Our research shows a 32% increase in top-line performance due to a salesperson's ability to serve as both a business consultant and business strategist.

Sales as a Source of Competitive Advantage?

In this competitive era, understanding the factors that lead to sales force performance is critical to an organisation’s success. Not knowing can have serious consequences: rising cost of business, loss of market share, lost customers, and the expense of supporting low performers.

Over the past several years, Wilson Learning has had the opportunity to work closely with companies to uncover the sources of competitive advantage residing in their salespeople and sales managers; to develop techniques for measuring skill levels; to develop these critical competencies in their sales forces; and to support application of these skills to their customer interactions. We have also collected sales performance data for many of these companies to analyse the impact of these skills on their organisation. This paper reports on five of those organisations, to independently show how these skills are improving each organisation’s financial and customer success. These studies examine organisations that operate in highly competitive environments and have complex sales processes that require advanced consulting and business skills on the part of their sales forces. While the industries are all different, they all provide products and/or services that have multiple components and tend to have longer sales cycles.

In this work, we have come to some important conclusions:

• Effective sales professionals play two complementary roles—business consultant to their clients and business strategist to their own organisation.
• Skills in both of these roles are essential to effective sales performance. If either is missing, then overall effectiveness is lower.
• Sales performance is closely tied to the salesperson’s ability to fulfil both of these roles. Depending on the organisation, between 17% and 67% of the differences between high and low performers is attributable to differences in these skills.

Consultant and Strategist Skills: A New Era in Selling

In understanding the distinction between the consultant and strategist roles, it is often helpful to examine historically the role of salespeople in creating competitive advantage. In the distant past, the successful salesperson was a “persuader,” a good presenter, and a product/service feature expert. This sales approach suited a market, mostly in the 1950s–1970s, where customers had little information and were eager to buy in an expanding business climate.

In the 1970s and to some degree today, the salesperson as “problem solver” became the sign of success. Salespeople discovered their clients’ needs, aligned their resources to their clients’ problems, and handled buying objections.

For some of our clients, especially those offering highly flexible and complex product offerings, this problem-solver approach was failing to achieve competitive advantage. As we worked with these organisation, a new view of effective sales performance started to emerge. The hallmark of this new approach was that taking a single perspective—either a persuader or problem-solver—was no longer sufficient. Rather, salespeople had to simultaneously wear two hats—the Business Consultant hat and the Business Strategist hat.

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