I’m excited to introduce this blog series with the Bluewolf team.

Over the past year we have discussed all the innovation happening in the sales world—new technologies, shifting consumer trends, and evolving selling methods. One of the most important of these trends has been the rise of customer engagement as the new bottom line for companies. Sales plays an essential role in customer interactions, so we asked ourselves: “How can we inspire and equip the sales world to be even more customer obsessed?”

For global businesses, customer engagement has quickly become the #1 priority for driving growth. In a recent study by IBM, 90% of CEOs cite customer engagement as their primary initiative. Today’s buyer is more informed than ever and has little patience with sales reps telling them what they already know. Sales reps must become trusted advisors to their customers, forging relationships, not closing one-off deals. Business processes and technologies must be recast through the lens of customer obsession. 

The goal of this blog series is to provide practical advice you can immediately apply to your sales process. Here are three ways you can ignite and sustain a customer-obsessed transformation in your sales team: 

1. Make it stick 
2. Inspire learning  
3. Measure it 

Make it stick

Often when I meet with sales leaders to discuss their process the conversation jumps too quickly to tactics, skipping past their sales values. Having a set of well-articulated sales values helps make any organizational changes stick. When done right, they become part of your culture and sales DNA. They come to life when salespeople embrace them. In this series, we’ll address real world examples of customer-obsessed sales and ways to drive customer obsession, from sales values to actual processes. This discussion is an important precursor to any sales transformation. 

Inspire Learning

With customer obsession infused in the sales culture, next step is to scale, which is reached through learning and best-practice sharing programs. Arm your sales teams with the tools and conversations to share customer stories with each other and ultimately with your customers. Teach your sales team how important it is to lead with customer stories. Build an onboarding program that is grounded in customer obsession. Train your sales teams to always put customer value as a top priority.  

Measure It

Finally, build the right cadence and empower first-line sales managers with the metrics, reports, and dashboards they need (and expect) to make customer obsession a reality. What are your customer metrics? How universally known are they? Do your sales managers talk about them in their weekly team meetings and sales huddles? Sales managers are where the proverbial rubber meets the road. It starts with them. They are your ultimate leaders to affect change.  

I’m excited to be able to share ideas and a conversation around customer obsession in the sales world. The benefits are clear. Our aim is to provide you with a roadmap to get there.  

In our next blog post we will focus on sales values and process and how to make customer obsession stick.

Bluewolf and Elay Cohen, the former SVP of Productivity at salesforce.com have teamed up to tackle the ins and outs of Sales productivity. See how you can make your Sales team more productive in our new guide, The Changing Role of Sales.