his hiring by another defense contractor by making the claims about drinking and his mental condition.” If you want to contact BAE’s Investor Relations about investing, you might wait until their damage-control staff has spoken to the last seething caller.

But put aside Sgt. Meyer’s legal case for a moment, and recognize that he won his Medal of Honor for “braving enemy fire as he tried to save the lives of fellow Marines who had been trapped in a Taliban ambush.” That he objects to BAE’s pursuit of this sale makes poignant sense. Sgt. Meyer found a point when revenue becomes filthy, and he spoke up. We need more people like him.

The pending BAE rifle scope sale isn’t the first in which revenue pursuit has collided with public policy issues, or with moral and ethical beliefs. Ambivalence over a prospect customer’s business mission, products, and services occurs more often than people might expect. Here are some examples from my selling past:

1. Cigarette manufacturing

Cigarette manufacturing is huge part of Virginia’s economy. The Philip Morris Richmond Manufacturing Center alone is located on 200 acres, with six connected buildings that cover 43 acres, totaling 1.6 million square feet. An outsider cannot appreciate the size of the industry until he or she drives on I-95 through Richmond and experiences the smell of ambient tobacco leaf in the air. Then you know. The huge network of providers—from production machinery to carton printers to filter manufacturers to warehousing—have the same logistics challenges that all manufacturers face.

For years, the technology I sold to companies in the tobacco value chain helped them manufacture and distribute a legal-lethal product better, faster, and cheaper. Not exactly a conversation starter at parties I attended with members from my masters swim team, or with my relatives in the health care profession. You see where I’m going with this. I overcame my dissonance because I rationalized that cigarette smoking is voluntary—as long as I suspended the nicotine-as-addictive-drug idea.

Had I stood on principal and refused to help these producers, my competitors would have gladly filled the void. Just as important, could I subtract tobacco-related revenue from my account portfolio and still make quota? Answer: no. But what happens when you can? (see #2)

2. Firearm manufacturing

One of my prospects was a large handgun manufacturer. While some might find my choice heretic, I decided not to call on the company because I didn’t need the revenue to make quota. Unlike cigarettes, theirs was a “stand-alone” plant, without an ecosystem of suppliers in my sales territory.

OK. Before we get into a heated philosophical debate over the intended meaning of the second amendment to the US Constitution, let’s agree that it’s perfectly legal to manufacture and distribute firearms in the US. No controversy. Done.

So what was my objection? Once again, it’s the lethal thing. For me, it would have been indescribably strange to walk the production floor, looking at bins of forged parts and watching Quality Control test bays, knowing the likely use of the finished product. I imagined speaking with the same clinically-detached operational terms used for the production of automotive seats and headlamps, but unable to escape knowing the ultimate purpose of the precision and quality was to better deliver a bullet. Just writing about it still makes me a touch queasy. Call me a wimp. I can handle it.

As in life, nothing in sales ethics comes easily. Was my idealism fair to my employer? Was it fair to my resellers? Probably not. I referred the gun manufacturer to a VAR who was not conflicted. And I still made commission on the sales—a twist to the story that I’ll save for another day.

3. Meat production.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a vegetarian for over 30 years. OK, I’m not really a vegetarian, because I eat fish. And I only mentioned that because it’s an important fact for wrapping this up with a not-so-neat ethical bow at the end, which I promise to do in just a moment. That said, it doesn’t bother me when other people eat meat, just that I don’t.

Yet, I don’t sell to meat processors for the same reasons I don’t sell to tobacco processors: for me, it doesn’t feel good. Yes, I did write about a big sale I made to a meat plant following an e-coli outbreak. Yes, I got a great shot of adrenaline, and yes, there was a nice commission for my sale. But—and I’m not trying to win converts to veganism here—there are times in sales when you have TMI (Too Much Information). Vegetarian or not, if you’re selling to the meatpacking industry, you should have the appetite for it (pun intended).

My friends say, “Andy, you eat fish but not meat. You won’t sell technology to a handgun manufacturer, but you will sell systems to automate navy supply warehouses—what’s the difference?” Great question, worth a conversation over a beer, at least. As author David Quammen wrote, “not every crisp line represents a triumph of ethical clarity.”

