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Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Roberge, Mark.
The sales acceleration formula: using data, technology, and inbound selling to go from $0 to $100 million / Mark Roberge.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-119-04707-0 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-119-04717-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-04701-8 (ebk)
1. Sales management. 2. Selling. I. Title.
HF5438.4.R58 2015
658.8'1–dc23
2014039741
Sales doesn't get any exemption from the curse of living in interesting times. Everyone recognizes that today we face unprecedented challenges: the consequences of the Internet and e-commerce, the increasing power and sophistication of purchasing, the effects of globalization. There's no shortage of “interesting” challenges confronting sales organizations, sales managers, and their salespeople.
Now stir another nasty difficulty into the mix. Sales is suddenly in the strategic spotlight. Boardrooms across the world are looking more closely at sales strategy than ever before. What's driving this new interest? There are several reasons, but two factors stand out above the others. The first is the huge increase in competition. Today no niche is safe. There's an oft-quoted figure that the average company today has twice as many competitors as it had five years ago. Nobody knows how true this is, but many experts – myself included – believe it to be so. Assuming the figure is valid, that's another way to say that, statistically, the average company's market share has been cut in half. The second factor is the precariousness of the strategy that most companies have relied on to counter the effects of hypercompetition. Ask the average company to tell you its primary strategy for success in a competitive world. I did just that recently at a meeting of corporate strategists. More than 70 percent responded that their strategy was “innovation.” And, in response to my follow-up question, “Is it working?” more than half said that it was not.
Now I don't want to knock innovation. It's a fine strategy if you can pull it off, and every company is forced to continuously innovate or risk going out of business. It's just that the knee-jerk response to competition has been to innovate, and, as many organizations have found, innovation has its downside. For one thing, it's a very hard strategy to sustain. Even Apple, the poster child of strategic innovation, may not be able to pull it off for much longer. But there's another less recognized downside, and that's the diminishing window of opportunity. The whole idea of innovation is that it gives you a competitive breathing space – a period when you have something unique and special that puts you ahead of competitors. In the good old days, a decent innovation could look forward to a year or two of advantage in the marketplace before the competition could catch up. Not so today: you're lucky if you have a couple of months at the most. As a result, many companies are questioning their reliance on innovation as a growth strategy.
