I recently had the pleasure of speaking at length with Jan Ropponen, author of “Secrets of Sales Innovators - how World-Class sellers win Million-Dollar deals”.

Jan’s book is the distillation of an extensive series of interviews with highly successful B2B salespeople - the sort of people whose disciplined approach to selling enables them to make President’s Club every year, through both good years and bad.

The lessons encapsulated in Jan’s book are highly relevant to every B2B salesperson who has the ambition to do even better and is open to learning from their peers - and should be required reading for every B2B sales organisation.

From the first interaction to the successful conclusion of a lengthy and complex buying journey, Jan sets out a set of clear principles that have been proven to be effective in today’s challenging business environment...

I was pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the latest edition of Top Sales Magazine - a regular source of insight for sales professionals - there's a subscription link below. I chose to focus on the importance of contrast in complex B2B sales. I hope you find my perspectives useful:

In any competitive situation, establishing positive differentiation against our customer’s other options is one of the keys to winning their business. But there’s another form of differentiation that is critical to success in any discretionary purchasing environment: the degree of contrast between the customer’s current situation and the better future outcome they are looking for.

It’s probably worth explaining what I mean by a discretionary purchase: unlike an inevitable purchase, where the customer has to do something - such as choosing which electricity supplier to use - a discretionary purchase may never happen. The customer may simply decide to do nothing.

This is important, because the most common outcome of discretionary B2B purchase journeys - and our most powerful competitor - is a decision to stick with the status quo. The temptation to do or use what they already have is even more common in today’s uncertain business climate.

That’s why we need to identify and wherever possible stretch our customer’s “outcome gap” as a core part of our sales strategy...

I was very pleased to be invited by the International Journal of Sales Transformation to contribute an article to their latest edition. The publication is a consistently valuable read for any sales professional, and I urge you to subscribe (I've included a link to their website at the bottom of this piece).

I chose to write about some of the key issues I see facing B2B sales leaders in 2021. I hope you find my observations both relevant and helpful... 

2020 proved to be a challenging year for many B2B sales organisations. Certain sectors powered ahead - for example, anything associated with e-commerce or digital transformation - but many other industries suffered significant declines in demand.

2021 will inevitably bring further challenges. Whilst the emergence of effective vaccines offers some hope for recovery, it would be unwise to assume that these will amount to a magic bullet, or that many sectors will enjoy a rapid return to pre-Covid “normality”.

One thing is certain - the future of B2B selling is not what it used to be. This poses both a threat and an opportunity: those that emerge as winners will need to demonstrate speed, agility and adaptability at both the individual and organisational level.

In a recent article (Advance or disqualify!), I proposed that salespeople - rather than clinging on to lifeless sales opportunities in the hope of a miraculous and unlikely resuscitation - should politely and professionally disqualify deals where the customer is unwilling to commit to even a modest advance.

I was merely reflecting what I’ve seen today’s most effective salespeople do as a matter of basic personal discipline: they have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing opportunities they have no chance of winning, whilst their weaker, less-disciplined colleagues hold on to them until the last possible moment, for fear that abandoning them will make their pipelines appear smaller.

But as René Voorhorst reminded me in his LinkedIn comment on my article, the failure to disqualify is not just an individual sales issue - it’s a sales management issue...

In his best-selling sales guidebook “SPIN® Selling”, Neil Rackham identified four potential outcomes from every significant conversation with a prospective customer in a complex B2B sales environment: a win, an advance, a continuation or a clear “no sale”. I’ll define these outcomes in a moment.

Given the number of meetings required to close a complex deal involving multiple stakeholders, it should be no surprise that relatively few customer conversations directly result in the immediate confirmation of a win accompanied by an order.

And if the customer genuinely has no interest in buying, having them explicitly decide not to go any further ought to be a relief - because it frees the salesperson to refocus their energies on more promising opportunities.

More worrying are the number of conversations that end in a limbo-like state, in which the customer agrees in principle to continue the discussion but without making any other meaningful commitment. These often lead to false hopes and wasted time pursuing a lost or losing cause.

That’s why I recommend that salespeople adopt an “advance or disqualify” mindset...

It might seem strange - in a season when we traditionally wish goodwill to all men and women - to take the position that salespeople and sales leaders should not have the desire to be liked as their primary personal motivation.

Largely inspired by the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and made real by Henry Ford and others, the age of mass production introduced the concept of role specialisation in the pursuit of manufacturing efficiency.

And for a considerable period of time his idea that there was “one best way” had the desired effect - as long as the customer was prepared to accept a standardised product, and often at considerable cost to the job satisfaction of the workers involved.

It also had no need to take account of the feelings of the inanimate objects being produced. A Ford Model-T is unaware of the number of workers that have been involved in its production, or of the hand-offs between them.

The idea of role specialisation appears to have obvious attraction when applied to the sales function, as exemplified by the number of organisations that separate the SDR, sales and account management functions.

But there’s a real problem in taking this concept of role specialisation too far when applying it to sales - because our “production line” (or sales pipeline) isn’t an inanimate, uncaring collection of parts, but a group of sentient human beings who expect and deserve to be treated with respect...

This is the time of year when most of us would benefit from some quiet reflection on what we’ve learned during 2020, and how we intend to apply that learning in the New Year.

It’s fair to say that for most of us the learning opportunities have been dramatic.

For anyone involved in complex B2B sales, the way in which we interact with our customers and prospects has been turned upside down.

Business models that traditionally relied on face-to-face in-the-room interaction have had to rapidly go virtual.

Many of our customers - often the majority - have become understandably more cautious about making major new investments - whilst others (often a minority, but an important one) have seen opportunity in the disruption and have accelerated their adoption of new approaches.

However 2021 turns out in practice, the future world of B2B selling will have irreversibly changed. A Darwinian “survival of the fittest” is already underway at both the organisational and individual level, and the ability to adapt and evolve to changing circumstances is going to be a critical success factor.

I recently made what I hope was a compelling case for creating a customer-specific unique value story for every significant customer opportunity.

I now want to turn my attention to a critical complement to every such value story: making explicit connections between collective organisational and customised stakeholder value.

This involves creating an “umbrella” value story that explains why it is in the organisation’s interest to act and aligning this overall story with more tailored value stories for each of the key interested parties.

In this way, we can clearly articulate “what’s in it for you?” for the whole organisation, for key functions and for key stakeholders - and establish the essential connections between them.

I want to give Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group the credit for stimulating this article. I’ve added a link to his original piece below.

Whilst trials have become an accepted and effective way of selling consumer or personal productivity software tools, many vendors suffer a far lower conversion rate in Enterprise environments.

Whether you think of them as trials, pilots or proofs of concept, these evaluations need to be managed far more carefully for complex software solutions if they are not end up as a frustrating and unsuccessful tyre kicking exercise.

As with so many other aspects of complex B2B sales, failing to prepare and plan typically means that you are effectively planning to fail...