Sellers: Are You A Control Freak, or A Puppet On A String?

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Balancing Leadership With Control In The Sales Cycle

Why Not Lead Rather Than Control?

Few other areas of business cling to the word or notion of ‘control’ in the way that sales does. The exception is perhaps engineering or operations – where you are dealing with schedules, equipment and other factors.

The reality is that while you can control things, you must lead people. That is at the core of management philosophy for many decades.

Just go to any business book shelf and scan the titles. You will find hundreds of books with leadership in the title, but few with control. But if leadership rather than control is the word used in other areas of business – why hasn’t it found its way into sales?

A More Sophisticated Form Of Control Is Required

Success in business, sport, or other areas requires a more sophisticated form of control – it is called leadership. That, rather than control is what sales needs too!

Rather than seeking to control, the seller should seek to lead the buyer. The additional ingredients that leadership has, but control doesn’t, include; vision, motivation, inspiration, teamwork, collaboration, empowerment, trust, integrity and so on. These are powerful in the context of winning the sale.

Its Time To Lead, Rather Than Control

You don’t control people, your only hope is to lead them. Control is a word we associate with dictators, autocrats, bureaucrats and demagogues. In seeking to control the sale, sellers have set the bar too low.

To paraphrase Sun Tsu ‘When the job is done the people say we did it’ – that is the essence of leadership and it as important in selling as any other area. It means to influence without seeming to take control.

Is Seller Control Just An Illusion?

Most buyers won’t be rushed or manipulated into making a decision by a salesperson. In many cases attempts by the seller to do so will be counter-productive, even destructive.

Corporate buying has changed – buyers have become more sophisticated, while buying decisions have become more structured. These changes have transformed the balance of power and control in the buyer’s favor.

Has the balance of power shifted in your industry?

An implication of these new realities of buying is that:

‘The seller can only take control where the buyer is not doing his, or her job properly. Buyers are admonished to take control into their own hands…

…Indeed, for professionally trained buyers the notion of the seller taking control is an ananethma. It is nothing short of a dereliction of duty!’

The last point is one that is easy for any of us to grasp. Selling to the procurement professional is different and it does limit our expectations of control. And selling to procurement is something that we are having to do more often as a profession – it is an obvious trend. But as we will see next, there are many more trends.

The 7 Trends Eroding Seller Control

There are at least 7 trends in buying that erode the seller’s ability to control the buyer.

1. More sophisticated buyers

The increased sophistication of buyers is a trend in many industries that has resulted in more confident, experienced and self-contained buyers. These are by their nature more independent and less under the control of the buyer.

2. Buying process starts before the sales process

Sellers are increasingly being called to the table later and then finding themselves in a competitive tender situation where there may be limited access and little to discuss other than price.

How many of these trends are evident in your industry?

3. Buying Process

Many organizations are adopting a more structured and process driven approach to buying. Increasingly there are steps that must be followed if the decision is to be sanctioned internally. The process while it may be resisted at first can quickly become source of comfort for the buyer.

The seller seeking to take control increasingly finds that buying process trumps sales process.

4. Competitive tendering

The rise of the competitive tender has resulted in the restructuring of the process of buyer-seller interaction in many organizations. By limiting access and engagement it often limits the ability of the salesperson to exert control over the sale.

5. The Rise Of Procurement

The professional buyer can be a ‘tough nut to crack’. Coming between the traditional buyer and the seller they can be cold or reserved and are immune to many of the seller’s techniques.

Even if procurement is not directly involved their influence is increasingly likely to be felt. They are laying down rules around buying – implementing processes, systems and procedures – that others must follow. One of the reasons for these processes is to limit the influence of the salesperson.

6. Buying Committees

It is harder to control a team than an individual. The increased number of executives (often from cross functional backgrounds) involved in the buying decision makes it more difficult fir the seller to take control. If managing diverse stakeholders is a challenge for buyers on the inside, that makes it an impossibility for the seller on the outside.

7. Asymmetry of Information

Once the salesperson was the sole source of information for the buyer. That put the seller in a position of power. Today the buyer has access to a wide variety of sources of information – many of which are more trusted than the seller. The buyer often knows more than the seller – particularly when it comes to their industry and their business.

So, with these trends diminishing seller control, how buoyant are sellers regarding their ability to change their customers and prospects. Let’s examine that next.