Every established sales methodology attracts its own fan base. Some are fans of SPIN®, others Challenger®, Miller-Heiman, Sandler, Solution Selling® and so on – the list goes on for ages. I’m particularly but not exclusively attracted to "value selling" myself.

Some of these methodologies have even seen fit to act as if their approach makes all others redundant. You may remember the Challenger-inspired and mischievously-titled article in the Harvard Business Review that proclaimed the “The End of Solution Sales”. It was a headline that may have sold a few more copies of their book but otherwise hardly justified the hype.

But amidst all these claims and counter-claims, one approach seems to consistently outperform all the others across a wide range of sales environments…

It’s falsely comforting to think of selling as a process in which one step follows logically after another. But although rigidly defined processes might be the best way of running a manufacturing production line, they fail to reflect the reality of any moderately complicated sales environment.

It would be convenient if things were simpler. But the brutal truth of the matter is that in complex B2B sales our customer’s buying processes are rarely linear, compounded by the fact that they are sometimes poorly defined and even if they appear to be well defined are not always well understood by the customer themselves [by the way, you can click on the above image to see a larger version].

Rather following a hypothetically straight path, many customer decision journeys zig and zag, go backwards as well as forwards, find themselves way off-piste, struggle to achieve consensus, can be redirected at the behest of a single powerful individual and can be abandoned at any stage along the way...

Most sales organisations of any significant size suffer from a significant gap between their best and worst performers. If we exclude recent hires from the analysis, sales people typically fall into one of three clusters:

A minority of the sales organisation - rarely more than 20% - are habitual over-performers. A larger number - often 30% or more - are habitual under-performers, with many displaying little evidence that they have the aptitude to improve.

After excluding these outliers, the majority of sales people sit somewhere in the middle: there is some indication that they have the potential to do better, but they have so far failed to consistently and reliably over-perform against their targets.

The middle ground represents a huge opportunity for performance improvement - so what can sales leaders do to narrow this gap between the best and the rest?

When asked, most sales organisations will claim to have a sales process. But there's a huge difference between having a loosely defined process that sales people give lip service to and having a highly effective and widely adopted sales process that is really driving sales performance.

The difference between the best and the rest, according to researchers from the Harvard Business Review, translates into an average 18% advantage in revenue growth. Other studies (including our own experiences) suggest even more dramatic benefits.

So how can you tell whether your current sales process needs attention?

I was delighted to be recently offered the opportunity to contribute to KiteDesk’s Sales Expert Interview series. Eric Quanstrom came up with 10 excellent questions that really got to the heart of the challenges many sales organisations face in sales prospecting and pipeline management.

We covered a range of topics, including the most common reasons for inconsistent revenue performance, and most common reasons sales people give for not prospecting. I hope that you might find my responses interesting, so I’m republishing the entire interview here…

In the majority of sales organisations, a high percentage of sales revenue is generated by the same minority of top sales performers, quarter after quarter. According to research published by the CEB in “The Challenger Sale”, this performance gap between top sales people and the rest is amplified in complex, high value sales environments.

They found that in a transactional selling environment, the performance gap between average and star performers was 59 percent - but in complex sales environments the gap was almost 200 percent - more than three times as wide. It’s clear that even a modest narrowing of this gap could drive a dramatic improvement in revenue.

The natural response from many sales leaders who are faced with this situation is to resolve to hire smarter next time, or to invest in sales training - but neither strategy seems to have a particularly good track record. When it comes to recruitment, it seems that there simply aren’t enough natural high performers to go around...

In complex sales environments, the role of the successful salesperson isn’t just about prospecting, qualifying and closing. In fact, the most effective sales people are the ones who manage to successfully facilitate complex buying decision processes that involve multiple stakeholders.

And yet the sales pipeline stages in the majority of CRM implementations are still defined with reference to the completion of a linear sequence of sales activities such as “qualifying”, “demonstrating” and “proposing” that usually bear little relationship to the true state of the prospect’s often-complex buying journey, or the likelihood they will either do anything or choose your solution.

It’s no wonder that so many sales pipeline valuations are wildly optimistic, or that sales forecasts often remain stubbornly inaccurate, with “current quarter commit” deals that turn out to be nothing of the sort. If you recognise, or even suspect that you have a problem in these areas, it’s time to take action.

With the Rio Olympics drawing to a close and with some remarkable individual and team performances still fresh in our memories, this is perhaps an appropriate moment to reflect on what sales people and sales organisations can learn from the world’s top sportspeople.

There’s no doubt that the profession of selling could be improved by embracing ideas like the accumulation of marginal gains and a focus on “controlling the controllables” - both subjects I plan to return to in the coming weeks.

But I wanted to initiate this train of thought by drawing upon a concept that I learned from Sir Clive Woodward - coach of the England 2003 Rugby World Cup winning team and Director of Sport for the British Olympic Association in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympics…

It’s becoming increasingly common for organisations to issue formal RFPs as part of their buying decision process. In most public sector establishments and in many large commercial operations, external legislation or internal procedures require that a formalised RFP process be followed for all purchases above a certain value.

However, it’s rare that all vendors who are invited to participate have an equal chance of winning. A range of studies have show that organisations that receive an invitation to respond to an unexpected RFP have on average a low single digit % chance of winning.

A huge amount of effort is therefore wasted every year by vendors who are flattered to be invited, believe they have a good solution fit and therefore decide to bid even though by any rational analysis the odds are heavily stacked against them. If you’ve ever experienced this situation, I’d like to offer a consolidated checklist of the things you need to consider before deciding whether to bid…

It doesn’t matter which way any of us voted as individuals: the nation has spoken, and impact of the decision to Brexit will inevitably affect anyone who sells for a living in the UK - and any global organisation with a sales presence in the UK.

We’re entering uncertain times, and I suspect that there is going to be a huge difference between sales people and organisation that adapt their sales strategies and tactics to the new realities and the remainder (no pun intended) who carry on as before in the hope that buyer behaviours won’t have changed very much…