Back to Sgt. Meyer, BAE, and gun sight technology for the Pakistani military. Few will argue that a core idea for sales success is belief in your product or service. But belief in the value of your customer’s mission and purpose is just as critical—maybe even more. Sgt. Meyer’s story is important, because in tough economic times, being moral about how you produce revenue is difficult enough. Having the courage to be vocal when something seems amiss is truly remarkable.

Penn State Board of Trustees, are you listening?

“Merck & Co. agreed to pay $950 million and plead guilty to a criminal misdemeanor charge to resolve government allegations that the company illegally promoted its former painkiller Vioxx and deceived the government about the drug’s safety.” (The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2011)

Penn State’s former standards and conduct officer, Vicky Triponey, told The Wall Street Journal that in 2005, she was informed that ex-coach Joe Paterno had demanded that she be fired, or he’d quit fundraising for the school. (The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2011)

Merck sold more than $11 billion of Vioxx between 1999 and 2004. Penn State’s football program brought $70.2 million in revenue between 2009 and 2010. Hard to imagine that achieving these big quotas wouldn’t involve a twisted ethical boundary or two. As one sales manager famously told me, “I don’t care how you make your quota, as long as you make it . . . .”

So it was refreshing to learn less-told stories about how sales innovation achieves good in the world. A panel of social entrepreneurs shared selling insights at a conference I attended this month called Digital Capital Week. One takeaway: you don’t need Sales in your title to have killer sales instinct, but you do need to know how to fail forward.

For me, social entrepreneurs are the sales anti-hero, conjuring images of Prius-driving vegetarians focused on putting the needs of others before their own. In traffic, when people cut in front of them, they blithely shrug it off. But that’s not an apt caricature. There was enough go-for-the-jugular content to rival any annual B2B sales kickoff meeting. Just minus the rah-rah.

Here’s what I learned:

When you need a truck, ask for a truck. Bread for the City

Challenge: how do you raise money to solve systemic problems that are not only dire, but complex and broad?

Sales lesson: make your idea tangible

Bread for the City provides vulnerable residents of Washington, DC, comprehensive services, including food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services, in an atmosphere of dignity and respect.

But when you need a truck to deliver food, just ask for a truck. A picture helps, too. According to Greg Bloom, the organization’s Development Associate for Marketing and Communications, that direct appeal produced the best results for donations. Bread for the City volunteers work tirelessly to overcome society’s most intractable social problems. Important as that is, the outcomes are harder to explain than describing what a delivery truck provides for bringing food to people who don’t have any.

There’s no such thing as a “comfort zone.” Washington Area Bicycle Association

Challenge: How do you encourage people with diverse goals and objectives to get involved in public policy, and to take action?

Sales lessons:
1. Get out of your comfort zone!
2. You can tell your story without having to be the center of attention.

The mission of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) is to create a healthy, more livable region by promoting bicycling for fun, fitness, and affordable transportation, advocating for better bicycling conditions, offering transportation choices for a healthier environment, and educating children, adults, and motorists about safe bicycling.

When people have access to bike lanes, people bike. When they don’t, they won’t. But if the Washington Area Bicycle Association stuck to their comfort zone, they’d confine outreach to middle-aged, spandex-wearing white males who ride Serottas.

Getting people jazzed about something as healthy and fun as bicycling might sound easy, but it’s not. It requires engaging diverse people who with diverse needs. Men. Women. Young. Old. Students. Professionals. Gay. Straight. White, black, brown, and yellow. People who ride bikes, people who used to bike, and people who have never biked.

“Is there a ‘white twitter,’ and a ‘black twitter?’” Greg Billing, WABA’s Outreach and Advocacy Coordinator, asked rhetorically. Possibly, sharing that Black Women Bike—DC has a common interest in creating bike lanes in Washington where none exist, and they might not follow the same conversations as those who want the latest cycling technology. So, connect, engage, and recognize that your organization won’t be the centerpiece of every group’s discussion. And that’s just fine.

“Spread the word to end the word.” Special Olympics

Challenge: how do you eradicate the conversational use of a demeaning and hurtful slur?

Sales lesson: “reward the passion of your fans.”

