Future Proof Sales Strategy

7 Steps to Rise Above the Chaos, and Transform Your Team and Take Charge of Your Career

Steven Norman

• Publisher: Grammar Factory Pty. Ltd.
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780648430735
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

The B2B sales profession is under tremendous, unprecedented pressure.

Empowered customers, product commoditization, more complex buying processes and the impact of technology have all dramatically altered the sales landscape. With over half of salespeople failing to meet quota, not only are current B2B sales methods being questioned – the very existence of the sales function is being discussed.

There’s a huge cull going on and a wide gap between those that are thriving and those being eliminated. So how do hard-pressed business and sales leaders sort through the plethora of advice and sales tools out there, and find the right answers?

Written by B2B sales expert Steven Norman, Future Proof Sales Strategy teaches sales and business leaders seven steps to transform their team’s performance and build a bulletproof sales machine – one they can point at a market with confidence, knowing it will generate revenue efficiently and profitably.

This tried and tested framework targets every step of the sales process – from acquisition to retention, hiring the right team to accelerating performance, from stakeholder engagement to change management.

The end result? More deals, more profit, career growth and a seat with the C-suite.

PART 1:

Understanding Today’s Sales Landscape

5 Key Trends Changing the Face of B2B Sales

‘If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, then the end is near.’

JACK WELCH

In the introduction, I touched on some of the major challenges facing the sales profession. Before we can focus on specific solutions to these challenges (as outlined in Part 2), it’s important to fully understand the forces and trends shaping the B2B sales profession – including what’s causing them and how they’re affecting sales teams.

This is the focus of Part 1.

I want to be sure that we all fully appreciate the severity of the challenges we face. This is not a discussion of what might happen – these are very real changes already facing the sales profession, to the point where the majority of salespeople are not hitting quota, and Forrester estimates that twenty per cent of the B2B sales industry will be culled by 2020.

Change isn’t optional. It is not a case of optimisation, best practice or making simple tweaks to improve already good performance. The B2B sales profession is in the midst of a complete upheaval, and change is essential for survival. And that change needs to happen now.

If you still aren’t convinced, then just consider the five key challenges sales teams must contend with.

1Responding to a savvier, more knowledgeable buyer

In the past, when a B2B buyer identified a need in their company that might require buying products or services, their predominant information source was the vendors who provided the product or solution you were looking for. Specifically, the vendor salespeople.

Any buyer looking for a solution was consequently subjected to an exchange with the vendor organisation where, in order to get information, they engage and give information about their company, their issues, their buying process, their budget and so forth.

As a result, for over a century – since the birth of modern selling – vendor salespeople have been trained to extract information about their prospects throughout the sales process, to pepper potential buyers with a hundred questions about their organisation, their priorities, their budgets, their decision-making process, their organisation structure and the list went on. From that point buyers couldn’t avoid going into the vendor’s system and being pushed through any associated follow-up activities and pressured to engage further.

For about 120 years, buyers had to play the vendor’s game and abide by the vendor’s rules. Since vendors had a near-monopoly on critical information, B2B sales organisations were virtually gatekeepers to the information their prospects needed and leveraged this position to their benefit. If the buyer wanted to seek out another information source, such as talking with other users for reference purposes, they would only be able to contact those users via the vendor and have to give up more information and power for the privilege.

In the traditional sales relationship, there was always more benefit for the seller and not much for the buyer in these interactions.

The sales process itself was linear: buyers engaged with sellers, opportunities were qualified, demonstrations and proofs of concept were done, proposals were presented and then decisions were made. Buyers and sellers were dependent on each other and the buying and selling processes were intertwined.

Figure 2: Traditional B2B customer journey, Source: R2integrated

Today, the buyer journey has changed. Today, buyers explore digitally and can find out a huge amount about your products and services as well as competitors. The buyer moves between a range of sources – including vendor websites, search engines, social media and word of mouth – to gather nearly all the information they need before even speaking to an actual salesperson. They can also easily explore alternative ways to solve their business problem, all without engaging suppliers and salespeople directly. They embark on a customer journey, where they have much more control, much more independence and therefore much more power over the process and more negotiating power.

As a result, today’s typical buyer journey looks something like this:

Figure 3: New B2B customer journey, Source: R2integrated

Yet, at the same time, most vendor sales teams are still running on the old model – assuming they are the guardians of all solution knowledge, and that buyers have to work with them to achieve their goals. It’s no wonder that customers are largely dissatisfied and frustrated about their interactions with salespeople. According to the book Insight Selling from the RAIN Group, six out of ten meetings with salespeople are assessed by buyers as ‘not valuable, or don’t live up to expectations’.

