Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, May 13, 2010
There’s a short article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly on “the basics of business-to-business sales success”. It captures the conclusions from their survey of more than 1,200 purchasing decision makers in small, medium and large organisations across the US and Europe who are responsible for buying high-tech products and services.
When McKinsey asked them what drove their buying decisions, although these buyers might have initially suggested that price was key, the two most important factors actually turned out to be product/service features and the overall sales experience. No great surprise there, probably.
Destructive sales behaviours
But then the question turned to the “most destructive” sales behaviours – the ones that were likely to cause vendors to lose an otherwise winnable deal. And that’s where I become concerned that the survey – although useful – may not be reflecting the complete picture in the complex high-end B2B sales environment in which most of my clients operate.
According to McKinsey, the greatest sales sin was “too much communication” in person, by phone or by email, followed by lack of knowledge about either their products or those of their competitors. More than 6 times as many respondents complained of “too much communication” than those who complained of too little contact.
Can you over communicate?
So how are we to interpret this data? First, I need to introduce the caveat that the survey appeared to span simple to complex products, and I think we all know that complex sales have important nuances that don’t apply to commodity purchases. Second, the number of options open to those surveyed seems to have been restricted.
But even with these reservations, the conclusion that you can over communicate with your prospect appears troubling in a world of multiple touch points. So I went back to the quantitative buyer research I’ve conducted in behalf of B2B clients – all of them involved in high-value complex sales – and I think I have at least one probable explanation.
Ensure that your prospect feels they are learning something
In almost every conversation with people involved in the B2B buying decision making process, I hear something along the following lines “for as long as I’m learning something, I’m prepared to listen. But as soon as I detect a sales pitch, or feel I’m being chased, I switch off”.
So I’m coming to suspect that the real problem is not the frequency of the communication – but the relevance of the message to the buyer. Repeatedly contacting the buyer to ask if they have made a decision yet is likely to be counter-productive. But sharing some potentially valuable insights with them is likely to be taken in a completely different and more positive light.
Building rapport - ensuring relevance
So when I’m coaching sales people I strongly advise them to build a level of rapport with their prospects that allows them to understand what they are interested in – and to selectively identify insights and news items and to share learning from other similar customers that is likely to be of interest to their client and can help to sustain a continuing dialogue.
So – do you think that it’s possible to over-communicate with prospects, and what techniques have you found to avoid being seen as a bore?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Apr 26, 2010
According to the latest research from Gartner, marketing spend amongst high-tech and technology providers is on the rise again in 2010 – after a year in which more than half of these vendors cut their marketing budgets.
But the resurrection of high-tech marketing budgets doesn’t, it seems, mark a return to a pre- recession marketing mix. According to Gartner research vice president Laura McLellan, “Marketing has to continue to look at being more efficient and cost effective” and she noted that many marketing groups were “searching for better ways to measure and show the value of marketing”.
The "new normal"
Well, hurrah to that. But what is this likely to mean in practice? Gartner predicted a “new normal” in which IT buyers rethink their spending approach and identified key priorities for many IT vendors in 2010 as sales programs to support both the direct and indirect sales forces together with increased investment in positioning and external communications.
These targeted investments are certainly consistent with some of the best practice I’ve been observing in high-tech companies that are managing to ride the rebound, rebuild their pipelines and get their sales and marketing engines running effectively again.
They reflect the two essential initiatives that we’ve been working with clients on: the clarity of their market focus and the effectiveness of their sales process.
Clarity of market focus
Clarity of market focus requires that organisations define their ideal customer profiles as well as understanding the hierarchy of needs that drive buying behaviour – but perhaps most importantly it requires a deep understanding of the sphere of influence that surrounds these prospects. Much of the increased investment in positioning and external communications will, I predict, be focused on reaching out to and through this BuyerSphere.
Effectiveness of the sales process
It’s no longer accurate (or fashionable) to describe sales being from Mars and marketing from Venus. The traditional tensions between the two functions are completely unproductive in the “new normal”, and it’s striking how organisations that have successfully aligned sales and marketing around a common focus on the customer are doing better by every important measure of performance. Gartner’s recommended focus on programs to support the sales process (and thereby facilitate the buying process) is a reflection of the growing trend towards collaborative behaviour.
