If you are in Consumer Product Goods, your world has been turned upside down with stores and establishment closures, and permanently changing consumer preferences and behaviors.
Devin Long, former leader for sales enablement and transformation at Heineken USA and I explored his Digital Selling vision as he dished advice on where to best begin, how to set a vision, key sales tech components, how to gather executive and field support, and how to measure and prove success. Here are a few key insights from our conversation:
“Some of the positive things that have come out of this (the covid crisis) I think really come from what I call this unexpected Work-From-Home experience or experiment that many companies are going through right now. It’s been forced upon them. It’s a forced sampling. And the reality is some of the good things about it is some of the barriers of entry to people jumping board to a digital selling environment, som of the barriers of entry are disappearing. They’re starting to fall away. Senior leaders are becoming much more comfortable with technology and much more comfortable with work-from-home. They’re starting to see and touch and feel ‘You know, I can I can still get things done, I can still communicate. We can still have a community and a culture.’ …”
“For us in the beverage/alcohol space, or the ‘Beer Business’, narrowly, if you want to talk about it that way… This is a tier system. You have manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers. So, we have that middle tier of independently owned wholesalers that are there, and when you look at the beer business historically, it hasn’t had a tremendous amount of evolution. The last big evolution was tech driven, and it came from this thing that was affectionately known as ‘The Brick’. The Brick was a hand held terminal from a company called Norand, and the Norand Brick, that technology completely changed the three tier system, where the wholesaler network went from pedal, where a guy went to his truck, he did all the selling, he did all the merchandising, he built the displays, took inventory, everything. And that technology allowed it to split to what we know today as pre-sell, where you’ve got. Salesman out there who’s an expert salesman, and all he does is sell, and he’s specialized, and then a delivery truck pulls up the next day and he delivers the merchandise… That’s the last real evolution that we’ve seen…”
Check out the full episode here! https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ujTPEc9nC3TTDhzLbzuid
We can do this, people!
Keep evolving, EVOLVERS!
Until next time…
#salesenablement #digitaltransformation #digitalselling #remoteselling
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