We're trying to sell to a buyer that no longer exists

We've spent the last decade or two obsessing over what we sell while choosing to ignore how people actually buy from us. When revenue numbers are tanking, the de facto reaction for many of our businesses out there is to blame plausible external factors, right? The economy is struggling, the industry is in a slump, The competition are outspending us, you know, whatever. We reach for these explanations because they don't require us to look at our own contribution to the current situation, which should probably tell us something. Far less willing to accept that our sales processes were built around a version of the buyer that no longer exists. The person who'd sit through our pitch, you know, be impressed by our track record, our 4 offices, our 300 people. Whatever, you know, and then can they convert after the salesperson would do enough arm-twisting follow-ups. Now that may have been the modus operandi 20 or more years ago, but many of us are still running the same playbook to a buyer that expects more and blaming the market when it doesn't work. You know, think about how much has shifted in how all of us buy things. You know, even personally, what happens? We do our homework, right? We're researching online, maybe seeking out advice from peers, friends. We do all of that well before we engage with the brand directly, right? Often we've already formed opinions before we've even spoken with anyone. By the time we do show up on the brand's radar, we already know more than the salesperson expects us to. The days when salespeople had the informational power passed decades ago, and most sales processes haven't caught up because nobody inside the business has any reason to point it out. One of the reasons why is because sales leadership designed the current process that we've all been following and working around its failings ever since. Marketing shapes its efforts around it. The CRM and RevOps team have been configured to support it. Even salary compensation structures are still architected around archaic frameworks, assumptions, and behaviors that are considered to be still valid. There's a whole operational infrastructure built on the premise that the current approach is fundamentally sound. So questioning that means telling several departments that the thing they've been spending all these years constructing might itself be the issue. Now, nobody wants to have that conversation, so nobody does. Instead, we tinker at the edges. We update the tech stack. We run another training program. We'll forensically scrutinize pipeline metrics with ever-increasing intensity every week. All of this effort gives the illusion of progress, but the underlying logic of how we engage with buyers, what we assume makes someone convert, what they need from us, and well, All that stuff probably hasn't been seriously pressure tested in at least a decade. We're treating the sales acquisition process itself as a single immutable constant that doesn't need examining. Meanwhile, buyers' habits continue to evolve. They've come along, they've had a look at us, and they've decided, "Nah, we're not really worth the effort," and have done all of this before our sales team has even had a conversation with them. I think it's also worth noting how selectively we apply process rigor in the business. The finance department, for example, has to get audited regularly. Yeah, the operations department gets optimized constantly. But the sales methodology? That sort of gets inherited like it's some kind of family heirloom. That's untouchable. Someone built it way back when, Nobody even knows when that was. And it's kind of worked for a while. Well, it was better than anything else we had. And now it just kind of exists, you know, lingering on like a bad smell we can't really get rid of. But if we applied the same scrutiny to our sales process that we applied to our quarterly numbers, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, would we? We'd probably discover that the assumptions baked into it about how buyers evaluate options, how long decisions take, what information matters and when, haven't been validated against actual buyer behavior in years, maybe ever. We're optimizing for a set of conditions that no longer apply and measuring success against benchmarks set when the market looked completely different. I think that's a lot of assumptions going unquestioned. For all of these businesses that claim to be so data-driven, don't you think? Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kickxeno.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.