Where’s your marketing money going in 2010?
How do your marketing spend priorities align with Gartner’s findings? Have you identified a “new normal” in the buying behaviours of your target markets? And have your sales and marketing teams learned to play nicely together?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Tue, Apr 20, 2010
Let’s face it, in almost every b2b sales organisation, there’s far too much valuable selling time going to waste. It’s being wasted on pursuing poorly qualified opportunities that are never likely to buy from you - and even in well-qualified opportunities, it’s all too often wasted on activities which are going to have no impact on your prospect’s buying process - or your chances of winning.
Think for a moment about your sales pipeline. How many opportunities are required at the top of the funnel in order to close one sale? However well your team is performing, the end to end conversion rate is almost certainly at a level that no operations manager could accept in a manufacturing plant. And if they did, they wouldn’t be keeping their job for much longer.
The analogy is a useful one, because although I understand very well that there’s a world of difference between building a standardised product and selling a complex solution, some of the ways in which we measure manufacturing performance have useful parallels in the sales environment.
Manufacturing companies have a real focus on getting things right first time. They go out of their way to engineer scrap and rework out of the process, through measures like rigorous raw material quality standards, templates, standardised machine setups, and so on. And if a component is going to fail, they want it to be rejected early, before a great deal of value has been added to it.
It’s not so different from running a sales pipeline. We want to be working well qualified opportunities and to prevent unwinnable deals from entering the pipeline in the first place. And if we’re going to lose, we want to lose early, before a great deal of wasted effort has been invested. If only we could have the level of visibility of what’s really happening from stage to stage that the leading manufacturers have of the products that are flowing along their production lines...
Then there’s the issue of time. Plant managers watch stage times like a hawk. If work in progress is taking longer than expected to move from one stage to the next, or showing unnaturally high failure rates, they will often stop the line in order to fix the underlying problem. Imagine how much more effectively we could manage sales pipelines if we better were aware of deals that were getting “stuck” at a particular stage without moving forward...
So what can we learn from the manufacturing experience? Firstly, even the sale of complex solutions will benefit from having a well defined sales process that draws upon the winning habits of your top performers, together with the best practices that can be observed in other high-performing sales organisations. CSO Insights concluded that companies with a defined, dynamic sales process outperformed their peers by a third or more in factors like the percentage of reps making quota.
Next, we need to instrument the pipeline so that we can measure deal velocity and stage to stage conversation rates, and see how performance is affected by factors like the product, salesperson and lead source involved. We need to take steps to diagnose and deal with the root causes of poor performance. And we need to trigger an alarm when a deal falls outside desirable performance standards.
And finally, we need to use the information to systematically identify the bottlenecks and constraints that are slowing sales or restricting our win rates, set high standards, and perpetuate winning habits. You might want to start with your CRM system. Does it truly embrace and encourage best practice, and is it providing you (and your sales people) the data you need? And if not, is the problem really with the software, or how it is being used and managed? It might be time to re-engineer your sales production line.
By the way, if you are interested in other techniques that can make the leap from manufacturing to selling, you might want to learn more about the Theory of Constraints and Lean Six Sigma.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Apr 01, 2010
In Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential election campaign, a sign famously hung in his Little Rock campaign headquarters with the following simple message: “it’s the economy, stupid”.
In today’s risk-averse buying climate, the message to ambitious B2B sales professionals seeking to win the votes of their prospects might have a familiar ring: “it’s the economics, stupid”.
Rational, emotional or financial?
I don’t mean to suggest that rational or emotional factors are irrelevant to high-value B2B sales, but the involvement of multiple stakeholders and the nature of the decision making process means that economic factors - and financial language - play a central role in justifying most buying decisions.
If companies are to invest in resolving them, issues need to be associated with economic consequences, and by and large this revolves around avoidable costs or incremental revenues. Until and unless it is compellingly obvious that organisations can make or save significant amounts of money, they are unlikely to spend money on making a potentially risky change.
Return on Investment isn’t enough
Even believing that there is a strong return on investment (ROI) isn’t enough to ensure that the need to change will be accepted or that the buying decision will be approved. No matter how strong the project ROI appears to be, it never exists in isolation. It will always compete for funds against other (often completely different) projects or the attraction of simply keeping the money in the bank.
