Opening up the selling process

Download Ron's new ebook Opening Up the Selling Process (PDF) from our friends at The Open Organization.

In Opening Up the Selling Process, Ron McFarland reflects on more than 30 years training and coaching salespeople and sales managers in the art of selling. He explores how open principles and practices, as well as recent advancements in customer relationship management technologies, have changed how we approach the selling process—and how they don't.

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Upon graduation from a Japanese university, I started working for a major Japanese truck manufacturer. After a few years on the job, the leadership of overseas sales operations learned their customers, the overseas dealership sales staff, were unaware of the vehicles' unique selling points and how those vehicles differed from both previous models and competing products. They weren't presenting that product information to the customers.

So company leadership asked me to develop a product training program for them. While writing those training materials and speaking with employees in the sales department, I learned that they weren't just unfamiliar with the products; they also lacked a basic understanding of the selling process and their daily sales activities. And that led me to create another resource: a manual of activities relevant to selling vehicles.

I started delivering sales seminars to salespeople around the world. And from those seminars, the training material grew even more. Learning of the need for sales management training, I developed a sales management training program for organizational leaders and coaches of salespeople.

I originally wrote that selling process manual and gave my first seminar in Singapore in 1985. Much has changed since then—and yet some things haven't, including the fundamentals of a sound selling process. In this guide, I review that process just as I taught it 40 years ago.

Yet while the selling process might not have changed all that much in many decades, other aspects of organizational life have. Today, forward-thinking organizations are becoming more open. So here I will explore how the open organization principles of transparency, adaptability, collaboration, inclusivity, and community influence the traditional selling process.

And today, Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) technology has matured to offer salesperson assistance in ways that simply weren't possible 40 years ago. So I'll also pay special attention to how modern CRM systems might enhance the selling process, especially in organizational environments that embrace greater openness. In some cases, capabilities I describe are already available today; I've noted them in my research on contemporary CRM. In other cases, my descriptions might be more speculative as I imagine what might be possible with additional application and enhancement. I'll leave this to the current generation of savvy salespeople.

In the end, I'll explain how sales managers can use that process to improve sales performance, especially by leaning into the open organizational principles that are reshaping organizational cultures globally.

A few notes before we begin: I designed this process specifically for selling expensive, durable products that will be in use for years. It is also for salespeople who sell through distribution to retailers or wholesalers with whom you want to build long-term relationships. It is not for everyday goods (like bread), which you can simply discard without much consequence should you be dissatisfied. Furthermore, this process is not only for sales department employees within corporations. They could be manufacturers' representatives, freelance salespeople, or people within open organizations who are trying to satisfy particular customer needs.

I've learned a few new things since 1985, too. In this guide in particular, I'll draw on resources from two books: Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change by Marc Benioff and Monica Langley, and Customer Relationship Management: Transforming Businesses Through Effective Customer Relationship Management by Cassandra M. Cohen.

Let's get started.

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Open Perspectives is a series of short, timely publications featuring voices from a community of experts on open organizational culture, design, and leadership as they explore what they consider the most pertinent and pressing issues facing modern organizations.