Originally, the terms mental retardation or mentally retarded were medical terms with a specific clinical connotation. Sadly, the pejorative forms, retard and retarded have been used widely in today’s society to degrade and insult people with intellectual disabilities. Additionally, when retard and retarded are used as synonyms for dumb or stupid by people without disabilities, it only reinforces painful stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities being less valued members of humanity.

“Hey, lighten up—I didn’t mean it that way!” Too late. The sting is there, and r-word offends many people, with good reason. So Special Olympics began the campaign, Spread the Word to End the Word, in 2008, airing a public service announcement on the television show Glee that continues to generate controversy.

But the campaign tapped into people’s passions, and created awareness of an injustice where little existed, according to Ryan Eades, Senior Manager, Social Media at Special Olympics. As of November 29th, 2011, 229,198 people have posted online pledges to stop using the r-word.

There’s more work to be done. The site’s r-word counter reveals that the r-word has been used online 144,017 times on the web through November 29th. Through that link, you can provide the URL of any website, and the service quickly counts the number of occurrences of the word on that site. Every CRM website I tested, including CustomerThink, was clean. Same for Justin Bieber’s fan page. Maybe we are making progress.

Merck. Penn State. The only certainty is that there will be other companies joining that list in 2012. Quotas are overwhelming, and salespeople are never far from temptation to skew off the ethical rail. But as these social entrepreneurs have taught us, that doesn’t have to happen. It’s possible align creativity and sales tenacity to improve the world.

Please. Just one more time—I know it’s painful. And I’ll forgive your instinct to reach for your keyboard and press the PgDn key, fantasizing that “Department of Energy” will mercifully flow left-to-right onto a large screen in front of him. I had the exact same urge.

The same urge I had when I watched Herman Cain self-destruct in his discussion of America’s actions regarding Libya. He attempted to answer the question, “so you agreed with President Obama on Libya, or not?” without the benefit of a blinking cursor dutifully waiting for him to type “Libya policy” in a search window. Eeks! Had to answer the question straight from the gray-matter knowledge bank. That seems almost bizarre to those of us whose confidence is immeasurably boosted by proximity to online search.

To say “I feel your pain,” to these candidates would be an understatement. Salespeople know too well what it’s like to be put on the spot, what it’s like to handle sometimes-hostile questions, and what it’s like to have a crushing desire to re-work the answer we just provided. We’re spared the agony presidential candidates experience only because our sales meetings are rarely videoed, and typically don’t go viral. Yet.

You can’t have twenty years in sales as I have without famous oops moments. “The three advantages of Thermal Transfer print technology are label durability, high first-read rate, and . . . (darn!).” Or the thousands of prospect questions that demanded straightforward, concise answers that were not straightforward enough or concise enough.

The difference between most salespeople and Perry and Cain, is that we’ve gotten better. Here’s what I learned from watching them:

1. Hubris sucks. There’s nothing like bringing confidence to a meeting, but oh, does it backfire when it mutates into swagger!

2. Substance beats style. Learn your subject—cold–before you show up in front of your audience. But first, know what your subject is. Teach others that you are valuable.

3. Be open-minded to coaching. Could these disastrous outcomes be averted if the candidates had abided by the recommendations they undoubtedly received? (see #1.)

If you’re a political strategist, bring a salesperson on staff to help out with debate preparation. All of us have been there, done that. Think on our feet—it’s what we do! Some days are better than others, but we’re never beyond knowing that we can improve.

The sales profession cries out for help. Buyers and sellers are not getting along, at great cost to our economy. We’ve tried everything we can to fix the problems, but nothing has worked. We need government intervention, and we need it now. We’re not asking for a bailout—just an overhaul.

The truth that nothing happens until someone sells something underpins our great financial system. Yet, trillions of dollars are wasted annually on ineffective sales strategies and processes. Day in, and day out, buyers and salespeople across the US fail to achieve the right outcomes. Buyers are miserably disappointed. Many salespeople don’t make quota. Companies fail to achieve their revenue objectives, GDP declines, and opportunities to build lasting wealth are lost—a vicious, seemingly unstoppable chain reaction.

Symptoms of this crisis pervade our daily conversations. Pejorative sales stereotypes infect social media and popular discourse, and they ripple into other areas of commerce. The Occupy Wall Street movement is but one artifact of consumer disdain for how our economic system and its institutions operate.

