This week’s theme is not about trying to balance between business and personal when it comes to sales. It’s about the fact that it must be personal. Sales is about one person helping another person.

If your potential customer’s just want business in a transaction, they will order online or do whatever they can to forgo the hassle of dealing with a salesperson. Amazon, online retailers, and even car vending machines have shown what happens when you let consumers make the decision between business (and convenience, on their terms) and personal.

Where Is Your Focus?

Now, for the sales operation builders, managers, and leaders, the question is: what is the focus of your processes, systems, and technology?

I would bet it’s very biased towards the business end of the spectrum.

Very few email/marketing automation programs are actually about the person who is reading the email. They are focused on sending emails at scale. You might have your ICP dialed in and some level of a personal-like feeling to the email. But it’s probably still written about you and with the intention of getting them to want to do business with you, not to start a relationship or conversation.

CRMs: Built for Business, Not the Buying Journey

Very few CRMs are built with the prospective customer’s buying journey in mind. The pipeline, stages, and dispositions are built for how you want to manage your sales business.

Very few phone systems, inbound or outbound, and teams are focused on the personal aspect of sales. They are focused on the business goals and KPIs. They are driven to qualify someone and then move them through the process, potentially with little regard for what that person truly wants or needs, but more about either “playing the numbers game” or selling to “product market fit” and not actual wants and needs.

Very few compensation plans, company cultures, training programs, leadership development, gamification platforms, and the other parts of a successful sales operation are built with the person in mind.

It’s more about getting the prospect to fit into the rules of the game that are built for a sales team – from the ops to the sales process to the communication channels.

If your leadership is telling your salespeople to make it personal but the 24 categories of the Scalable Sales Success Iceberg [https://www.sellingeffectiveness.com/for-sales-leaders] are not in alignment with that, it will never actually work out the way you are coaching them to be.

Since there are so many tools, technologies, systems, and processes involved – too many for us to go through one at a time in this conversation – let me share the best thing you can do: Go through the process as a potential customer. It’s really that simple.

Mystery Shop Your Own Company

Go to your business’s website and read it like you were a customer, not an employee. See if it speaks to you as a person or is it filled with self-promotional talk, logos, and stats about how amazing your company is?

Then fill out the form as a lead and see what happens.

Then call the number on the site and see what happens.

Then go through the sales conversations like a customer (Undercover Boss mode so they don’t know who you are) – through the whole process and see how it feels.

If you have a physical location, go in as a new prospective customer. Mystery shop your own company with the focus on seeing how personal it really is.

As you read the automated follow-up email you will get, does that make you feel like your company cares about you?

Your mission and discovery process is simple. The solutions are more complicated. And when in doubt, you can also ask your customers and non-customers. The people who didn’t buy from you are always a wealth of feedback on their Sales Experience.

Conclusion

Remember – all that matters is the Sales Experience. And you must make sure it’s personal.