As sales leaders, can we really be surprised that, when given the tools and the opportunity, buyers have embraced independent research?

Today, smart companies are investing heavily to understand the buyer journey for their specific customers and to ensure they are developing and mapping sales and marketing activities against this journey.

Of course this results in a lot of digital activities designed to catch potential customers early in their buying process and develop them towards becoming a lead.

Nowadays, buyers are much more likely to access – and be influenced by – reviews, referrals and other such sources. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, two thirds of buyers read online reviews, and ninety per cent said positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions.

Ultimately, salespeople are no longer buyers’ go-to source for information. According to Forrester, salespeople come fifth on the list of sources buyers use for research when looking for a new mobile device – after peers, analysts, IT forums and tech publications.

Figure 4: Information power shift

And this isn’t just the case for simple, out-of-the-box solutions. The data shows that buyers are becoming increasingly comfortable buying more complex and expensive products and services without consulting, or at the least delaying their interaction, with salespeople. According to CEB, the average business buyer is fifty-seven per cent of their way through their buying journey before engaging with a salesperson. According to SiriusDecisions, sixty-seven per cent of a buyer’s journey is done digitally, while Forrester found that seventy-four per cent of business buyers perform more than half of their research online before buying offline.

67%

of the buyer’s journey is done digitally

That’s why – when we do actually get that slot with the customer – it’s critical that we maximise that time as much as possible. Twenty years ago we were trained to ask customers what keeps them awake at night. We can’t do that any more – not only is it going to chew up valuable customer-facing time, but we should already have some idea of what their major concerns and challenges are. We need to go into that meeting fully prepared to bring value.

B2B companies tend to be more conservative than their B2C counterparts, in the sense that they can be slower to react to this change in buyer behaviour. Also, if you recall the CSO Insights data on sales performance, the decline in overall B2B sales performance has been gradual. Perhaps we’ve noticed our performance is dropping a bit year after year, but it’s not dramatic – it has happened gradually. This has caught many B2B sales professionals off guard.

However, many companies are now attempting to restore the balance of power between buyer and seller by leveraging emerging technologies, processes and organisational structures (which we’ll discuss in Part 2).

Rather than merely reacting to the journeys that consumers themselves devise, companies are shaping their paths, leading rather than following. Marketers, in particular, are increasingly managing journeys as they would any product. As a result, journeys are becoming central to the customer’s experience of a brand – and as important as the products or services themselves in providing competitive advantage.

2The rise of the buying committee

Every year CEB surveys how many people are involved in business buying decisions, and for the past few years the numbers have been going up. In 2014 they calculated that there were an average of 5.4 people involved in business buying decisions, while in 2017 that number had climbed to 6.8. They also found that in large enterprise decisions there were an average of seventeen people involved.

I had a discussion with Michele Buckley, global sales and marketing adviser at Gartner, which backed up these findings. ‘Buying is being done by larger teams than ever before,’ says Michele. ‘A lot of sales reps say, “I just need to get to the senior decision maker and then everything will flow smoothly.” This is fool’s gold – it doesn’t exist. There is no longer a single decision maker – this is just some of the conventional sales wisdom that no longer applies in today’s sales world.

17

is the average number of people involved in an enterprise-buying decision

‘Our research is showing that, to make a technology purchase, there is a core team of eight people, with another five to six people who just pop in and out occasionally. I like to think of them as seagulls. They kind of just fly into a meeting, poop on your proposal and then fly out again – and perhaps toss in some kind of security or compliance requirement that the buying team didn’t anticipate and needs to adapt to.

‘In addition, we’re finding that this buying team could be led by IT. It could be led by business. It could be led by a cross-functional team, or a senior executive. That leadership will be different, company to company. It can also differ during the life of the purchase process. It might start with one particular leader, but that changes to a different leader at the end. So, it’s actually incredibly dynamic – you might even say chaotic.

‘When you think about having fourteen people in a room trying to make a decision, it takes longer to generate consensus. Building that consensus is very time-consuming. The number of communications that are required is also time-consuming.

‘There are some other factors making the sales cycles longer. One of them is that there are multiple approvals that need to be sought. Cost and risk consistently come up as key objections. In fact, we’re finding that fifty per cent of buyers are running into costs as an objection and fifty-three per cent are running into risk as an objection.

‘These objections take quite a long time to resolve. Ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Embracing Change
• Part 1: Understanding Today’s Sales Landscape
• Part 2: Seven Steps to a Next-Gen Sales Team
• Conclusion: Where to From Here?
• About the Author