In the past, the Federal government has stepped up to stem the rancor. We have the Do Not Call Registry, and recently the Federal Communications Commission approved spending $4.5 billion per year for the Universal Service Fund so that people living in rural areas can have more information power with which to make purchases. But we need more government, not less. The problems in our economy are caused by systemic frictions between buyers and sellers. Leaving it to the “free market” to lessen the discord hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t in the future.

I have a solution that will improve the economy, create jobs, and ensure the preservation of at least three Federal agencies—the Departments of Commerce, Education, and the . . . uh . . . : put every sales function performed in the United States under the direct control of the Department of Commerce and give those employees the title Federal Trusted Advisor.

Overnight, two million Federal jobs will be created, offsetting the two million that will be eliminated in the private sector. Fear not, because an additional 500,000 new senior Federal managers will be needed to staff the agency, creating a net job gain, ensuring Federal Trusted Advisors a secure retirement, and injecting a new stream of disposable income into our economy.

A nationwide force of Federal Trusted Advisors will correct everything that plagues buyer-seller interactions by:

1. mandating Trusted Advisor Process Step #1 as define the business problem. Under today’s selling model, vendors first bring solutions to customers, then ask what the problem is—if they ask at all. In the absence of government control over buyer-seller collaborations, sellers always have an agenda. This broken model creates the winner’s curse, and endless buyer complaints.

2. creating strong governance. Today, sales professionals do not have to conform to universal ethical standards. Rather, it’s left up to each company to establish guidelines—or not. There’s a wide strike zone between right and wrong, and government control would make it a requirement for every Federal Trusted Advisor to sing from the same ethical hymnal. As you know, without sales ethics, trust cannot flourish. And without trust, no economy on this planet will work.

3. standardizing professional credentialing and staff development. Today, there are no standards of competency for sales professionals. All Federal Trusted Advisors will be required to meet the same standards for business knowledge, social skills, and problem-solving capabilities. We should implement this by hiring all private-sector professional sales trainers to work as government employees within the Department of Education. Making it the responsibility of the Department of Education to train 2 million Federal Trusted Advisors and their managers would undermine any attempt to eliminate the department.

4. implementing a single salary model, and eliminating variable compensation. All Federal Trusted Advisors will receive the same salary, without regard to what customers purchase. Federal Trusted Advisors would not be trusted if they had a vested interest in “closing the deal,” or “upselling,” as they do with the current model. And no customer would feel pressured or shunned because their planned purchase wasn’t sufficiently large, or was outside of a specific timeframe.

5. providing customers warmth, empathy, and understanding. Let’s face it: a root cause of buyer-seller friction today isn’t that products fail, or that they’re “oversold,”—it’s that buyers feel unloved. By institutionalizing love, we can eliminate passionless terms like Customer Relationship Management, and buyer loyalty programs, that aren’t serving customers in ways that are valuable to them.

I couldn’t propose adding 2.5 million new Federal workers without acknowledging the counterpoint arguments:

1. “It’s Big Government.” True, but like the GM and banking bailouts, there’s no time like the right time.

2. “We can’t afford it.” Understood. But the department will be self-funding because every customer will pay a 9% flat fee to the US Government on every purchase.

There are no simple answers and no silver-bullet solutions for securing America’s position as the world’s leading economy. But we must begin by overhauling the sales profession, and by establishing—and enforcing—harmony between buyers and sellers. I urge you to enact this initiative right away.

Respectfully,

Andrew Rudin
November 10, 2011

“The perfect salesperson is one who has a new car, a mortgage, a stay-at-home wife, a baby, and another one on the way.”

Translation: “Motivating people isn’t my thing.” Sure, workers who exist in consumption traps bring motivation to the job, but they also bring plenty of problems, including stress. Is that profitable? Is that sustainable? And, does that create happiness for anyone? Maybe I’ve asked these questions in the wrong order.

Thirty years ago, few executives worried about the correlation between personal happiness, physical and mental health, and on-the-job productivity. In the early 1980’s, I sat in hours-long meetings when cigarette packs and lighters occupied space on conference room tables the way Blackberries and iPads do today. Where I worked, not smoking was considered anti-social. “Sure, go ahead and light up! If smoking helps you get your work done, we’ll provide matches and ashtrays!” So it was. I knew everyone’s preferred brand, and my clothes reeked at the end of each day.

