UNREASONABLE IDEAS: the inflexion-point blog

Whether you’re a sales leader or CEO, holding regular sales pipeline reviews ought to offer an essential way of keeping your finger on the pulse of the business and giving you the confidence that revenue forecasts are likely to be met.

But as we all know, there are often frustrating gaps between the apparent potential of the forecastable pipeline and the resulting actual revenue performance. I want to suggest that part of the reason is that the wrong questions are being asked during the process.

And no, I’m not referring to the usual questions around “how much is the opportunity worth?” “what are the next steps?” “who is the decision maker” “what is the probability of winning?” and “when is the order going to be received?”

We’re all very familiar with the idea that modern B2B buyers are increasingly well-informed and far less dependent on individual sales interactions to get hold of the information they need to make buying decisions.

But according to a recent survey revealed by Neil Rackham of SPIN Selling fame, B2B buyers are also demanding more expertise and support from sales people than ever before. How can these two apparent contradictions be rationalised?

It turns out that the answer lies in the increasingly polarised nature of B2B buying behaviour…

B2B Marketing have just published a comprehensive 60+ page survey of business social media - and one of their key conclusions is that LinkedIn (94%) has replaced Twitter (89%) as the B2B marketer’s favourite business social media platform.

The preference gap widened dramatically when marketers were asked which social network was most effective in supporting their business goals. More than twice as many - 45% - chose LinkedIn, compared to 20% that chose Twitter.

Perhaps this should come as no great surprise: as the survey pointed our, fluffy justifications for social media investments won’t pass muster any more. Business social media is increasingly expected to deliver hard business benefits.

So what are the implications for B2B marketing?

One of a series of articles celebrating the lasting impact of “Crossing the Chasm”

It’s more than 20 years since Geoffrey Moore published the first edition of “Crossing the Chasm”. Since then, it has become a classic, and has cemented its position as the one must-have book that every B2B technology marketer needs to have read.

I’ve been applying the principles since 1991 - the year in which the book was first published - and the timelessness of the core concept is striking. But the world has moved on in a number of significant respects, and the recently published 3^rd edition reflects this.

One of a series of articles celebrating the continuing relevance of SPIN Selling

I had the chance to listen to Neil Rackham, creator of the best-selling SPIN Selling, at the Portsmouth Business School a couple of weeks ago. He proved an extremely engaging speaker - and he shared a closely-guarded secret: SPIN Selling should really have been SPIV selling.

For those of you unfamiliar with SPIN Selling, the four-letter acronym stands for Situational, Problem, Implication and Need-Payoff questions. It resulted from years of research into the winning questioning habits of top-performing sales people.

“Improving sales and marketing alignment” has been close to the top of CEO priority lists for years - and with good reason. Most people would agree that sales and marketing organisations that work well together are likely to outperform their poorly-aligned peers.

But organisations sometimes struggle to come up with the hard data to back up this belief. It’s a subject that the Aberdeen Group has monitored over many years, and their latest Research Brief offers compelling evidence of the benefits of sales and marketing alignment.

Other than making sure you recruit the right people in the first place, how you go about on-boarding new sales people makes a huge difference to their chances of ultimate success. Yet far too many companies seem to believe that a little product training is all that is required to equip a new hire to succeed.

It’s a subject that deserves more attention, and that’s why I was very pleased to be asked to contribute to Brainshark’s excellent new eBook “Prepare Your Sales Force: Ideas for Enabling B2B Reps With More Effective Onboarding and Training”.