Adapting to the World of Selling

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>> Hi, my name is inaudible. Today we explore how the selling world has changed and how you can adapt to it. We have an expert here. Massood Zarrabian is the CEO of OutStart. Welcome, Massood.

>> Thank you.

>> You have been in this country since 1966. And you probably have seen a lot of changes. What is the number one most fundamental change you have seen and how it has influenced the world of selling.

>> Well, I think the most and the biggest change I've seen has happened or appeared in the past five or six years in the world of selling. If you look at internet and what internet has done is basically taken a lot of control for differentiation away from account executives and sales people. A lot of information that used to be confidential and shared by sales people all of a sudden became available.

>> To everybody.

>> To everybody. The white papers are there, the analysis reports are there. There is a lot of information available about the products and companies now. So buyers now actually qualify themselves before they even talk to you. So now the question becomes how do you interact with that prospect through the process, and depending how long it takes, and they are more in control than you are.

>> And every customer comes with a different level of knowledge, depending on how much work they have done.

>> Exactly right. And therefore, you know, I read someplace that somebody was referring to sales as the ultimate knowledge warriors. Because that's what they are, right?

>> Right.

>> At the end of it, the winning or losing on their behalf is going to get done by how good they are and how responsive they are and how they can pick up all of this miniature knowledge now. Not documents or not presentations. The miniature knowledge connected to show there in a sentence or paragraph that makes it relate back to the customer's need, not knowing where they are in the process, right?

>> Right.

>> So it's very difficult now to give people, you know, something that they say at the step three. Because you don't know if you're a step three or a step five or a step six. And that change, basically, says unless the sales people in this changing world are always on top of their game and information, that they're going to fail.

>> Right. And I think, upon my interruption, I think a sales person has three roles. They need to find the information much faster than ever before. Secondly, they need to customize that information for the individual customer. And they need to do it in a way that it really energizes the customer and makes them want to move forward in the process.

>> That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And if you look at a solid study that says, yes, finding the information is 20 to 50% of their time.

>> Yes.

>> Now, independent of efficiency issue here, if it takes 20, 50% of your time, think about it. The customer is waiting. If I was competing with you and I got there faster than you by a day, I have differentiated myself.

>> Totally. So it's all about speed and accuracy of the information and development of the information in the situation.

>> That's exactly right.

>> So you have built a system that allows sales people to navigate through their knowledge huge databank out there and just extract what they need in order to move the process forward.

>> That's correct. If we build one that does that, we have also enabled it so if you have formal training and you want inaudible delivered, that it can do that too. So it's a planted environment of knowledge.

>> So what advice would you give to sales people just starting out right now? And obviously there are more technologies, and we'll embrace the technology. But on the other hand, we need to educate those sales people to adopt a mindset that embraces adaptation on an ongoing basis. How do we do that?

>> That's correct. I think some of that is a technology problem and some of that is a support problem. So from a technology problem, the vendors need to make it so the system fits their existing environment.

>> Right.

>> Because if there's something else they have to go do and have to get up and go to a third floor, if it's not natural for them, you're going to have inaudible. So our system allows you to use the national tools we use, including IM.

>> But what about the mindset?

>> The mindset one, the best examples I've seen in the mindset one is when the leadership itself starts using system. When the leadership tells people that from now on, all those questions you have for me, through e-mail, will have to go through a system, and I will respond to you immediately through the system. Others will follow. This is a great example of success I've seen in high-tech. The second example I've seen that's been this successful is when presales engineers have turned around and realized how much more efficient they would become.

>> My insight from what you said is that ideas change technology. Technology changes the way we do business.

>> Yes.

>> And change drives us all crazy.

>> That's true, too.

Inaudible

>> Massood, I want to thank you. It was very interesting information. And if you'd like to learn more, go to outstart.com

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====