Rules and regulations that once seemed draconian have squashed workplace freedoms like smoking anytime and anywhere, but for those who thrive on inhaling clean air and wearing fresh clothes, there are undeniable benefits. In thirty years, we’ve progressed from “Oh! You smoke!” to “Oooooh—you smoke?”, a remarkable shift. And happily—or disappointingly, depending on your view—other personal behaviors have received similar attention.

In an article, Workplaces Feel the Impact of Obesity, Avi Dor, a researcher at George Washington University, said that employers “recognize that there’s so many potentially highly productive workers who happen to be obese — highly skilled workers in some cases — that they really want to tackle this problem head-on.”

This level of caring and compassion didn’t happen overnight. But it happened. Why? A symposium I attended last week at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, Cultivating Well-Being: The Necessary Role of Business Leaders, Researchers, and Educators, ” offered four ideas:

1. The relationship between employee well being, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction has become better understood. Similarly, the notion that employee well-being and profitability are negatively correlated has fallen out of favor, because for many companies, customer satisfaction and lower employee churn drops to the bottom line.

2. What employers pay attention to and ask about has changed.

3. Employers recognize that employee well being is less about ROI, and more about value returned to the company and its customers.

4. Employers and public policy makers have recognized that personal health is not always “somebody else’s business.” Companies must work to solve problems that are real to everyone.

Forget the social-do-goodism for a moment. It’s still all about money. Employee personal health has become the same hard-nosed dollars and cents issue to companies as supply chain efficiency and cost of capital. Even with automation and software tools, working in the “knowledge economy” has become more mentally and physically demanding—not less. So employees who aren’t ready because they’re out of shape, overstressed, or unhappy, are a competitive liability. Which possibly explains why it’s rare to meet a top sales producer who chain smokes and weighs over 350 pounds.

Maintaining personal wellness seems natural to many of us, but not every manager or employee buys in. “You have to show people the benefits of engaging in certain behaviors,” said keynote speaker Punam Anand Keller, Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “You have to tailor your marketing to their needs.” Biz-dev 101 stuff. But Keller said the rates of participation in corporate and public well-being programs are “dishearteningly low.” Part of buying in depends on the ability of senior managers to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

One panelist, Dianne Houghton, former CEO of Digital Focus, Inc. said “Never have a doubt that creating an environment where people can do their best work is the best thing for the bottom line,” she told the audience. Another panelist, Jerry Ng, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional (BTPN) cited other benefits. Supporting well-being “is not only philosophically good, it creates competitive advantages.”

His company’s financial results support his opinion. The Indonesian bank, which serves a largely low-income, elderly clientele, has been growing at a 40 percent annual rate. Among the services BTPN offers are free medical clinics, seminars on how to live healthy, and courses in financial management. Amazing what financial good can result when banking executives are capable of thinking beyond five-dollar-per-month debit card fees.

Keller provided examples of other companies that are outstanding promoters of employee wellness, including Abbott Labs, Disney, Johnson Controls, Whole Foods. The Abbott Labs Work Life programs web page touts “available sports vary by site and may include bowling, basketball, golf, volleyball, softball, skiing, tennis and bingo.” Bingo? Something for everyone, I guess.

Do the connections between wellness, productivity, and profitability mean that the new sales achiever must be a tee-totaling, non-smoking, mountain-biking, vegetarian triathlete who hits the gym instead of the bar after work, and who coaches Little League? I don’t know. But sales readiness means physical and mental readiness. And that’s as important as having product knowledge, social skills, and business acumen. The best salesperson is one who not only has motivation, but confidence fueled by a sense of well being. Something the regional sales manager didn’t consider.

It’s understandable that managers might be reticent about asking an employee to lose weight, eat a healthier diet, or start an exercise program. But whether you agree that employee wellness benefits society, corporate profits, or both, the need to apply leverage might be unavoidable. Another panelist, Josh Wright, Acting Director, Office of Financial Education and Financial Access for the U.S. Department of the Treasury felt that choice that is purely free doesn’t exist. “Whether government- or market-influenced, all choices are biased in some way . . . There’s no need to mandate behaviors, but why not help to structure people’s decisions?”

