For my latest article for Top Sales Magazine, I’ve decided to explore the power of three whys and a who...

When it comes to complex B2B buying decision journeys, things are rarely straightforward. As Gartner are fond of reminding us, our prospective customers’ decision processes are typically complex, involve multiple stakeholders, and are often far from linear.

Simply understanding and satisfying their needs is rarely enough. Having the “best” offering (whatever that means) does not guarantee success. In fact, if a discretionary rather than an inevitable purchase is involved, the odds they will do anything at all are typically no better than 50/50.

In addition to uncovering, developing and satisfying their prospective customer’s needs, today’s B2B salespeople also need to both understand and influence how and why their prospective customers choose to buy - and that involves three whys and a who...

One of the key things that separates great salespeople from the rest is their commitment to rigorously qualifying every potential opportunity. They have the confidence to disqualify weak opportunities early on the cycle before they have wasted significant resources on a lost or losing cause, because they know they can reinvest their energies in finding and winning more promising opportunities.

Compare that to their less confident, less effective colleagues, who are often inclined to cling on to weak or poorly qualified opportunities for fear that disqualifying them will make their pipeline look smaller. This isn’t just the salesperson’s fault, of course: sales managers have to bear a large amount of the blame for weak qualification and the wasted sales cycles that inevitably follow.

I was very pleased to recently share the stage with Annette Behrendt of PDAGroup for a deep dive into the critical subject of sales qualification. I’ve included a link below but wanted also to share some of the key topics we covered...

You’d hope, wouldn’t you, that most salespeople understand what their prospective customers want to buy. You’d expect, wouldn’t you, that your salespeople understand what their prospects think they need before making a proposal.

That may, of course, be sufficient in a relatively simple, transactional environment where the prospective customer is in the process of making an inevitable purchase.

But no matter how good a job your salespeople do when it comes to understanding and hopefully influencing what their prospects think they need, understanding what their prospects want to buy is only part of the picture.

In complex, discretionary B2B buying environments it’s just as important - often more important - to understand why your prospective customer has embarked on their buying journey.

I recently participated in a fascinating panel discussion facilitated by Jonathan Farrington of Top Sales World on “Identifying the New Post-Covid Frontline Sales Professional” with Dave Mattson of Sandler Training and Lisa Leitch of Teneo Results. I’ve included a link to the recording at the bottom of this article.

Needless to say, there was a lot of discussion about what the future of B2B buying was going to look like, and what the implications are going to be for the B2B sales profession.

Of course, none of us knows for sure that the future balance is going to be between virtual, face-to-face and automated selling, but it’s probably safe to assume that it won’t involve a complete reversion to the world as it was in 2019.

However, there was a general consensus that - driven by the impact of both Covid-19 and other factors - the future of complex B2B selling was going to be increasingly collaborative, and I believe that there are some profound implications for the sales community...

Soon after “The Challenger Sale” was published, you could see a stream of lazy commentators homing in on one percentage prominently quoted in the book – that the average B2B buying decision process was “57% complete” before the customer wanted to talk to a salesperson – and using it to justify their position on a bunch of unrelated issues.

Similar figures have been published by other researchers, and to the same effect: to paraphrase Andrew Lang, the commentators who thoughtlessly requote these statistics are guilty of using them like drunk people use lampposts – to support their own positions rather than offering illumination to others.

The inconvenient fact, of course, is that there is no such thing as an “average B2B buying journey”, particularly where a complicated and significant decision is involved. Every opportunity is different. Some opportunities involve salespeople early and others involve them late or never at all.

Basing any B2B sales strategy on the “57% assumption” is both reckless and incompetent. Like many other aspects of the real world, and like it or not, the truth is much more complicated...

This article first appeared in the April 2021 "Supercharging Sales" issue of the International Journal of Sales Transformation.

Given the overall theme of the magazine, I thought it might be appropriate to focus on a topic that has long been a focus of mine - how can salespeople supercharge their sales conversations?

Given that - according to research by Forrester and others - customers report that the majority of conversations they have with potential vendors create little-to-no positive value (and often leave them with a negative impression), there is clear scope to have more impactful interactions.

By the way, the one thing we want to avoid when “supercharging” our sales conversations is to talk more quickly. All of the available evidence shows that top performing salespeople speak slowly, clearly and confidently and take their time to make their points without being verbose....

One of the most unhelpful “rules of thumb” in B2B selling is the long standing and widely quoted myth that the benchmark standard when it comes to sales pipeline management is 3* quota coverage.

I’ve struggled to find any original research that justified this - and even if there was any, the concept has been around for so long that any original research must now be well and truly out of date.

This 3* rule of thumb is no more accurate (and not much more useful) than a stopped watch that happens to tell the right time twice a day.

So - what is the optimal level of sales pipeline coverage? If you’re looking for a lazy, simplistic general answer then I’m afraid you’re inevitably going to be disappointed - because the only universally accurate answer is “it depends”...

Whether proactively reaching out to potential future customers or responding to inbound enquiries, salespeople and business development reps in complex B2B sales environments often find themselves having to make a large number of contact attempts in order to get a single new conversation started.

Of course, good research and preparation (and a strong, relevant, and distinctive value proposition) can help. But the sense of relief in finally uncovering a potential prospect with an apparently promising issue, need or problem after a series of unsuccessful attempts can often cause the salesperson to rush to present their solution.

This temptation - variously described as “the itch to pitch” or “premature elaboration” - might be understandable, but it is completely the wrong thing to do...

Regular readers will know that I have been evangelising the critical importance of customer-specific value stories for a long time. I’d like to take this opportunity to update you on my latest story framework, fuelled by a growing number of client projects in complex B2B sales environments.

Let me start by explaining what I mean by a “customer-specific value story”. Unlike value propositions generally, which tend to be targeted at broad audiences rather than specific organisations, a customer-specific value story is unique to each prospective customer.

Because of this, no two customer value stories are ever exactly the same, even if those crafted for similar organisations who are facing similar issues will often exhibit similar overall themes. But they all benefit from following a similar framework...

Business customers have become increasingly used to as-a-service models, rather than outright purchase - and many of them have come to prefer it.

It’s hard to think of any reason why new software offerings would not be developed with a Software-as-a-Service model in mind, and many existing upfront licence software offerings have already migrated to SaaS.

This movement is not just about software - a growing range of business offerings, from Aero engines to Zithers (well, OK, guitars but allow me a little artistic licence) are being sold and consumed as a service.

But it’s not just the consumption model that has changed - it’s the profit model. And in an as-a-service world, profit is not guaranteed at the point of purchase, but earned as a result of ongoing satisfied usage...