Is Your Sales Force Ready for Disruptive Change?

New technologies always change the way things are done in some way, but there are some technologies such as 5G that provide such a quantum leap in performance they can totally disrupt the ways your customers currently do things.  If you want to keep up, or even better, get ahead of the change, you need to be an expert in exactly how they do things, what may change, and what that will mean to them.

By definition, technology is the application of knowledge for practical purposes. The “practical purposes” that your customers care about are the processes that they use to add value to their customers, and new technologies can affect those processes in three ways. I’ve used examples from health care to make the point, but you can probably substitute almost any industry:

• Improve: take a current process and speed it up, reduce the error rate, raise uptime, etc. In healthcare, for example, 5G can offload computing power from portable medical devices to the cloud, making them cheaper and improving their battery life.
• Change: change the current process in some fundamental way. Ultra-low latency can enable surgery to take place without having the doctor and patient in the same location.
• Replace: enable totally new processes. In health care, predictions are that the share of spending will shift from treatment to prevention, diagnosis and monitoring. These are the hardest to predict. Who knew that digital photography would spawn selfie sticks and Instagram?

As you move up this pyramid, value to the customer increases, but so does the complexity of your sales process. That’s why you should start preparing now to improve, change or replace your own processes—your sales processes.

Here are some question you should start thinking about:

What processes do your customers use to serve their customers and differentiate themselves?

What improvements will you be able to make? How will that affect the quantity and quality of outputs? How will it affect the various inputs into the process? How much time will be saved?

How will those processes change? People taken out of the equation, faster, more reliable, fewer mistakes, new capabilities, etc.

What new processes will the technology enable? What new capabilities will they have?

How will any or all of these changes affect their revenues, costs, and asset investment requirements?

What risks will they face?

What potential unintended consequences do they need to prepare for?

What will those cost them?

What obstacles will they encounter trying to upgrade their processes? Who will be the new/different problem owners? What will they care about? How are they measured?

Who will be most likely to resist the necessary change?

How will your competition (players, differentiators, and strategies) change, and what will you do about it?

What selling skills will you need to learn, develop or reinforce to be able to adapt your sales approach?

I don’t expect that you will know the answers to all or even a majority of these questions, but the sooner you start asking them, the better off you will be when the change starts to happen. And it’s coming soon! In that spirit, I will leave you with one final question:

Will you be a disrupter or a disruptee?