Along with political revolutions, we saw some gravity-defying sales strategies, painful flops, and one Guiness-worthy product record. According to The Economist (Beyond the PC, October 8, 2011), “Around 8 million units of the Kinect, a Microsoft device that attaches to the Xbox and lets people control on-screen action with their body movements, were sold within 60 days of its launch in November 2010. No consumer electronics device has ever sold so fast . . .” “These people will absorb new technology on a scale that is simply quite stunning,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s head of research and strategy.

These people, of course, are the same consumers who recently rejected Microsoft’s Kin, HP’s Touchpad, and RIM’s Playbook. Make a note in your sales training guide that pitching “latest and greatest technology” might get your Account Executive laughed out of the conference room.

In 2011, India’s Tata began the worldwide product launch for its Nano, touted the world’s cheapest car. The entry-model Nano will set you back 599,000 taka (about $7,900), which doesn’t include front console cup holders (I am not making this up). Still, that’s ten times the price of another bold 2011 Tata product launch—a 250 square foot home, sold flat-in-a-box that includes doors, windows, roof, and an assembly guide with twelve useful swear words in six languages. This product isn’t available at Ikea, but I see it in the future.

If wow-factors alone assured sales success, Tata might have considered offering cup holder-equipped Nanos. But sales enablement is much broader than showing off glitzy features. Strategy determines the market outcomes for these products and thousands of others. Launching Tata’s house-in-a-box requires selling local governments on how to best help India’s large homeless population. It requires soliciting private landowners to provide space. “Your (sales) mission, should you decide to accept it . . .” If street luging doesn’t provide you an adequate adrenaline rush, email your resume to Tata. You’ll get plenty there.

Whether your product provides shelter to those who don’t have it, cheap transportation, 24/7 connectedness, or something else, “waiting for things to settle down” isn’t a viable strategic action, because stasis seems unlikely. Since you started reading this, much has already changed. So here’s What’s Hot and What’s Not for 2012:

Hot: “Our community is great!” As Vanessa DiMauro wrote in a recent blog, “. . . companies increasingly look to real-time customer intimacy channels such as online communities as a new approach to reach and engage their customers.”

Not: “We’re great!” Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sound of one hand clapping is so 2011.

Hot: Jazzy relationships. Collaborative problem solving, quality post-sale support, and sustainable vendor-client relationships are the new bells-and-whistles.

Not: Jazzy product features. For B2B sales, “build it and they’ll come” is no longer true, especially when a vendor owns a reputation for persistent service issues.

Hot: Peer referrals. The fact that customers talk about their vendor experiences isn’t new. But their growing influence on prospective buyer actions should not be underestimated.

Not: “Just close the deal!” If your customers don’t actively recommend your company’s products and services to prospects, are you really in the game anyway?

Hot: defining customer problems. A teachable sales-enabling skill that’s rarely performed. But inventor Charles Kettering said “a problem well stated is half solved.”

Not: leading with product solutions. When what you’re selling is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Management guru Eliyahu Goldratt put it another way: “By bringing solutions to a problem, that distorts the definition of the problem.” Customers need solutions, but never before their problems are defined.

Hot: Content relevance. Yes, your prospective customers do believe “it’s all about me.” And who are we to call them selfish?

Not: Infrastructure. Your IT architecture and 24/7 e-commerce up-time don’t get prospects barking-dog excited the way they used to. Besides, cloud computing gives you the opportunity to align your internal staff much closer to your sales mission.

Hot: Return on engagement. Get beyond creating awareness, driving people to your website, and lead generation. Measuring the value that social media provides across departmental and organizational boundaries will lead to better decisions about how to deploy it.

Not: Return on social media Investment. I know. I’ve beaten this one to death, and here I go again. But if you’re asking “what’s the ROI for social media?” you’re asking the wrong question. I can’t think of one successful instance of social media use when it hasn’t been part of a larger system.

Hot: “Fail forward!” Companies need marketers and business developers capable of taking intelligent risks, and who aren’t ashamed to share what they’ve learned when things don’t proceed as planned.

Not: “Fail and we’ll fire you.” Heavy-handed management often fosters a selling culture that favors timid, risk-averse people. Some of them occasionally make quota.