ROI models are based on assumptions that bias the conclusions (whether the assumptions are good or bad may depend on whether the vendor or the prospect calculated them), but they rarely take account of the execution risk that is associated with any change. Some projects deliver the desired outcomes, some exceed their goals, but many fail to achieve anything like the promised results, and your stakeholders are factoring this – whether formally or informally, consciously or unconsciously – into every significant decision they are called upon to make.
The least risk option
There’s a significant body of research suggesting that B2B buying decision teams are strongly influenced by the desire to mitigate risk when deciding if and how they need to implement change programmes (which, let’s face it, are what most significant purchases of complex solutions involve).
So it’s not enough for an organisation to emerge as the favoured vendor – they also have to be perceived as the least risk of all available options, including the all-too-popular decision to “do nothing” about the problem – at least for the moment.
The consequences of inaction
So it’s clear that having a compelling ROI – though necessary – isn’t going to be sufficient to win deals in today’s climate. In addition to strong benefits, vendors have to ensure that they help the prospect’s stakeholders identify, articulate and elevate the consequences of inaction. The consequences of inaction are all about what is likely to happen if the status quo was allowed to prevail.
So some of the most important questions your sales people can and must ask include “why is this issue important to you now?”, “have you tried to address this issue before, and what were the results?”, “what would happen if you failed to resolve this problem now?”, and “who else would be affected if the current situation continued?”.
Where’s the value?
These are thoughtful questions, and frequently stimulate the prospect to think differently about the issue they have described to you. They often help you gain access to other stakeholders. But you should consider it a huge red flag if despite your help and after due consideration your prospect is still unable to articulate significant economic consequences of failing to address the issue.
Even if they are keen to continue the conversation, unless you can use the consequences of inaction to elevate their need from merely interesting or important to urgent, there’s little likelihood – no matter how positive your conversation – that the deal will close any time soon.
Of course, this is not a reason to abandon the prospect – simply to recognise that there is still work to be done to educate them, and/or that you may need to wait for, or try to create, a trigger event that will serve to establish clear economic benefit, urgency, and the need to take action.
Final thoughts...
Take a critical look at your sales pipeline? How many of those opportunities are associated with a clear economic impact that has been acknowledged by the prospect? How many of them are associated with clearly defined consequences of inaction? What does this understanding do to your sales forecast? And how can you help your sales people, and your prospects, to eliminate risk and create an unimpeachable (back to Bill Clinton again) case for change?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Last week I took part - together with 30+ senior sales and marketing executives from the technology sector - in an excellent discussion hosted by Richard Eldh of Sirius Decisions on the topic of sales and marketing alignment.
The audience included experience of everything from early stage start-ups to mature market leaders – a spectrum I’ve written about in a recent blog about "The Jungle, the Footpath and the Highway".
Crossing the Chasm Revisited
Richard offered an idea which I’d like to develop here, because I believe it lies at the very heart of making intelligent decisions about sales and marketing strategy. In fact, the Sirius perspective is that it provides the essential foundation for all sales and marketing efforts.
I imagine anyone in high tech will be familiar with Geoffrey Moore’s characterisation of technology markets as evolving from early adopters and then crossing the chasm (with varying degrees of success) to address mainstream and - ultimately - laggard buyers.
New Concepts, New Paradigms and Established Categories...
Sirius presented the idea of the “demand spectrum”, and identified three categories – new concepts, new paradigms and established markets. For reasons that may become apparent later, I've tended to use "established category" for the latter.
As you’ll see in a moment, it’s clear that the behaviour of both buyers and sellers changes significantly between demand types, and that making the wrong assumptions – or choosing the wrong strategies – can wreak serious damage to an organisation’s sales and marketing effectiveness.
I’d like to offer my interpretation – drawn from experiences and observations of a growing number of B2B clients – as to how the idea of the demand spectrum can and should drive sales and marketing strategy.
New Concepts
New concepts are truly disruptive product or service offerings. They either solve a new problem which has so far been unrecognised by the market or – perhaps more likely – open up a potentially important new opportunity. Budgets are unlikely to exist – they will have to be created. The solution category is unlikely to be widely recognised – so educating the market is critical.
