Mastering the Complex Sale
1 May, 2004
By: Dan CoenMastering the Complex Sale
Jeff Thull (John Wiley and Sons, 2003)
If you have spent any time leading a contact center organization or discussing best-practice levels of management and sales, chances are you have come across Jeff Thull’s Mastering the Complex Sale. Over the past two decades, business has discovered that supervising and motivating staff with the expectations of them reaching new levels of performance improvement requires more than a rudimentary knowledge of management 101 skills. It also calls for a deep understanding of motivational skills such as sales and persuasion.
Studies have shown that people act because they believe it is in their best interests to act, and to that end, employees in a contact center will perform when provided the reasons to perform and the tools to do so. Unless a roadmap is presented and a system is in place to meet objectives, call center management and staff cannot reach for great heights. In Mastering the Complex Sale, Thull does a superior job breaking down the different eras of sales management, culminating in today’s Era 3, which focuses on “mutual engagement, understanding the scope and cost of the issues and jointly creating a solution.”
Bottom line: The sales manager is responsible for not only understanding his end goals and what is good for his organization, but also bridging the gap with the end goals of the customer, team members and staff, and what is good for them.
This Era 3 defines what contact center management goes through each day, juggling relationships, finding commonality and driving ahead for mutually beneficial goals.
Throughout the book, Thull asks the reader to embrace the fact that complex sales involves numerous elements, which in the contact center could be defined as the employee, customer, the customers’ customer and peers. Each element needs to be navigated, structured and convinced in different ways. As Thull points out, business today is battling increasing complexity with rapid commoditization, often with complex technology and systems being used to manage routine actions, such as talking to customers and future customers, handling email transactions and dealing with numerous business units.
One of the central themes to Mastering the Complex Sale is the reality that selling is not only about selling, but also about managing quality decisions. In contact center operations, managing the quality decisions can make or break success; consequently call center management is responsible for making and understanding those decisions. How many agents are needed for a particular project? From where should I hire these agents? What questions should I ask? How do I create an impactful training program so they learn everything they need to learn? How do I get my staff to perform, stay motivated and not leave for greener pastures?
Thull makes it clear that sales management has moved from conventional to complex because of the importance of decision making. I would agree, and take it a step further, pointing out that the contact center industry has moved from conventional to complex in merely a decade. The contact center is no longer a vehicle that merely answers calls, takes orders and follows up on leads. It is now a full service direct marketing machine that facilitates relationships—and potential relationships—between staff, customers and future customers. Today’s contact center is truly a sophisticated communication channel, and call center management needs to understand that Mastering the Complex Sale, with clients and with staff, is critical to compete and win in today’s environment.
