In business software, everything in sales has changed so the future is collaborative and customer-centric
The switch away from on-premises IT to cloud computing has been profound in many ways, both technically and in business terms. We consume IT differently, pay for it differently and manage it differently. But what has been less remarked upon is that the cloud transition also fundamentally changed the way that IT vendors sell and relate to customers.
In the days before cloud became popular, on-prem enterprise software selling was essentially a transactional market. A company would sell a software product and walk away until the expiration of the licence, returning only when it was time to talk about renewal terms. Often it was hard for customers to walk away and they felt locked into a supplier that had no time to listen to them. Cloud brought about a power shift because it was easier for customers to swap out suppliers, so those suppliers needed to work harder for their money.
Coincidentally, at the same time as the cloud was on the rise, we gained greater visibility into suppliers. Everyone could Google suppliers and compare notes online on customer service. That meant that public relations, marketing and communications became more important. Enterprise software could no longer be about the hard sell because much of the decision-making was conducted before vendor negotiations. Often, sales people were acting as superannuated order takers. Today, software selling has had to become more about customer understanding, the service ethos and soft skills.
New sales, new skills
Progressive software companies are looking for sales people who ‘get’ what customers need and want, who listen rather than preach, and who feed back into the organisation about what is going right and wrong.
Today, the best sales people aren’t bulldogs or rottweilers gnawing at the sales incentive bone; they are naturally curious, instinctively collaborative and wanting to help. Being an account manager is tougher than ever and cannot be an 8am-5pm. Order-taking machines are no longer valued and I’m not just looking for ‘closers’ who can seal a deal because to succeed in modern software requires people with a high emotional quotient and intelligence.
The sweet smell of success
Customer success management has become an essential aspect of any software organisation. Software companies need to partner with customers, pointing them to ways to make optimal use of tools and nudging them towards better practices. A new KPI has emerged: if customers are successful then vendors will be successful too because adoption is viral and stories with happy outcomes get shared.
The move towards annual recurring revenue as the critical success indicator, above and beyond perpetual licences, has also moved the needle. That change of emphasis has meant that customer satisfaction and utilisation is more critical than ever because software vendor success is measured as much or more on customer retention and wallet share growth than new logos.
It also changes internal structures and activities. We are investing more than ever in account-based marketing and demand-gen because the pre-channel has to be really effective. We need to personalise offers without being creepy or invasive and go further to understand what turns customers on and off.
External relations are important too and we have to work with other vendors as partners rather than being all-out enemies because that‘s what customers need us to do in order to be successful. The old coarser software world has been sanded down and softened as the sales prism gets viewed through the lens of ‘how do we make customers happy?’ and ‘how can we help?’, not ‘what can we sell?’.
Everything in software selling has changed. Our people need to get used to new ways of working, new competencies, learn new skills and understand new definitions of what success looks like. We need them to be participative, federated, consultative and culturally attuned. We also need them to be long-term thinkers rather than productive robots ticking off short-term projects. AI will make this even more the case over time as chores become automated and analytical insights become easier to unpick.
Like any major change, this is a journey, not a quick fix but we can already certainly point to some milestone discoveries:
Hiring has changed. We can’t rely on a decent product, execution, raw energy and financial compensation as our only sales tools.
Collaboration is key. We need to get sales and marketing working more closely together and we need to have product development teams understand feedback.
Personalisation is here. The sheer volume of data and new tools let us really understand customer actions and passions via a single customer view so we can focus more on individual needs rather than broad categories.
Let the bots do the grunt work. AI means we can liberate our people from dull chores and give them a chance to be more creative and customer-facing, so we need to use the new tools to do just that.
Of course, some of the fundamentals remain, not least the ultimate skill (and it is a skill) of being able to persuade a client to sign on a dotted line. But software selling has changed and for the better. The earlier vendors see that change and overhaul bad habits accreted over decades, the better it will be for customers… and for the vendors themselves.
About the Author
Johan Reventberg is chief revenue officer of operational and planning cloud software company Unit4. He also serves as a non-executive board member and family representative for Kockska Stiftelserna, a group of foundations that support the arts, medical research and elderly housing funding.
Unit4’s next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions power many of the world’s mid-market organizations, bringing together the capabilities of Financials, Procurement, Project Management, HR, and FP&A to share real-time information, and deliver greater insights to help organizations become more effective. By combining our mid-market expertise with a relentless focus on people, we’ve built flexible solutions to meet customers’ unique and changing needs. Unit4 serves more than 5,100 customers globally across a number of sectors including professional services, nonprofit and public sector, with customers including Southampton City Council, Metro Vancouver, Buro Happold, Devoteam, Save the Children International, Global Green Growth Institute and Oxfam America. For further information visit www.unit4.com. For more information, please visit https://www.unit4.com/, follow us on Twitter @Unit4global, Facebook: Unit4 Business Software, Instagram: @unit4global or visit our YouTube: Unit4 and LinkedIn page