Without obvious reference points in the market, vendors introducing new concepts have to fire the imagination of their potential prospect champions, who will almost always be forward thinking executives for whom the new concept will help them achieve a breakthrough goal. It’s hard to achieve this without effective issue and thought leadership of a world without reference points.
My take? Without existing category reference points, the potential market needs to educated - or more accurately inspired - about the potential of the concept to help them address a critical business goal.
New Paradigms
New paradigms offer innovative ways of addressing an already recognised problem or opportunity. Unlike new concepts, with new paradigms at least some of the reference points exist – the category of problem is already understood and accepted as important by the market place. It’s the way in which the problem is solved that is innovative – perhaps bordering on the disruptive.
One of the best examples of the introduction of new paradigms is CRM delivered through software as a service, exemplified by Salesforce.com. CRM was already seem as an important function, albeit one that often cost too much, took too long or failed to deliver the promised results. With this as a reference point, Salesforce were able to show that their distinctively different approach delivered dramatically better results.
My Take? The market did not need to be told about the problem – they needed to be educated that there was, in fact, a better way of solving it.
Established Categories
The third group - established categories - represents the vast majority of product and service offerings. The problem that they solve is well understood, and they fall within a well-recognised and clearly defined category of solution, so there is no need to educate the market on the need for the solution. But because of this, the market is also crowded and fiercely contested.
Vendors are milling around in the market, all trying to steal market share from each other. The question is not whether the problem needs addressing, but rather when to solve it (urgency) and which vendor to solve it with. It seems to me that vendors in this market have two choices – to either out execute their competitors in a head to head battle, or to outsmart the opposition.
My take? If you're not already the category leader, I’m a great fan of the second approach - helping your prospect to rethink the problem in a way which de-commoditises the situation and differentiates you as a vendor in a meaningful way.
Where do you sit on the spectrum?
So – where are your products or services positioned along the demand spectrum? Are they new concepts, new paradigms or established markets? And are you consciously tuning your sales and marketing activities accordingly? If not, what's holding you back?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Tue, Nov 24, 2009
Recent research from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business suggests that companies that eliminate bonuses for achieving sales quotas generate more revenues. According to Professors Nair and Misra, the benefits can be significant – in one case stimulating a 9% uplift in revenues.
As 2010 approaches, that sort of sales uplift could make the difference between achieving your revenue goals for the year - or falling short. It’s a powerful argument for reviewing your sales compensation plans now, so that you’re ready for the new business year with a set of principles that can optimise your sales performance.
If you’ve run a sales force for any length of time, you’ll probably be familiar with the principle that compensation drives behaviour. As Nair and Misra point out, quota bonuses can result in sales people gaming the process. If they have already made their quota for the period they may defer or “sandbag” deals, whilst sales people who see no chance of achieving their quota may instead defer their efforts to the next period.
Removing these quota-related bonuses can help to remove the inefficiencies caused by the sales people’s attempts to game the system. In the example quoted in the research, they worked with an organisation to redefine their compensation plans for FY2009. The results were impressive - the new structure resulted in a 9% improvement in revenues, translating to an additional $1m a month. What’s more, the new plan proved extremely popular with the sales people.
Of course, removing quota-based bonuses may not be the answer in every situation - but the research draws our attention to the need to carefully define the desired sales behaviour, modelling the desired outcomes, and tuning the compensation plan accordingly.
Most organisations want their sales force to be encouraged to maximise profitable revenue, and to do so as early in the business cycle as possible so that end-of-quarter and end-of-year surprises can be eliminated. This can be achieved through careful design of targets and accelerators. Similar principles can apply to incentivising certain elements of the product mix.
As the end of the sales year approaches and you prepare to hit the ground running from the very start of 2010, I suggest you reflect on how well your current sales compensation plans stimulated the desired sales behaviour. Even if you did well, is there room for improvement? And if it looks as if you may end the year short of your original goals, how can you change the situation for next year?
An external perspective may help. We’ve worked with a number of clients to help them structure and tune sales compensation plans that drive the desired outcomes, and eliminate the opportunity for sales people to game the system. Drop me a line at bob.apollo@inflexion-point.com if you would like to learn more.
Getting it right is worth it. On average, organisations spend more than three times as much on sales compensation as they do on advertising. Careful planning can make sure that the money is well spent.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Nov 09, 2009
I was reflecting on a thought-provoking blog by Dave Brock, who asked "what would happen if we saw things the way our customers saw them?".
As Dave points out, your capabilities as a vendor are irrelevant unless and until they can be connected to your prospect’s challenges in a language they can relate to. Your value propositions can’t be generic – they have to relate to what really matters to the prospect.
The really smart sales people have already figured this out. That’s why they so often tailor the “corporate” presentations churned out by marketing to reflect what they have learned their prospects are really interested in... which is almost never the "feeds and speeds" or technobabble so beloved of the average product pitch.
Marketers, this is no time to get upset with them or curse them as rebels. They are only responding to what they sense their prospects are looking for - and remember they are probably having many more prospect conversations than anyone else in the organisation. Let's celebrate their adaptability!
Imagine what could happen if product marketing listened to and learned from their wisdom? Imagine what they could produce if they saw their primary role as "problem solving marketing" instead?
Of course, the best product marketers do this already - to the great benefit of the organisations they work for. But from my observations, many others - and it's a significant proportion - are still far too fixated about what their product does, rather than what problem it solves.
The resulting sales tools often end up wandering around like the Marie Celeste, with no clear sense of their destination or what role they play in facilitating the prospect's buying process. As a result, as many as nine out of ten corporate sales tools end up being little used by sales people. It's a huge sales enablement challenge for many organisations.
I'd like to suggest a checklist that could help to ensure that sales materials are focused on the problem, not the product:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Who are we trying to solve it for?
- How will they recognise they have a problem?
- How do our capabilities help them solve the problem?
- What phase in the buying process is the sales tool intended to support?
- What do we want the prospect to do as a result of the tool?
I think it's a fair bet that if your organisation's sales tools were designed with these questions in mind that your sales people would be more inclined to use them and less inclined to develop their own. Even more so if they contributed to the design and development of the tools in the first place.
Am I on the right track? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Are you ready for a fresh perspective?
Would you like to learn more? Then please continue to browse the site and when you are ready, contact me here or call me on +44 7802 313300.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Nov 02, 2009
How many times have you sat and suffered through a dull b2b presentation, eagerly anticipating the final slide and an end to the relentless torture? All too often, if your experience is similar to that of most people I meet.
It seems that many presenters have got themselves into the habit of using PowerPoint as a prop for themselves, rather than as an aid to the audience. They treat the event as a broadcast, rather than as a conversation – and as a result what they say and do just washes over the audience to no lasting effect whatsoever.
Avoiding death by PowerPoint
Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about presenting to an audience of thousands at an industry conference, where it’s challenging to make it more than a one-way communication – although heaven knows, most of us could learn a lot from the best television broadcasters when it comes to engaging a mass audience.
No, I’m referring to the vast majority of business meetings, which are held in one room, often across a table, with a handful of people involved. My preference is always to use a flipchart or whiteboard in these circumstances. But if you feel that you must use PowerPoint* then I’d like to share a few suggestions.
The 10-20-30 rule...
Firstly, I strongly encourage you to follow Guy Kawasaki’s “10-20-30” rule. It’s laughably simple, but highly effective:
- Use 10 slides or less
- Plan to speak for a maximum of 20 minutes
- Use a minimum 30 size font
I hope that the first two points, after a little reflection, will be self-explanatory – if what you’re trying to put across can’t be conveyed in 10 slides and 20 minutes (this, by the way, excludes questions) then you’ve got to wonder whether you are making the subject too complicated.
The font size is an interesting one (by, the way, Guy offers an alternative rule of thumb – find the age of the oldest member of your audience, divide by two, and that’s your minimum font size). The real reason for following it is that you should not need to read off your slides to make your point, and if allow your audience to read ahead, then they are unlikely to be paying attention to you at the same time. Use graphics wherever you can. If you must use text, use phrases rather than sentences, and words rather than phrases.
It's about them - not about you...
Next, remember that your presentation should be about what you can do for your audience, and not about how great you are. Cut out the all the corporate bullshit and boring statistics. Establish empathy by illustrating the points you want to make with reference to how you have helped similar organisations do the same.
Build rapport with your audience and get your points across by telling stories, rather than delivering “pitches”. Start with the end in mind. What do you want your audience to think or do as a result of the meeting?
Let's get the conversation started...
But, above all, look on the presentation as an opportunity to stimulate a conversation. Think of every slide as a chance to make your audience think, to ask questions, and to get a discussion going. Don’t ever, unless you are in full-on “broadcasting-to-a-cast-of-thousands” mode, ask them to leave their questions to the end. Be prepared to tune and adjust the rest of your presentation according to what you learn at each step.
Who knows? You might even have more fun presenting as a result. I can guarantee that your audience will.
*Other presentation tools are available
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Oct 01, 2009
Nick de Cent, editor of Modern Selling recently asked me if I had any feel for how people are thinking about the economic climate and business prospects looking forward over the next few months. It gave me a chance to step back, reflect, and gather my thoughts.
Here's what I told Nick ... I'd love to hear whether it tallies with what you are seeing and hearing in your own markets:
"According to the messages I hear from the market, it remains tough out there, but some of the projects that have been in limbo since Q4 last year are starting to come back to life. Even in live projects, there remains a big gap between being chosen and getting the order. Many internal champions haven’t yet fully understood how to navigate their pet projects through a financial approvals process that has become much stricter and highly risk-averse. “Deciding to do nothing” remains a common outcome. The vendors that are breaking through have mastered the art of both eliminating the perceived risk of their solution and elevating the negative consequences of doing nothing. Simply exhorting your sales people to “sell harder” is absolutely, definitively, a losing strategy. Instead, they have to focus on eliminating risk and facilitating the prospect’s buying process.
The early adopter market has shrivelled to almost nothing – not because their aren’t still some early adopter individuals out there, but because the companies they work within have become more conservative in approving new projects and new expenditure. So innovative technologies are having to work out how to “cross the chasm” (and talk business, not technology) far earlier in their company’s evolution than was necessary in the past. Start-ups who haven’t mastered this are particularly hard hit, without an installed base or an established service revenue stream to fall back on. But failure is not inevitable – companies that have the discipline to focus on creating genuine customer value (rather than product marketing puffery) are winning business."
What's your perspective? Please share your comments.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Jul 06, 2009
How confident are you that you truly, deeply understand who your best prospects are, what really matters to them, and how and why they choose to buy?
It's an increasingly important question, for two reasons: firstly, the latest studies confirm a trend which has been apparent for a number of years - that prospective B2B buyers are using the internet and their circle of connections to do much more research before they are ready to approach potential vendors. The balance of information power has unquestionably shifted in favour of the buyer.
Second, in the current economic climate, we're seeing B2B buyers shy away from anything that might be seen to be a potentially risky decision. If they cannot be convinced otherwise, a growing number are inclined to believe that the safest thing is to "decide to do nothing".
Faced with these two trends, vendors have to focus - on connecting with prospects who have issues they cannot afford not to deal with, and for which they have a demonstrably superior solution - and then they need to ensure that they emerge as the lowest risk of all available options - including that of simply preserving the status quo.
But careful qualification isn't enough - vendors also need to execute impeccably in facilitating the prospect's buying process - and to influence the way the prospect looks at the issue that caused them to start searching for a solution in the first place.
Persuading the prospect to think differently - to embrace a new perspective - is one of the key factors in creating a potentially winning environment. Sales people who successfully pull this off are able to achieve the much sought-after "trusted adviser" status. But timing is critical - they need to shape the prospect's view of the world before they formalise their needs and priorities.
That's where trigger-nometry is so important. The time during which a prospect evolves from being unaware or unconcerned to recognising they have an issue that they need to deal with is a critical stage in the whole process of buying.
Vendors need to understand and anticipate the trigger events that catalyse this transition. These trigger events can be external (things that happen in the market) or internal (things that happen within the prospect's organisation) but they represent the time during which the prospect's perspectives are at their most pliable.
Vendors who only get involved in deals after the prospect has crystallised their view of what they need, and what they should be looking for, start with an obvious disadvantage - whereas vendors who are visible at the time of the trigger event, or who can help create a trigger event, are in pole position to shape the buying agenda.
How can sales and marketing organisations improve their trigger-nometry? By observing the key forces that are shaping their target markets. By tracking key changes within their prospects. And by ensuring they have a relevant and potentially provocative perspective on how the prospect might respond to these issues.