Is Your Firm Doomed to be Second Rate?
Last month I had an interesting conversation with Howard Stevens, the CEO of the HR Chally Group. Every year or so, he conducts an exhaustive survey of tens of thousands of customers and buyers to determine which of 7,300 sales organizations customers actually prefer to buy from. Occasionally, when a company emerges prominently from the pack, Chally gives them a sales excellence awa...rd.
Unlike a lot of so-called “market research,” the Chally awards are the real deal. The research is done without preconceptions about who might win and, in most cases, the first time the winners even hear about the award is when they get a call from Howard telling them that they’ve won. (I know this because I've talked to past winners.)
In the fourteen years that Chally has been giving these awards, only 21 sales organizations have been honored. In the past, the list included the usual suspects (IBM, John Deere, DuPont, Exxon, yada, yada.). However, this year a completely different pattern emerged. The four winners were:
- Applied Industrial Technologies (a distributor of industrial products)
- Corporate Express (a distributor of office supplies)
- Global Imaging Systems (a distributor of copying solutions)
- Insight Enterprises (a computer systems integrator).
Notice something odd about the list – other than that all four are relatively obscure? Look closely. None of them design or make their own products. They just sell things that other companies build.
What gives? Why do customers love these guys so much?
It’s all about focus.
According to Howard, today’s selling environment has changed so dramatically, and the demands on the sales force have become so overwhelming, that "world class selling" (as he calls it) is only possible inside companies that outsource most, if not all, elements of their business that aren’t customer-facing.
The trend is so pronounced in the research that Howard believes that it may not be possible to have a truly “world class” sales team inside any firm that’s also deeply involved in manufacturing, engineering or finance. In other words, unless your firm is focusing almost entirely on sales, you're doomed to be second rate.
Now, I’m not saying that Howard is right, but we’re talking real research here.
I’m curious what you guys think.