I was delighted to be asked to contribute to Membrain’s “The Art & Science of Complex Sales Podcast” with Paul Fuller, and our conversation about taking a Customer-Outcome-Centric approach to B2B sales has just been released.

I think you’ll enjoy the conversation, and hopefully find some things that are directly relevant to what you are trying to do in your own organisation. You can listen to the podcast here, but in the meantime, I want to share a few of highlights...

In my last article, I shared Gartner’s findings about the current war for talent. In this article - first published in the International Journal of Sales Transformation - I want to explore more of the implications.

Finding and recruiting the right salespeople is perhaps the most important role for any sales manager or leader. Hiring the wrong person - or at the other end of the scale, failing to fill the position at all - is costly in so many ways. The wasted recruitment costs are trivial in comparison to the revenues lost and all the other direct and indirect costs and consequences associated with failure.

The recruiting manager is often torn between the fear of missing out [FOMO] and the fear of messing up [FOMU]. Missing out means failing to fill the open headcount. Messing up means hiring someone who subsequently fails in their new role. Neither is a satisfactory outcome. In both cases, the manager is typically still responsible for the quota allocated to the role in the meantime.

To compound the problem, salespeople with proven potential are in short supply. There is a tremendous war for talent. Good salespeople are confident of their own value. They are highly selective when it comes to their choices of role and employer, and they have developed powerful bulls**t detectors. Headline on-target earnings matter less to them than their confidence about the income they will actually earn. Their potential employer’s reputation and culture matter to them, as does their working environment...

Are your prospects Satisfied with the Status Quo, Painting by Numbers, Pursuing a Vision, Busy Going Nowhere or Searching for Guidance?

I recently wrote about the phases B2B prospects tend to go through as their buying decision process evolves, and the need to align our sales and marketing tactics accordingly. Of course, our prospect’s journey is rarely linear: at any point they can choose to move forwards, revert to a previous phase, go around in circles, put the project on hold, or abandon the journey altogether.

But the phase our prospect has reached in their buying journey isn't the only thing we need to be aware of when it comes to understanding their likely buying behaviour: we also need to determine whether or not they have a clear goal in mind, and whether or not they have a clear process for deciding how to achieve that goal.

This isn’t as crazy as you might think: one of the primary reasons that so many buying journeys end in “no decision” is that the exercise either lacked a clear goal, or a clear buying decision process, or both. Or the ultimate decision makers in the customer might actually have been satisfied with the status quo all along…

As you reflect on 2017, and as your thoughts turn to what you seek to achieve for yourself and for your organisation in 2018, I hope that you might find some of our more popular articles helpful in shaping your thinking.

2017 has been a year in which the typical buying process for complex B2B sales has often become even more complicated, taken even longer and all-too-often resulted in a decision to stick with the status quo and do nothing.

It's been a year in which the gap between the top sales performers and the rest has often continued to widen, and in which it has taken even longer for the average new sales hire to become fully productive.

But it's also been a year in which new lessons have been learned and new skills mastered, and in which the best sales organisations have continued to make impressive progress...

With over a million copies sold, Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” guide to marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers is still one of the must-read books for B2B-focused sales and marketing leaders.

One of Inc. magazine’s Top 10 Marketing Books of All Time, its core principles are still enduringly relevant, more than 20 years after its first publication. Now in its third edition, it has of course been regularly revised to reflect the realities of modern high-tech marketing.

For me, the core of the book has always been its simple but effective framework for establishing a compelling and clearly differentiated value proposition, and I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in reinterpreting Moore’s format for a contemporary audience…

If you’re involved in complex, lengthy and high-value B2B sales environments, you can’t afford to regard opportunity qualification as a one-off exercise. You need to think of it as an ongoing process, in which you continually accumulate new learning as well as regularly revalidating any previous assumptions.

The level of resource that you have to invest in winning any significant sales opportunity requires that you make thoughtful decisions about which deals are worth pursuing and which ones should be firmly qualified out.

Top sales performers – in my experience, at least – have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing opportunities they have little chance of winning. They tend to be ruthless in their initial qualification, and they are typically very aware of changes in circumstances that could turn a previously attractive opportunity into something that is no longer a valuable use of resources.

So how can we equip every sales person to embrace the same rigorous approach?

When you crunch the numbers, the most common outcome of even apparently well-qualified complex sales opportunities is a loss - not to an alternative solution, but to the status quo.

“Do nothing” is today’s most powerful competitor. It’s become the most common outcome because organisations often struggle to build a consensus for change and because the easiest and safest option appears to be to carry on as before.

But the real reason is often because nobody - internal champions and sales people alike - managed to create enough contrast between where the customer is today and where they need to be in the future.

It’s blindingly obvious, when we think about it - contrast drives change…

Almost every traditional book on sales methodologies has a section on overcoming objections. The techniques proposed often seem to be manipulative and self-serving. They often come across like an attempt to outwit the customer.

The problem lies in our choice of words. When someone “objects” to something, they are expressing disagreement, disapproval, refusal or opposition. The language is inherently confrontational. We’re applying the wrong mental model when we label our customers’ legitimate questions as objections - and we’re making it harder to deal with them.

Because, most of the time, our customer’s “objection” isn’t actually a statement of disagreement, disapproval, refusal or opposition - it’s simply an expression of an unresolved concern…

There’s abundant evidence to show that when sales people rush the all-important discovery stage of a complex B2B sale they store up a bunch of problems for the latter stages of the sales cycle - and often find that that the deal ends up stalling or (to continue the motoring metaphor) that they spin off the road long before reaching the finish line of a successful sale.

It's clear that the old adage “more haste, less speed” applies just as strongly to selling as it does to many other aspects of our lives. When we look at what experienced, effective sales people do differently to their less productive peers, we see that they tend to move more deliberately and slowly during the early stages of the sale, and invest more time in deeply understanding the dynamics of the deal.

This has been borne out by a series of analytic assessments of sales performance: all other things being equal, a deliberate and thoughtful approach to discovery allows effective sales people to identify and eliminate poorly qualified opportunities early in the process, and to create the foundation for swifter progress through the remaining stages of well-qualified deals.