How 5G Will Affect Selling

The 5G wave is about to hit, and it’s going to disrupt businesses, industries, even entire economies. Every disruption stirs up new winners and losers, and it will be no different with the selling profession. If you sell anything remotely connected to wireless technology, will you be ready?

What is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology, and it’s much faster than 4G. So much so, that it’s a game-changer, offering 10-100x throughput and 1,000x data volumes.  That kind of performance increase is going to cause a revolution in what can be done with wireless communication, and hence what can be done by businesses to add value to their customers to generate revenues and profits. From self-driving cars to machines talking to each other to mission-critical applications, it doesn’t mean just doing the same things faster and more efficiently, it means being able to do completely different things, a lot of which no one has envisioned yet. It’s like the difference between a flip phone and a smart phone, or even between a typewriter and a computer.

How will it impact business?

Industry evangelists love to compare 5G to transformative General Purpose Technologies such as the steam engine and the internet, which have such a broad impact that they touch every single part of the economy. But even for those who don’t fully buy into the hype, there is a clear consensus among technologists, economists and business executives that it will have transformative effects on many industries, especially automotive, health care and industrial automation.

At the very least, “…industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities,” according to an economic impact analysis conducted by IHS Markit in 2017. But there’s more to it than that. In that study, they surveyed almost 4,000 business executives and 91% “feel that 5G will enable new products and services that have yet to be invented.”

If you think how much your life has changed personally since the introduction of the smart phone you can extrapolate that change to entire industries. Which industries? Only those who sell a product or service that benefits from the exchange and processing of information—and off the top of my head I can’t think of one that doesn’t.

How will it impact selling?

Change brings both promise and peril. That’s because every major new technology creates a race to the top, as sellers bring fresh innovative consultative approaches to create new value. In essence, they will not only help their customers do things differently, but they will also help them to do different things. And that will change the way their customers buy.

But even though 5G technology is new, salespeople have faced the same challenge before. Network providers, for example, went through it when analog phones were first introduced, then again in the transition to digital. The danger is that sales forces that have come of age during stable markets and have developed complacent and reactive selling habits will at best leave a lot of money on the table and at worst lose business to smarter competitors.

New technologies go through a predictable technology adoption life cycle, and what Geoffrey Moore wrote in 1991 holds true today: “the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.”[1]

The reason it’s so perilous is that many sales forces fall by the wayside on the road to the mainstream market because they don’t adapt their approach. Initial sales to visionaries are fairly easy; they love the technology for its own sake and will come knocking at your door to acquire it, but what works with them does not work with the early adopters, who are looking for a strategic leap forward, and the early majority, who seek productivity improvements.

For sales forces, the promise is that at least for a short time the power pendulum will swing back from buyers to sellers. In stable markets, when you’re asking a company to buy more of the same or some incremental improvement, your buyers are at least as well-informed and tuned in as you are, which is why buyers in recent years have gone more than halfway through their buying process before they even contact a salesperson. By the time salespeople get involved, they’re coloring in lines laid down by someone else: expectations are fairly set and competitive advantage rests on small differences and price cuts. But when technology is new and unfamiliar, and there are very few use cases to learn from, salespeople can paint on a blank canvas—but only if they are talking to the right people.

That’s where the peril lies: talking effectively to the right people. The bigger the change, the higher the decision, and the greater the “business” content of the conversation. If you’re asking your buyers to fundamentally change the way they do business, or radically change a strategy, that’s way above the pay grade of the technology buyer or of procurement. Those decisions have to be made, or at least sponsored, at the highest levels of the company, so salespeople must have the comfort level and the skills to play here.

Those who can describe their products in excruciating detail will find that they are speaking in tongues to business-level decision makers who speak the language of finance and strategic impact. They won’t want to sit through long technical discussions, but they do want to know how you can help them through the inevitable uncertainty they’re going to go through. They know that there will be winners and losers, and they will eagerly speak to those who can make sure they’re on the right side of that ledger.

What can you do to prepare?

You can’t sell a strategic leap forward unless you understand your customer’s business and industry deeply enough to recognize at least the broad outlines of their business strategies, and it’s tough to credibly sell productivity improvements without a working knowledge of the language of business and finance. While you may get materials and support from your company’s marketing and sales enablement functions, there is a lot you can do on your own, even if you don’t have an MBA or a degree in finance.

• Start cultivating relationships at higher levels, or at least go outside your technology and procurement comfort zone. Not only is the view better up there, it’s far less crowded. Just be sure you’re talking about their business far more than about your technology.
• Read your customers’ latest 10-Ks and/or annual reports, and check out their quarterly earnings calls to start finding hooks for your new enhanced capabilities.
• While you may not be able to suggest a breakthrough idea they haven’t thought of, at least you should be able to improve the quality of the questions you ask and be able to hold your own in C-Level sales conversations.
• Learn how to read a financial statement, both to know how your customers are doing and to know how your offerings will affect their scorecards. Study the details of their cash flow engines, so you can make a direct connection to productivity improvements based on effectiveness, efficiency, and speed.
• Get familiar with their key financial ratios so you can express productivity improvements in the terms they pay attention to.
• You may not need to do a differential cash flow analysis by yourself, but at least learn the difference between terms such as payback, ROI and NPV.
• Read a book such as Bottom-Line Selling: The Sales Professional’s Guide to Improving Customer Profits.

Although it’s tough to predict how quickly it will happen, you have very little time to lose. Verizon and AT&T have already announced rollouts in selected markets in 2018. There will be a 5G gold rush, and a lot of money will be made by those who are best prepared to stake an early claim with business decision makers. Will you be ready?

[1] Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, p. 5.