Hot: people as individuals. Back by popular demand from last year’s Hot/Not. Through social media, the ability to engage in personal sales conversations has become even stronger.

Not: people as data. If you can’t get closer to customers than that, you’re in trouble. According to IBM’s 2011 CMO study, From Stretched to Strengthened, “Lower performers are still focused on transactions,” not on customer relationships. Besides, you can’t converse with a spreadsheet cell.

Hot: point-of-impulse. Or, in tech-speak, mobile application delivery. But calling it selling at the point-of-impulse sounds much more exciting.

Not: point of purchase. . . . Unless you believe that’s where the buying process begins.

Hot: strong sales backbones. “Here’s what we do, and why it’s good for you!” I know, it sounds so product-centric, but as the late Steve Jobs said, “sometimes people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Not: hyper-agility. As a CIO recently told me, “Customers don’t want to hear ‘Oh! We can change that for you!’ Everyone says that.”

Hot: corporate character awareness. If you’re paying attention to Occupy Wall Street, choosing Corporate Social Responsibility over murky ethics offers a sales strength that, sadly, not every competitor can replicate.

Not: Brand awareness. OK, keep doing what you’re doing, but now people also want to know whether your company achieves good in the world. And there’s no avoiding the importance of walking the walk: according to IBM’s 2011 CMO Study, 53% of CMO’s said brand awareness is strong contributor to success, yet 57% said significant work is needed to get employees on board. I wonder what percentage of prospects finds the lack of connectedness disturbing.

Hot: privacy. Now, a strategic differentiator! When customers believe you’re serious about protecting their privacy, they’re more inclined to buy.

Not: transparency. Especially when it means unfettered sharing of personal customer information.

Hot: approachable companies. No surprise that people like working with companies that actually want to learn from what others have to say.

Not: approachable customers. According to Axel Schultze, “too many companies create a nifty social media campaign but prospects still have no way of getting social with (them) – it’s just another, expensive marketing gig.”

Hot: flexible sales job requisitions. A Wall Street Journal article (Why Companies Can’t Find the Employees they Need, October 24th, 2011) said, “Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.”

Not: unbending requirements. Unless you can afford to wait for the “perfect candidate” while scaling your sales force.

A recent blog, “From Watson to Siri: As machines replace humans, are they creating inequality too?” presented an idea worth pondering: “Equipped with new capabilities, such as the capacity for natural language, these machines will begin to displace human beings in core economic sectors, such as sales.”

Sales? Ouch! Why sales? Communication is core to everything we do in sales enablement, but it seems shallow to propose that automating capacity for language will catalyze adoption of a robo-rep. I believe it will take thousands of development hours to program a machine to perform assumptive closes, offer best sales questions, and give firm handshakes—if it can be done at all. Still, I’m holding a spot on next year’s Hot/Not list. After all, we live in a time of accelerating change.

As a VoIP-enabled voyeur, learning what others really think was enlightening. Still, the male ego is a delicate thing. I revealed my presence by saying, “Mary, I am not short.”

Last week, I had a similar opportunity for insight when I attended a panel discussion at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner, Virginia, What Technology Buyers Really Want from Marketers. The session was full of candor, so I wasn’t disappointed. First, the bad news: as sales professionals, our reputation is checkered, to say the least. You already knew that. Then, the good news: technology buyers need salespeople. But what you might not know how is how buyers perceive our interactions with them.

The Tower Club reeks of consumption. Suits and ties. No unshaven faces or flip-flops, even for twenty-something technology entrepreneurs. The club is located on the 17th floor of an office tower which the locals call The Shopping Bag Building, owing to its conspicuous pinnacle that resembles two shopping bag handles. The imagery is not accidental. The building casts its huge shadow on the country’s seventh-largest shopping mall, Tysons Corner, and it’s a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Capital One. I’ve heard that paper money flows through its ductwork.

A fitting venue for the three CIO panelists—David Roth of The Carlyle Group, Bruce Mancinelli of Inc.spire, and Vijay Samalam of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—whose cumulative career IT purchases approach $1 billion. Divide that number by 1,000, and you know the total number of PowerPoint slides they’ve endured through countless sales presentations. A battle-hardened group.

