Why we chose to partner with Membrain
Inflexion-Point has just announced a partnership with Membrain to incorporate our Value Selling System® methodology into their groundbreaking sales effectiveness platform for complex B2B sales.
We’re delighted to build on what has been a long-standing relationship, and I thought it might be worth highlighting some of the key motivations behind this important initiative.
Any sales leader responsible for a team of B2B-focused sales people that are selling into a complex B2B buying environment is facing a set of challenges that simply don’t exist in more transactional sales situations. You may recognise some or all of the following issues...
- The fact that your sales people often need to create, uncover or reframe the customer’s problem before they can start to think about proposing your solution
- The ever-increasing number of stakeholders that have a significant role in the buying decision process (an average of just under 7, and still rising according to the CEB)
- The growing percentage of apparently well-qualified opportunities that end with the prospect deciding to stick with the status quo and “do nothing” (over 50% according to SBI)
- The large and growing performance gap between the handful of the best sales people who have mastered value selling and the rest (a nearly 3* gap according to the CEB)
THE PROBLEM WITH MOST CRM SYSTEMS
The problem with most CRM systems - and therefore with most CRM implementations - is that they simply weren’t designed to cope with these complexities. Here are a few simple examples that I hope will illustrate the point:
- The absurd and illogical idea that the probability of any deal closing is the same fixed percentage that is applied to every opportunity that has reached the same stage. This may even itself out in high-volume, simple sales environments - but it’s a recipe for disastrously inaccurate revenue projections in complex sales environments where the outcome of a few critical deals can dramatically swing the overall revenue number
- CRM implementations that expect sales people to capture a bunch of data points that no-body ever seems to subsequently review with them and which seem to them to be irrelevant at best (and a distraction at worst) to getting on with the task of selling
- CRM implementations that do nothing to guide new sales people in (or remind long-established sales people of) the critical things that evidence has shown they need to know and do to give themselves the best possible chance of winning
You are probably familiar with a number of related issues. And whenever enlightened sales leaders have attempted to address the challenges in the past, it has typically involved a long and often eye-wateringly expensive customisation of their CRM platform. So even if they recognise the problem, many sales leaders don’t think that a practical and affordable solution is available.
THE MEMBRAIN ADVANTAGE
Membrain’s CRM has been designed from the ground up to address these issues as a central design objective, rather than as a bolted-on afterthought. The platform probably represents over-featured overkill to organisations with a B2C or a simple transactional B2B sales model - but those organisations are already well served by an ever-growing choice of conventional CRM platforms.
We see Membrain's approach as a perfect fit for the organisations that represent the vast majority of our client base: well-funded, fast-growing, B2B-focused, tech-based businesses with a disruptive value proposition that are selling into complex B2B buying environments and need to engage, influence and persuade a number of significant buyer stakeholders.
The Membrain approach is designed to facilitate widespread and rapid adoption across a sales organisation, and we’re aiming to accelerate that process further by embedding the well-proven principles of successful complex B2B sales into our Value Selling System® powered by Membrain.
Our clients now face an equally attractive and effective choice: if they have no current CRM system, or are so dissatisfied with their existing CRM that they are ready to start afresh with a much more effective platform, they can choose to deploy the Value Selling System version of Membrain CRM.
INTEGRATED DIRECTLY INTO SALESFORCE
Or - if like many of our clients - they are committed to using salesforce.com but want to do a much better job of opportunity management, they can implement the Value Selling System powered by Membrain directly into their existing salesforce.com implementation. Either way, they will get all the benefits of a modern guided sales process that their sales people will actually want to adopt.
The potential benefits - in terms of shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, larger average deal values and getting more sales people on or above quota - can be truly transformative.
Take a look at the 2-minute video below to preview this powerful combination in action. And if you like what you see, why not get in touch to find out how this new partnership between Inflexion-Point and Membrain could help to transform your sales effectiveness?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and mature corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based growth-phase businesses, equipping and enabling them to systematically create and capture mutually meaningful value in every customer interaction.
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