For sellers today who are part of an account team where you sell a single product like mobility CSEs or a strategic wireline services or fiber CSE your days are numbered the company is looking to go to a single integrated seller model, some of you may recall we tried this 10-12 or so years ago and it fell flat but someone in leadership has presented this as a NEW IDEA and this visionary concept is gaining traction. Time to brush up on those cross solution skills because it’s about to go live before the end of the year in mid markets platinum and will be tested in global business in one of the vertical segments. This is a C- level wet dream, Just think of all the dividends we can pay by cutting the sales orgs headcount by 50%. Woo Hoo
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Wrong. They are in the process of layoff 80% of the salesforce and will be outsourcing nearly all corporate sales to solution providers. The writing has been on the wall for a couple of years now.
I’ve been on both sides of that house twice now and while very capable, I 100% believe this would again be a 24mo total disaster before reversed for a 3rd time.
As the OP said, this has been tried before. Actually a couple times over the past 15yrs. And correct, has always failed badly with large revenue losses, very poor performance results. Very poor customer sat scores too, but we barely cared back then and absolutely do not care about that now.
As Ron Swanson once said, don’t half a$$ multiple things. Whole a$$ one.
Why hasn’t this been implemented before?
Frankly, that’s what the frontline store sellers do everyday. They sell/offer multiple products. Makes sense.
It's basically fiber and cell phones. It's not that complicated. Also diversifying sellers can weed out some of the scammers.
This is a great way to streamline the business. The main problem is that many employees don’t want to learn new aspects of the job or take on additional assignments.
they've tried the same thing in development and that also failed miserably. Create a pool of people who can work on anything so that there's never any idle time. They spend half their time trying to figure out the most recent assignment, sometimes do what's requested and then it gets passed back only for someone else to take it over again to go through the same thing.
Now they are sending things to India so lets see how even more messed up things get when you can't even reach someone during your work hours.
they flip flop between exclusive product selling (and claim they have product selling experts) to sellers who can sell everything (and claim a customer has wants one account rep for everything).
Every time they flip flop, they consider it a game changer and give themselves raises for making such novel changes.