Here are the highlights:

Question: What advice would you give someone who’s new to tech buying about working with technology vendors? David Roth responded, “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten much more cynical: don’t trust what they tell you.” He described his struggles to keep his team focused on required outcomes when they meet with vendors. When he hears business IT users say “I didn’t like that sales rep,” or “I really like the team that presented,” he encourages them not to allow those biases to permeate their evaluations, adding, “Demos screw up the buying process. Don’t see them until you understand your business requirements.”

Question: Outside of your organization, what are the top sources of influence in your buying decisions? The panelists agreed that peers hold the greatest sway. David Roth shared that “CIO’s of private equity firms get together every three to four months, and just to talk about what we’re doing . . . it’s like looking at yourself in the mirror.”

Question: What do you consider the biggest recent changes in the buying process? There were several insights:

• The acquisition of technology no longer requires investing in capital assets, such as hardware (I recommend reading this twice while inhaling deeply and slowly. If there is any development more significant for IT vendors, I don’t know what it is.)

• Business users are more involved in IT buying than they were in the past. A challenge for IT executives is how to include them in the procurement process, and how to achieve balance between business unit needs and IT requirements.

• The traditional developer concept, “build it and they’ll come” is no longer true. Today’s technology buyer sees ease of operations, maintainability, and user support as offering greater value than “jazz factors” of technology.

• Technology buyers are no longer perfunctory when discovering the experiences other companies have had with a vendor’s technology. Today, such discovery is done early and often in the buying process–not just after the purchase decision has been made. Bruce Mancinelli shared that such rigor helps buyers “pick up patterns of good, bad, and concerning.”

• Demands for shorter time-to-value are driving unprecedented requirements for simplicity, ease-of-use, and customer support. This development creates faster buying cycles, a counterpoint to what many say are lengthening sales cycles.

• Having a path for IT evolution is a major buying consideration.

Do these developments mean you should siphon funding for marketing communications into customer support? No, but they do mean that your sales training program, product leadership and nifty website won’t get you very far sales-wise if your customers don’t have anything good to say about you or your company.

They mean that sales people who are stuck in demo-mode, with little tactical training outside promoting feature/capability/benefit, won’t make quota, no matter how hard they’re flogged. They mean that your company’s ability to make its revenue plan now depends as much on the selling skills of your customers as it does on those of your sales force. A year ago, you would have been forgiven for thinking of that idea as a tad facetious. Not anymore.

Do these CIO’s foresee the end of the road for salespeople, as others contend? I didn’t hear it. IT buyers need salespeople. They need them to walk their company’s walk and talk their company’s talk. In other words, they want salespeople with backbones, but packaged in a less product-centric, more strategic wrapper. David Roth told of one sales representative who repeatedly said, “Oh, we can change that,” when he talked about his company’s offerings. He contrasted that approach with a more resolute salesperson who said, “. . . we heard you, but here’s what we think.” It was obvious which salesperson won his respect. Steve Jobs said, “. . . a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Agility is great, until it gets in everyone’s way.

Even with gobs of information available through Internet and social media channels, IT buyers still value salespeople who can educate them. Not by reciting product specs laden with bits, bytes, feeds, speeds, features, and functions, but about tacit stuff that’s harder to uncover online: relationships. Each panelist shared how IT decision makers are focused on the expectation of trusted, long-term relationships. It’s hard to assure that vendor-client collaborations will go well by showing a PowerPoint slide, or by saying it on an “About Us” website page. So salespeople will have to dust off touchier-feelier relationship skills that were less in demand when cold technical product knowledge coupled with “show ‘em the sizzle and the steak” could truly rock a group of techie buyers in a sales call.

But education can go wrong, as Vijay Samalam shared. “Howard Hughes Medical Institute conducts pure research. Some cold calls I receive are about clinical trials or drug trials. I tell the salespeople we’re not involved in that.” Are these errant sales conversations educating prospects? Yes, but not in a good way, because these vendors are teaching prospects to devalue their efforts. Selling is complicated, but this part isn’t rocket science. A little pre-call homework goes a long way.

My mind goes back to David Roth’s succinct summation, “don’t trust what they tell you.” Like “short, little whiner,” it’s a wee bit harsh, but hearing it offers the listener the opportunity to know what to change.