This article was first published in the July 2023 edition of Top Sales Magazine (link below).

Salespeople have traditionally been advised to “sell to the decision-maker(s)”, and while this may seem like common sense, the way in which B2B decision-making has evolved makes this advice more complicated (and more nuanced) than it might at first appear.

Whilst identifying and engaging a single final decision-maker may be relatively easy in some (not all) simple, low-value transactional sales, most high-value significant purchases involve multiple stakeholders, all of whom have an influence in the decision process - and the latest research suggests that this number is growing.

When the ground-breaking “Challenger Customer” was first published in 2015, it reported that the average size of the stakeholder group was 5.4. Subsequent research by Gartner and others has progressively increased this average number to 10 or more. Some particularly complex situations involve even more stakeholders.

Why is this? Why is it no longer enough to base our sales strategies on “selling to the C-level”? That particular strategy may have sold a lot of books by authors who published creative variations on that particular theme, but I was never persuaded that it was ever a universally effective approach, and I’m absolutely convinced of that now.

This article was first published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Sales Transformation under the title “Complexity will save salespeople”.

We’re entering a “brave new world of sales”, fuelled by the convergence of evolving B2B buying behaviours and the availability of AI-based new technologies. Is change the only constant, or do some of the traditional attributes of a successful salesperson remain important?

I think it’s clear that many relatively simple pre- and post-sales transactions are already being automated, with varying degrees of success and customer acceptance, and we have to assume that this trend will continue to accelerate, and that the role of the traditional transactional salesperson will continue to decline.

But it also seems clear that the situation will be different when it comes to complex B2B buying journeys - particularly when the prospect’s decision to purchase anything at all is discretionary rather than inevitable, and where their particular buying journey involves entering new territory and is therefore unfamiliar rather than something the prospect has successfully mastered dozens of times before...

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...

What role should sales leadership play in their organisation’s deployment of CRM?

A CRM application lies at the centre of the technology stack of most sales organisations. It often represents one of the most significant investments made to support sales effectiveness. And yet both organisations and users often express frustration with both the user experience and the quality of the information and insights that are generated.

Clearly, some CRM platforms are better for a particular purpose than others. Clearly, some are (a lot) more cost effective than others, Obviously, some implementations are far more successful than others. But when you really dig in, many of the issues with CRM are not related to which technology has been chosen, but to the role sales leadership plays in creating the right environment.

To put it bluntly, no CRM implementation can come anywhere near reaching its potential unless the sales leadership of the organisation is actively and visibly committed to its success. And that process starts with establishing the right framework and setting the right expectations in the first place...

The following article was first published in the March 2023 edition of the always-excellent Top Sales Magazine - there's a subscription link at the bottom of this article.:

A key theme of this edition of Top Sales Magazine is selling on value rather than price. You might think that having a “unique value proposition” is a key element of achieving this. And in some B2C and transactional B2B environments this might be true. But when it comes to winning business in complex B2B sales environments, the idea of a generic “unique value proposition” is an oxymoron.

The problem - of course - is that every complex B2B customer environment is unique and whilst spouting the same cookie-cutter slogan to every potential prospect might (if you’re lucky) get a sales conversation started, it won’t help us to close the sale.

You see, for a value proposition to really resonate, it must align with each prospect’s specific needs, priorities, and motivations - and it needs to address the 4 questions every B2B prospect expects answers to when they are thinking about embarking on a change programme that involves significant investment or disruption...

There’s been a great deal of research into the dynamics of salesperson-customer interaction over the years, and the results are typically pretty depressing. Studies regularly show that prospective customers regard only a small minority of the conversations they have with salespeople as being a valuable use of their time.

It’s not much better from the salesperson’s side: most of the interactions they have with potential customers result - at best - in an agreement to continue the dialogue, with the customer declining to extend the conversation being the most common outcome. Only a small minority of conversations actually result in an advance in which both parties commit to moving forwards in a tangible way.

By the way, I’m not talking about cold calls here, but about potentially meaningful interactions in which the customer has already expressed interest in having a conversation.

The outcome gap between the best and worst sales performers is particularly stark: top performers tend to either advance the sale or disqualify the opportunity as a result of their conversations, whereas weak performers tend to either stumble along with a vague agreement to continue the process at best or (more likely) being disqualified by the prospective customer at worst.

Some of this disparity can clearly be attributed to talent or skill. But I’m happy to agree with Neil Rackham (of SPIN® Selling fame) when he concluded that the biggest single difference between the best and worst sales performers was their commitment to invest in preparation and planning.

I’ve had the good fortune to learn from some top sales performers, and I’ve identified five key things that they consistently do better than their weaker colleagues...

Every competent salesperson recognizes the importance of accurately qualifying every sales opportunity.

But I want to suggest two other things that we also always need to know about every sales opportunity - and they relate to the nature of our prospective customer’s buying journey.

These two factors are:

• Do they consider this to be an inevitable or a discretionary purchase, and
• Are they embarked on a familiar or unfamiliar buying process?

These two factors have very significant implications for our customer’s buying decision journey, for our sales strategy and process, and for our chances of winning their business - and I’m going to spend the rest of this article exploring the ramifications of these factors.

This post is longer than usual and was originally published on LinkedIn. I’ll also be covering the material in my webinar with the Institute of Sales Professionals on the 7^th February - you can sign up here...

Gartner’s latest guidance for Chief Sales Officers [Leadership Vision 2023: 3 strategic actions for success] contains a conclusion that I believe every sales leader will recognize: retaining and building a high-performing sales team is harder than ever.

The challenging economic climate and the increasing expectations of B2B buyers means that mediocre salespeople who lack the necessary attitudes, behaviors and competencies will struggle even more than they might previously have done to win business.

Gartner’s research shows that hiring is taking longer, retaining talent is becoming harder, and new hires are more expensive. They have found that achieving a 10% sales headcount growth often requires 37% new-to-role sellers. In this challenging climate, I believe that great sales organizations will become stronger and weak sales organizations will become weaker, and the gap between these two groups will widen.

No sales leader or CEO wants to be trapped on the weaker side of this growing divide...

As Matt Dixon (of Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer fame) points out in his latest book “The Jolt Effect”, B2B salespeople have been preconditioned by most of the established sales methodologies to focus on cultivating their customer’s fear of missing out (FOMO).

The fear of missing out is, of course, particularly significant in discretionary purchases where the prospective customer doesn’t have to buy and believes they could potentially get along just fine by continuing on their current path and doing nothing.

When it comes to discretionary purchases, it is well established that the salesperson has to manage two sales in parallel: the first “sell” involves persuading the customer that they need to change rather than stick with the status quo and the second “sell” involves convincing the customer that the vendor’s approach represents the prospective customer’s best available option.