Keep on learning… to be successful

30th September 2024 |   Simon Kelly, Dr Paul Johnston and Stacey Danheiser

Learning is not just important; it’s essential for success in sales.

When we saw the headline on the cover of this Journal (edition 9.5) “Do Salespeople Have Time to Learn” we were left with a massive feeling of déjà vu and drifted towards a discussion of what was top of the pop charts when we first heard that said. Thankfully, the focus of the Journal was to draw out the importance of learning, which we would also like to weigh in on.

In global research we conducted for our book Standout Marketing: How to differentiate your organization in a Sea of Sameness, we set out five key competencies that sales professionals need to help differentiate their organization: Visionary, Activator, Learner, Usefulness and Evaluator (Figure 1).

In an era where customers increasingly look for vendors and partners who can provide value to them, learning is a critical competency if you want to truly stand out as a seller.

Why salespeople need to be constantly learning

It should be no surprise that learning is seen by global sales leaders as a core competency to create value for the customer and their own organisations in a world where the only constant is change.

To convince a customer of the need to buy, or to get them to change what they’ve already got is not a trivial task.

B2B buying behaviour has changed a lot in recent years. Many B2B buyers are 70% of the way through the buying cycle before they engage with a seller, which equates to roughly eight months in a typical deal (6sense 2023). We also know that the size of the typical buying centre is growing, and for any significant deal there are likely to be six to ten people involved in decision-making (Gartner 2019).

I think learning is hugely important in global business. Everything is constantly changing. So, you really have to be in that learning mindset.” – Christine, VP of Marketing.

So, when you do get to see customers, they are increasingly likely to want someone who can connect the dots between the problems each department faces, and the solutions you can provide.

On top of this, buyers want more personalized solutions and interactions and have had enough of wasting their time with vendors that don’t learn about their business. In fact, LinkedIn reports that 56% of buyers will consider a brand if the sales professional understands their business needs.

This means, the more you learn and understand about your customers, the more likely you can position yourself as an expert dedicated to adding value through relevant content, insights, and trends.

The effort pays off, as 88% of buyers prefer to work with sellers they perceive as trusted advisers, which means actively listening to the buyer’s specific challenges and crafting solutions that help them achieve their goals (LinkedIn).

Ultimately, your ability as a seller to uncover, communicate and deliver customer value is what determines your success.

Four critical areas to learn

Now that we’ve established the importance of learning in the context of presenting value to your customers, you may be wondering: what should I learn?

To have a standout value proposition you need to have a deep understanding in four main areas: Markets, Customers, Competitors, and you’re your own company (Figure 2):

Alarmingly, many of the B2B companies we work with say they do not know enough in at least one of these areas. Worse, some even admit to skipping customer research altogether, or don’t have any mechanism for making sense of all the intelligence that comes back from sales meetings with customers.

Here are a set of questions you could ask yourself to test how much you need to learn in these four key areas (see Figure 3 ):

Three strategies to excel at learning

As with most things in life, specific focus and attention is key, so here are three strategies for learning.

Strategy 1 – Adopt an “always be learning” mindset

Instead of thinking about what you want to sell, start thinking about why your customer would buy your solution and what problem it will solve.

Malcom Knowles (1980) talks of people in the context of learning as either:

• Dogmatic (pushy) – “This is how it is and this is what I’m going to tell you what you must know,” and
• Reconciliatory (builds bridges) – “Let’s try and understand how to work together.”

In other words, don’t assume you have all the answers. Adopt a curious mindset which will allow you to dive deeper and ask questions.

Strategy 2 – Prioritize learning

“We’re all a bit too busy trying to sell and make our numbers to focus time on learning.” That’s always been the ultimate get-out for sales.

Jeff, a Business Unit President at a global professional services firm, sums it up: “I think learning is important. It just gets deprioritized.”

You’ve probably experienced firsthand what Jeff is saying. You may have several projects to juggle at once, a growing list of “to dos” and internal demands from your peers that get in the way of learning. But the reality is: you have to take personal responsibility for your learning and growth.

Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary” (W Edwards Deming) …. Or is it?

Best-selling author Mandy Hale (2022) said it best: “Too busy is a myth. People make time for the things that are really important to them.”

If you need an extra incentive to make time to learn, here it is: 90% of C-Suite executive don’t respond to impersonal B2B sales (LinkedIn). Taking the time to understand your customers, their industry and the overall market is the only way to become a credible resource with a much higher response rate from valuable prospects.

Learning can come in a variety of flavours. Whether you like to read, watch videos, sign up for courses, listen to podcasts, or get hands-on, there is an option for everyone.

Strategy 3 – Embrace double-loop learning

Good learners use a practice called double-loop learning, (Argyris and Schon 1978), which helps identify the underlying causes of problems, not just the symptoms.

Let’s say you keep losing deals you bid for in the manufacturing sector. On the surface, you may blame “high prices” for losing. But with double-loop learning, you would dig deeper, looking for patterns. If you keep asking yourself why things are happening, you will get to the root cause:

• Why do we keep losing deals in manufacturing?
• We submit RFPs but get the same response: “Your price is too high.”
• Why do prospects think our prices too high? We are a new entrant to the market and customers thought we would be cheaper.
• Why would they think we’d be cheaper? Because we told them we can help them cut costs.
• Why did we tell them that? Most of our messaging and marketing/ sales content is all about how we can help control your costs and save you money.
• Why are we still going to market with a cost-savings message? Because we haven’t updated our value proposition since the pandemic in 2020.

If you embrace double-loop learning you’re much more likely to discover the root cause for losing bids, and adapt your approach to win more often.

Promote learning – learning promotes

So, back in 1995 when Celine Dion was top of the charts with “Think Twice”, and salespeople “Didn’t have time to learn”, an insightful sales leader colleague, Colin Mattey, hired a new guy onto one of his account teams with an eye to getting higher and wider in the account.

The new business development hire, Ian Hamilton, then proceeded to tell his assembled new colleagues: “Don’t contact me on a Thursday; all I do is read.” Everyone looked aghast, and wondered how Ian could assign that time to learning. Of course, during that time, Ian developed new insights to take to customers based on what he could see coming down the tracks. Today, it could well be related to AI; back in 1995 it was probably something called the internet!

Colin himself read widely, which helped him engage in peer-to-peer dialogue with board-level contacts. Back in 1995 it may have been a conversation based around Hamel and Prahalad’s seminal book Competing for the Future.

That thirst for learning helped the account teams get higher and wider, and was a key reason why Colin rose to become a CEO of the large tech company. The reading truly did help Colin and his teams stand out.

Finally… don’t forget… forgetting

Hopefully, we have given you some focus and direction for learning; ultimately, its up to you to make it happen.

And don’t forget: if you don’t act on learning or provide coaching to your sales teams, they will soon forget. You may have heard of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus 1885). German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus found that the brain starts losing knowledge over time. Within the first month, our brains forget 90% of the recently acquired knowledge that we’ve learned!

So, keep on learning, and coaching to grow as an individual… to standout with the customer… and be a more successful salesperson.