“The customer is always right”. This is the principle that drives the disruptors, those innovative brands that are transforming industries with a highly customer-centric approach to product development, marketing and sales. 

The best known disruptors need no introduction. Innovators such as Airbnb and Uber famously identified gaps in the market left by larger organisations who had lost sight of what customers really want – and have enjoyed extraordinary success as a result.

Likewise, when Salesforce began, our aim was simple but revolutionary. We wanted to make the buying and using of enterprise software to be as easy as finding and purchasing a book on Amazon.com - or what is now simply known as cloud computing. 

Seventeen years on, we’re still listening to what customers want and continuously reinventing our services to meet those needs. And we’re huge admirers of other brands that risk it all to deliver something that will transform the lives of their customers. 

As history tells us, the more you know about the person you’re selling to and the more you’re able to tailor your offer to his or her circumstances, the higher likelihood of sales success. This is not rocket science. And I should know. In 1968, I helped get the Apollo capsule to the moon and back.

The question is, how do you get a deep understanding of your customers? There’s good news on that for sales professionals of today. The introduction of intelligence is now underway and will play out for quite some time. This means that within five years, basically every salesperson will have an intelligent assistant that will use intimate computing to deliver rich context around every step of the sales process, from initial contact to closing.

Einstein, the “1st comprehensive AI platform for CRM” (Benioff) landed back at the end of August when the news spread across the ecosystem like wildfire.

Now, more information has surfaced, clarifying some of the speculation.

We’ve better start familiarising ourselves with the technology, as both declarative and programmatic developers will be able to build on Einstein.

A brand is not what a company says about itself. A brand is what the market says about the company. A good brand can take years to create and be lost in a second. Similarly, you have a personal brand: “That person is a team player,” or “They can sell,” or “They really deliver.” And just like with a company, your brand can sour almost instantly based on one negative interaction.

You may consciously work on your brand, but it still comes down to what people perceive about you — and that’s usually based on what your dominant behavior is. Think of celebrities. They basically have to be super polite every minute of every day because it only takes one time where the public thinks they acted like a jerk for that to become their brand.

I was recently part of a sales leadership offsite that kicked off with several of us getting together for dinner at a great new restaurant. The menu featured a variety of creative main courses spanning the spectrum of typical country fare. After careful review of the options, the team members placed their orders one by one, each satisfyingly selecting something different.

I was the last to go. "How’s the tenderloin?” I asked the waiter. “It’s incredible!” he replied. “The best thing on the menu in my opinion.” He then proceeded to describe the maple syrup reduction and parsnip mash the accompanied the dish. Four of the six people in our party immediately changed their order.

Weeks earlier in a sales operations discussion, my team and I were looking at which sales reps were doing the best job of generating their own pipeline. The idea was that if we could zero in on what these reps were doing, we could help them promote their winning behaviors across the organization. What did we find?