Accelerating Revenue Growth: The Inflexion-Point Blog

What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

According to some of the latest reports from Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights and other leading B2B research organisations, the best-in-class sales and marketing organisations are as much as 5 times more effective than the average in converting inquiries into sales - as well as maintaining significantly faster average annual revenue growth.

There’s a multi-million $ industry built up around solution selling. Training companies deliver courses promising to help delegates achieve it. Authors write books promising to reveal the secrets behind it. Consultants (your writer included) charge sales organisations for advice on how to achieve it. Sales people claim to have mastered it in interviews.

Faced with increasing competition, commoditisation and margin erosion most B2B vendors have chosen to embrace “solution selling” in one form or another. But, as many have learned to their cost, simply slapping solution lipstick on a product pig tends to be a cost-added, rather than a value-added strategy.

I recently wrote about the need for B2B organisations to transform their marketing from a cost centre to a revenue centre. It's a topic that is attracting an increasing amount of attention, and I'm delighted that Dan McDade of PointClear has agreed to share his experiences of this critical transformation is a guest article for the Inflexion-Point blog. I think you'll enjoy his perspectives - over to you, Dan:

I'm delighted that Swayne Hill, Co-Founder & SVP of Field Operations at Cloud9 and author of the excellent Data-Driven Sales Management has agreed to let me republish another of his thoughtful articles - this time asking "Marketing Scores Leads, Why Doesn't Sales Score Opportunities?" - as a guest contribution to the Inflexion-Point blog. I really like the methodical way in which Swayne thinks about these matters, and I think you will too. Over to you, Swayne:

Described as “The most important advance in selling for many years” by no less an authority than Neil (SPIN Selling) Rackham, The Challenger Sale is subtitled “Taking Control of the Customer Conversation”, and with good reason.

I'm delighted that Swayne Hill, Co-Founder & SVP of Field Operations at Cloud9 and author of the excellent Data-Driven Sales Management has agreed to let me republish one of his latest articles, entitled "Battle-Tested Method for Creating a Dynamic Sales Process" as a guest contribution to the Inflexion-Point blog. I hope that you enjoy his perspective on a critical aspect of B2B selling as much as I have. Over to you, Swayne:

CSO Insights have just published their 2012 Sales Management Optimisation study.  As always, the conclusions from their latest research make compelling reading - and provide B2B sales leaders with much to think about.

We want our prospects to agree with us, right? So why am I suggesting that the last thing you want is for your prospect to start by sharing your point of view - at least in the first call? Because there’s a hidden problem if that first conversation goes too smoothly.