Built to sell products, asked to sell transformation

The problem

The deck puts it bluntly. The division had not prepared for selling enterprise-wide transformation because of its product-oriented way of selling. Salespeople knew the products. What none of them had was a repeatable way to research a customer’s strategy, digital maturity and operating priorities before the first conversation, so every meeting started from whatever that individual happened to know.

The gap was sharpest in where the company already sells. Its coverage runs from operational technology up to single site solutions, at the level of one product. The space it wanted was the other end of both axes, multi-site and enterprise-wide, for customers already running a transformation programme. Between the two sits a conversation nobody was equipped to have.

Closing that meant researching customers the team already sells to, testing a draft method on live calls, and revising it with the people who have to use it. Several weeks of undivided attention, which a working sales organisation does not have spare.

Two buyers, two different conversations

The sprint’s central move was to stop treating customers as one audience. Two archetypes came out of the customer work, and they need opposite approaches. With a transformation seeker you are selling the solution, because they have already decided digitalisation matters and are investing in it. With a traditionalist you are selling the need, because they do not yet see digitalisation as a route to scale or efficiency at all.

That distinction changes who you ask for, and in what order. For a transformation seeker the first meeting is with a sales or operations director and the second with a chief digital or technology officer. For a traditionalist the first meeting is with the chief executive, and it starts with their improvement agenda rather than with any product.

What was handed over

A five step research routine to run before any first meeting: the customer’s vision and mission and how digital sits inside it, their stated financial objectives and KPIs, how they are organised and whether anyone owns digital, what they have already done and with whom, and finally a maturity ranking that places them as one archetype or the other.

A player map connecting nine customer KPIs to the five executives who own them, so a salesperson knows which number matters to whoever is across the table. Revenue and cost sit with the chief executive. Adoption rate of a new solution sits with the digital and IT lead. Tonnes produced and operating expenditure sit with manufacturing. Preventive against corrective maintenance, unplanned stoppages, overall equipment effectiveness and capacity utilisation sit with the people running the plant.

Then a six stage framework from desk research through to customer assurance, and two meeting playbooks, one per archetype. It is a method, and this page does not claim a result, because the engagement did not produce one and the deck records none.