The Inflexion-Point Blog: VALUE SELLING STRATEGIES

For three years in a row, the highly influential benchmark and advisory firm Sirius Decisions has reported that the number one revenue inhibitor in complex B2B sales environments remains the average sales person’s inability to communicate value.

You’d hope that we would have made more progress in solving this. I believe one of the reasons that we haven’t is that most of the effort has been spent focusing on the value of our solutions and not on the cost to the prospect of not dealing with the problem.

One of the most common sources of friction between poorly aligned sales and marketing organisations is sales’ perception that the quality of leads generated by marketing is poor - and marketing’s frustration at sales inability or refusal to follow up on the “leads” they have generated.

It’s a stand-off that must be resolved, and one of the best ways of doing it is through the adoption of a lead scoring system that clearly defines - to the satisfaction of both parties - what a “good” lead looks like, and what sales commits to do with it.

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.

But the latest research from CSO insights suggest that 3 out of 4 companies are taking the wrong approach to sales coaching - an approach that is clearly holding back both individual rep performance and overall revenue achievement.

Three approaches to coaching

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”.

Well, you’ve got to wonder: if the majority of sales managers can’t perform that basic task "highly effectively", what value are they adding to the process? And what’s stopping them from supporting their sales people more effectively? To put the statistic into context, in “world class” sales organisations, the figure is not 34%, but 93%.

Stop behaving like a "forecast accountant"

What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

According to some of the latest reports from Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights and other leading B2B research organisations, the best-in-class sales and marketing organisations are as much as 5 times more effective than the average in converting inquiries into sales - as well as maintaining significantly faster average annual revenue growth.

CSO Insights have just published their 2012 Sales Management Optimisation study.  As always, the conclusions from their latest research make compelling reading - and provide B2B sales leaders with much to think about.

CSO Insights have just released their eagerly-awaited annual review of the state of sales performance - reflecting detailed inputs from over 1,500 sales organisations from around the world. Their latest report suggests that B2B sales leaders could and should do more to equip their sales people to succeed through more relevant and effective training.

According to a recent Aberdeen Group report, “alignment of marketing and sales goals is a key strategy for many organisations seeking revenue and customer growth amid economic and market challenges”. Poorly aligned organisations are quickly falling behind their best-in-class competitors in the critical areas of revenue growth, sales productivity and return on marketing investment. But how can you tell if your organisation has an alignment problem?