The sales function is changing. Traditional process-laden sales models are becoming obsolete. Increasingly, sales professionals are required to exercise agility, flexibility, and a deeper understanding of the customer to win sales and grow their businesses. In HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Sales, some of the world’s most astute sales experts offer insights into this new sales environment and how sales professionals can adopt new behaviors and business models to succeed in today’s dynamic marketplace.
Companies waste millions of dollars on behavior-based training programs that fail to deliver long-term results. Individuals embark on self-improvement initiatives, then revert to previous self-destructive patterns. Why? Because there is a missing piece in these efforts—an understanding of the relationship between needs, beliefs, behaviors, and results. In You Are What You Believe, behavioral change expert Hyrum W. Smith presents the Reality Model—a method for exploring the interaction between needs, beliefs, behaviors, and results to drive substantive, long-term, self-driven behavioral change for the better.
In Mobilized, SC Moatti outlines the path of mobile products from their inception in the early 2000s to now. Her journey to understand how companies harnessed success in the mobile age began with a desire to determine whether a business plan formula existed. When she discovered that there was no such thing, she set out to create one that would help businesses succeed in the mobile economy. The Mobile Formula applies three rules of personalization that the mobile era demands—the Body Rule, the Spirit Rule, and the Mind Rule. Gone are the days of an industry mindset where mass production and scale were dominant. To succeed on the mobile stage, companies must consider how to amplify their customers’ humanity by making a commitment to personalization. Companies that do not adopt this approach will find that access to customers and their data will become increasingly harder to harness, and they will have to rely on old methods for customer reach and development.
