In my last article, I mentioned a little-understood problem standing in the way of securing long-term relationships with customers. Based on research done at Kennesaw State University in the metro Atlanta area several years back, it was learned that in B2B markets, buyers were “in the market” much less frequently than historically assumed. “In the market” means actively looking for a supplier. I don’t have the data in front of me, but I recall the cycle of using the same supplier was around two years on average. When in the market, the average time before a new supplier was found or the current one recommitted was less than a month. The rest of the time in the two-year cycle, the typical buyer was not looking, and not entertaining thoughts of changing unless something disruptive in the current relationship changed. (Keep in mind this was not a survey of printers. However, at the time I was doing a lot of work for Thought Transformation and Linda Bishop and I both thought the results of the survey resonated with the reality we were seeing with clients.)

I hope that gives the reader pause. It did for me. When I was running companies I was always interested in what my salespeople were up to. They were too expensive for me not to know. In retrospect, how much of what they did on a daily basis accomplished something that led to new business? How many prospects were they chasing that never responded? How many times have you heard that a great account had just switched printers and you weren’t even quoting? Ouch! The message here is two-sided. One, if this research is valid and it probably is, much of the activity we have pushed salespeople to persist with for years would yield the marginal gains people seemed to be experiencing. Two, if anything was accomplished it was that the customer became aware we were there. Aren’t there better ways to do that?

As I started writing this article I thought of something else that seems to be a universal phenomenon. Why is there such a large spread in the output (annual sales) of salespeople in the typical company? It is not unusual to find a company where the leader outsells the rest of the salesforce combined. I’ve seen a $15M company with 12 reps and three of them outsold everyone else combined. Why is this? Well, it’s not hard to come up with a couple dozen reasons that sound plausible. The reason I think is truer than the others is two-fold: