As “doer-sellers,” professional services partners are responsible for not just delivering services but also the entire business-development process. As “rainmakers,” they must build awareness of their expertise in the market to generate demand, identify and close new client business, deliver the work to the client, and then renew and expand the relationship over time.

For decades, salespeople have been taught that there is only one possible reason for lost sales: that salespeople have failed to defeat the customer’s status quo. Perhaps the customer doesn’t fully appreciate the problem that their solution is designed to solve. Or maybe they don’t yet see enough daylight between their company’s solution and that of the competition.

Particularly during the pandemic, when face-to-face visits with customers have been constrained, inbound selling in calls centers has become more important to company revenue. New research uses recordings of millions of such calls, analyzes the way salespeople drive the conversation, and record whether the call results in a sale.

To better understand the impact of this crisis on customer service departments, our team at Tethr (an AI and machine learning venture) recently completed a study of roughly 1 million customer-service calls involving more than 20 companies representing a broad cross-section of industries. All of these calls took place between March 11, when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO, and March 26.

Customer service jobs are notoriously joyless, and callers’ experiences with reps can be just as unsatisfying. But T-Mobile has a new operating model that’s making both employees and customers happier.

In almost every company, the contact center typically features row upon row of workstations, with reps at each station—headsets on and heads down—going through the same scripted, robotic interactions with each and every customer.

Practitioners and pundits alike have long debated which metric is best for assessing the performance of a service organization. Is the silver bullet customer satisfaction, net promoter score, customer effort score, or some other measure?

New research shows that there might be an unexpected reason why some potential purchasers sit on the fence rather than commit.

Why are consumers increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of help they get from customer service departments? The authors’ surveys and interviews with contact center personnel worldwide suggest that companies don’t hire the right people as frontline reps, nor do they equip them to handle the increasingly complex challenges that come with the job.

In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers’ needs and selling them “solutions.” This worked because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems. But the world of B2B selling has changed: Companies today can readily define their own solutions and force suppliers into a price-driven bake-off.

Our article in the current issue of HBR, “The End of Solution Sales,” has created quite a stir among B2B sales professionals and pundits alike. While supporters see a fresh and accurate articulation of current challenges facing the profession — some even suggesting that we didn’t go far enough in declaring the end of the solution sales approach — detractors accuse us of everything from academic arrogance, to misrepresentation of current sales approaches, to cynical link baiting.

The phone rings at your desk — it’s a big potential customer and they want you to come in and make a presentation. They have budget approval and consensus, up to the highest levels of the organization, to move forward on a major purchase. Their specs line up perfectly with what your company can deliver. And, you’re on the customer’s shortlist — they’ve narrowed it down to you and two of your biggest competitors.

The fourth article in a four-article series. Read the first, second, and third entries.

The third article in a four-article series. Read the first, second, and fourth entries in the series.

The second article in a four-article series. Read the first, third, and fourth entries.

The first article in a four-article series. Read the second, third, and fourth entries.

Every leader knows that the compensation plan plays an important role in recruiting and retaining the best talent. But what these executives often don’t realize is that how they communicate about pay can be as important as the plan itself.

Most sales and service organizations have invested more time and effort in the past five years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous 50. This makes perfect sense: research by the Sales Executive Council shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving reps’ performance.ere

The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But a study of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using self-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make little difference: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem.