Inflexion-Points: Smart Ideas for Accelerating Revenue Growth

Are your prospects Painting by Numbers, on a Quest for the Grail, Lost in the Fog, or running around like Headless Chickens?

There's been a lot written - some of it by me - about the stages B2B prospects tend to go through in their buying decision process, and the need to align your your sales and marketing tactics accordingly. Of course, their journey is rarely linear: at any point they can choose to move forwards, revert to a previous stage, put the project on hold, or abandon the journey altogether.

The changing shape of the buyer's journey has introduced a raft of new issues for sales leaders who are trying to manage sales pipelines and generate accurate revenue forecasts. Prospects are leveraging the internet and business social media to do their research - and engaging sales people later in the decision making process.

As you can imagine, I get to speak to a fair number of B2B-focused CEOs and sales leaders - and I can’t recall any of them ever disagreeing with the principle that effective sales coaching is an absolutely critical skill for first-line sales management.

I recently recorded an on-demand webinar with BrightTALK on the increasingly important need to connect your marketing messages with the conversations your sales people are having with prospects and customers in the field.

I hope the headline caught your attention - it was intended to. After all, aren’t fresh leads the lifeblood of any company that depends on winning new business to grow? Of course they are. I left half the headline out. Here’s how the sentence ends:

For an industry that has embraced so many “lean” and “agile” principles when it comes to software development, it’s always surprised and frustrated me that many B2B software and SaaS businesses remain oblivious to the opportunity to eliminate a bunch of wasted, value-sapping effort in their sales and marketing process.

What is it that your top sales performers do better than anyone else? Part of the explanation may, of course, be simply that they are more naturally talented, or have a greater emotional intelligence when it comes to decoding complex sales relationships.

Miller Heiman’s always-excellent research programme has thrown up another compelling statistic: only 34% of all the sales organisations surveyed believed that their management team was “highly effective in helping the sales team advance sales opportunities”.

It makes for pretty uncomfortable reading: CSO Insights’ latest global study of sales forecast accuracy suggests that - on a deal-by-deal basis - it is at close to an all-time low at 46.5%. To put that in context, simply tossing a coin would give more accurate results.

I wrote late last year about the idea that “you can create brilliant content marketing and still miss the point”, and I want to develop the thought that there are still far too many dangerous disconnects between the marketing messages propagated by organisations and the conversations their sales people are actually having with prospects.