INTELLIGENT SELLING STRATEGIES: Insights from Inflexion-Point

In the majority of sales organisations, a high percentage of sales revenue is generated by the same minority of top sales performers, quarter after quarter. According to research published by the CEB in “The Challenger Sale”, this performance gap between top sales people and the rest is amplified in complex, high value sales environments.

They found that in a transactional selling environment, the performance gap between average and star performers was 59 percent - but in complex sales environments the gap was almost 200 percent - more than three times as wide. It’s clear that even a modest narrowing of this gap could drive a dramatic improvement in revenue.

The natural response from many sales leaders who are faced with this situation is to resolve to hire smarter next time, or to invest in sales training - but neither strategy seems to have a particularly good track record. When it comes to recruitment, it seems that there simply aren’t enough natural high performers to go around...

Traditional market segmentation is usually based around the core demographic attributes of company size, sector and location: for example, we might choose to target medical equipment companies turning over £100-250m located in the South East of England.

But, as many sales organisations have learned, this simple approach to segmentation really only scratches the surface, and tells us very little about whether any individual organisation is likely to be a prospect from our solution now or at any time in the future.

That’s because demographics are only really useful for defining populations - our potential target universe - but are a wholly inadequate way of identifying markets...

When we observe a chess grand master in action (or an expert in any other similar strategy-based game), it quickly becomes apparent that they are not merely living in the moment but thinking several moves ahead. Pursuing the most obvious immediate move could store trouble up for the future.

The same, of course, applies to selling. The best sales people pursue long-term strategies - and they also give themselves options that allow them to anticipate and adapt to their prospect’s future behaviour.

Perhaps the best example of this is how top sales people adapt their strategies to their entry path into the prospect. There are really two fundamental paths: top-down and bottom-up, and the strategies that need to be adopted vary significantly between the two.

Let’s face it, establishing a distinctive, differentiated position for our products and services is hard and getting harder in an increasingly crowded, over-communicated-to market. It’s probably accurate to say that it’s never been harder to stand out from the crowd.

Geoffrey Moore recognised the problem in “Crossing the Chasm” more than 20 years ago - a book that has been recognised as one of the few timeless classic texts on B2B marketing. Moore offered a simple framework for crafting a unique and relevant value proposition targeted at a well-defined audience.

But in today’s hyper-competitive world, I’ve found that it’s worth expanding Moore’s original framework just a bit to ensure that we’re capturing the raw insights we need to craft compelling communications and conversations…

In complex sales environments, the role of the successful salesperson isn’t just about prospecting, qualifying and closing. In fact, the most effective sales people are the ones who manage to successfully facilitate complex buying decision processes that involve multiple stakeholders.

And yet the sales pipeline stages in the majority of CRM implementations are still defined with reference to the completion of a linear sequence of sales activities such as “qualifying”, “demonstrating” and “proposing” that usually bear little relationship to the true state of the prospect’s often-complex buying journey, or the likelihood they will either do anything or choose your solution.

It’s no wonder that so many sales pipeline valuations are wildly optimistic, or that sales forecasts often remain stubbornly inaccurate, with “current quarter commit” deals that turn out to be nothing of the sort. If you recognise, or even suspect that you have a problem in these areas, it’s time to take action.

With the Rio Olympics drawing to a close and with some remarkable individual and team performances still fresh in our memories, this is perhaps an appropriate moment to reflect on what sales people and sales organisations can learn from the world’s top sportspeople.

There’s no doubt that the profession of selling could be improved by embracing ideas like the accumulation of marginal gains and a focus on “controlling the controllables” - both subjects I plan to return to in the coming weeks.

But I wanted to initiate this train of thought by drawing upon a concept that I learned from Sir Clive Woodward - coach of the England 2003 Rugby World Cup winning team and Director of Sport for the British Olympic Association in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympics…

One of the fundamental capabilities that distinguish top sales people - and top sales organisations - from the rest is their ability to accurately qualify sales opportunities from a relatively early stage in the sales process.

Effective qualification is important in any sales environment, but it’s absolutely critical in high-value complex sales situations with multiple stakeholders, where man-months of precious resource can easily be wasted pursuing opportunities that were never likely to buy anything or if they did, were never likely to buy from us.

Traditional approaches to sales qualification - like the over-simple BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) are utterly inadequate to reflect the dynamics of today’s complex sales opportunities. Fortunately, there are far better ways of dealing with the issue…

How can B2B sales people (and the sales organisations they work for) identify and engage the prospects that are most likely to buy from them?

In even the most successful B2B sales organisations there is always a significant fall-off between the number of qualified sales opportunities that enter the top of the sales funnel and the number that eventually emerge as customers.

In less effective sales organisations this fall-off from top to bottom of funnel is significantly higher - and often happens later in the sales cycle, compounded by the number of “zombie deals” that have somehow managed to remain in the sales pipeline despite showing no recent signs of life.

If we’re destined to lose, then we had better lose early - before we have invested significant resources in pursuing a set of opportunities that are never likely to buy from us. But that takes discipline, and a determination to ruthlessly weed out weak opportunities...

Hank Barnes of Gartner recently published a thoughtful post on the need for sales people to see the “big picture” and make a real effort to understand the customer’s perspective and adapt to their situation.

I believe that the issue is of profound importance - and explains why many sales people so badly misjudge the prospect’s appetite for their solutions, and why so many sales forecasts are rooted in hope rather than reality.

As Hank points out, it’s natural for sales people to be narrowly focused on promoting their product or service - without fully understanding or truly appreciating the world within which their prospects prioritise their actions…

There’s a fascinating article from Jason Lemkin on SaaStr about what the CEOs of early-stage companies need to look for from the key players in their first management team.

But I believe that the principles also apply to organisations at all stages of development. In fact, I think they are particularly relevant to post start-up expansion phase companies - and that the CEOs of these businesses would do well to take them into account when recruiting and assessing any new functional heads.