Everywhere you look, sales organisations of all descriptions are promoting their so-called “solutions”. It’s become such an overused term that for years the UK’s Private Eye magazine published a fortnightly column satirising the most amusingly egregious misuses of the word.

Hopefully neither you nor any of the companies you have been involved with achieved your two weeks of fame by being featured in this way. Because it is my fervent belief that your potential customers don’t care for - and aren’t looking for - generic solutions.

I contend that a solution cannot exist in isolation from a clearly defined problem that a customer is determined to address. But a cursory review of sales and marketing literature shows that many of these mismarketed “solutions” are no more than another way of labelling a set of products or services, with no reference or relevance to an underlying problem or opportunity.

The quality and accuracy of opportunity qualification is widely acknowledged to be a key predictor of future sales success - and a critical differentiator between the best salespeople and the rest.

Today’s top salespeople have too much respect for their own time to waste it on “opportunities” they have little or no chance of closing - while their less-effective colleagues often appear to hold on to dead or dying opportunities like a shipwrecked sailor clinging on to a piece of driftwood.

When we analyse relative sales performance, the benefits are obvious: the additional time and effort that top salespeople invest in qualification is more than repaid in terms, shorter sales cycles, greater average deal values and higher win rates.

Note: This article has been adapted from the latest fully revised and updated version of my “Introduction to Outcome Centric Selling” - you can download the full document here.

Complex B2B buying journeys are inevitably complicated. Your customer’s decision process is rarely straightforward or linear. Multiple stakeholders are involved, often with widely different perspectives and priorities. Without strong internal project sponsorship, consensus is unlikely and without consensus, action is unlikely.

These challenges have been compounded by the current coronavirus epidemic. And yet despite all this, a significant number of customers are still investing in new projects, but only when these investments satisfy three key criteria: the project must be strategically relevant, tactically urgent and be capable of delivering rapid time-to-value.

Frontline sales managers - the people from whom individual members of the sales organisation take their day-to-day direction - have always played an absolutely pivotal role in the success of every sales organisation.

The actions they take and the guidance they offer have a profound impact on both individual and team performance. Yet relatively few of these critical players have benefited from formal training or coaching in the essentials of their role.

Many were promoted to their current position because they were top performing sales contributors. But the demands on frontline sales leaders (and the skills they are expected to demonstrate) are often very different from those on individual sales contributors.

The issues have been amplified by the impact of the current Covid-related challenges, and Gartner recently identified three key actions that Chief Sales Officers could and should take to ensure that their frontline managers are creating maximum impact...

I’ve written before about the persuasive power of a Mutual Success Plan in technology-based B2B sales, and I believe the concept is so important that it is worth returning to it, particularly in the light of recent developments in collaboration technology.

You may have come across the spiritual precursors to the Mutual Success Plan in the form of “Close Plans” or “Mutual Action Plans” - you may already be using one or the other of these concepts - but in a world where enabling our customers to achieve provably better outcomes has never been more important, those more traditional approaches have been found to be lacking...

Whenever a purchase is inevitable (the customer must act) your competition tends to be predictable - and it will often be another vendor like you. But - as is so often the case in complex B2B sales - the purchase is discretionary (the customer may or may not decide to act) - your fiercest competitor is often the status quo.

This was true even before Covid affected our economy. It is even more true now. It will continue to be important in the future. But the status quo isn’t what it used to be.

Preserving the status quo involves doing nothing and sticking with what is familiar rather than venturing into the unknown. It has often been seen by customers as their least-risk option, particularly if there was any significant uncertainty about whether any proposed changes were likely to have a positive impact.

But your customer’s world has changed and for many the old certainties and uncertainties will no longer apply. Battening down the hatches until they can revert to the “old normal” - far from being the safe approach - may now be a risky strategy. For many, change is inevitable...

As Winston Churchill was working to establish the United Nations after World War Two, he observed that leaders should “never let a good crisis go to waste”.

Faced with the current pandemic-induced crisis, we all face choices, and we are all at risk of failing to grasp the opportunity to drive much-needed and often long-overdue change.

We can either hope to return to something that looks similar to the old normal, or we can use the “crisis” as a catalyst to rethink the way we go to market…

I recently recorded another conversation with Andy Paul, award winning author, speaker and the host of the Sales Enablement podcast. Inevitably, our discussion turned to the impact of the current pandemic on B2B buying behaviour and on how salespeople are having to adapt.

We concluded that any salesperson that hasn’t re-evaluated where their best current opportunities lie is likely to be struggling. This requires that salespeople have a clear idea of the issues they are best positioned to solve, the organisations that are likely to want to deal with them, the people responsible for driving the change agenda, and the triggers that cause them to recognise the need for urgent action.

Without a clear and compelling need for urgent action, customers are likely to defer purchase decisions. But what are the common characteristics of the projects that are being approved?

In today's challenging and uncertain business climate, your customers have good reason to be cautious. They are unlikely to initiate new projects unless they see them as being strategically relevant, tactically urgent, and capable of delivering rapid time-to-value. The rest can wait.

If your sales organisation are to break through the deadlock, they must develop compelling answers to their customer's three critical questions:

• Why should they change?
• Why should they choose you?
• Why should they act now?

If your answers to any of these questions are less than completely compelling, the chances are your customer will stick with the status quo. Generic value propositions are not going to be much help - your salespeople need to learn how to craft customer-specific outcome-centric value stories...

It’s become common for commentators to refer to the fast-evolving reality of B2B selling as the “new normal”, and I’ve often used this phrase myself. But in some interpretations, that seems to imply an acceptance that we’re going to have to learn to live with a situation that is somehow worse than what we had before whilst we strive to get back to the “old normal”.

I don’t believe this is either inevitable or appropriate. I believe we must instead use the events of the past few months as a stimulus to accelerate long-overdue changes in how we treat each other and how we behave as B2B sales professionals, and to eliminate the accumulated tolerance of wastage and inefficiency that has become characteristic of the sales profession.

We have an opportunity to emerge smarter and better for our recent experiences, and we need to grasp it.