Transforming sales: business-to-business value co-creation. How organizations and people collaborate, learn, co-create value, and develop ‘fit for the future’ sales professionals

Disruptive forces, technology, new players and dynamic shifts in how companies buy, and sell are threatening incumbent industry leaders and traditional business models. To survive and thrive in future, companies will need to transform how they go-to-market, shift mindsets, and develop new capabilities for how they sell and engage customers to co-create value.

Drawing on almost eighty years combined experience and consultancy in sales and marketing, across industries and geographies, our public works represent a body of knowledge developed through research and real-world application of our methodologies and principles. These public works illustrate the tools we have used to shape how companies engage with and sell to their customers.

This Context Statement critically explores how we have engaged with clients and applied frameworks, principles, and tools across the go-to-market continuum of relevance, strategic/value selling, co-creation, and organizational transformation. It evaluates the impact of these works on how leading companies, such as 3M, Abbott, Cisco Systems, General Mills, Medtronic, and Johnson & Johnson sell to, and engage with their customers, and outlines the ways in which these companies have transformed how they go-to-market, evolving from a transactional supplier-buyer model focused on product features and price, to co-creating differentiating value beyond-the-product both for their customers and for their customer’s customers.

Two lenses are applied to interrogate and re-examine our public works:
• Character Science: An individual’s unique combination of beliefs and character habits that motivate and shape how they relate to others. This lens builds on the research of Dr. Fred Kiel.
• Mindsets: Specifically, the sales mindsets that influence how salespeople think and behave. This lens draws on the work of Dr. Philip Squire.

These two lenses reveal the importance of transformational selling fluencies, behaviors and capabilities that will enable sales, business-to-business value creation, learning, and relevance in the future, in the fourth era of selling – and highlight a glaring gap in how these capabilities are developed today to enable.

• Customer-centric organizational transformation
• Learning and development transformation integrating both horizontal process/skills and vertical acumens.
• Personal transformation that enhances the value and well-being of sales people, increasingly threatened by the forces of technology, complexity, and commoditization in the marketplace.

Finally, this Context Statement describes the integrated Return on Character® Value Chain for Sales, a hypothesis for the sales fluencies of the future – the next generation of sales mindsets, skillsets and behaviors that will enable companies and sales people to continue to enhance how they go-to-market, co-create value with customers, and professionalize selling in the eras ahead.