Reaching, engaging, influencing and demonstrating clear business value to today’s modern B2B buyer is more challenging and complex than ever before. And the challenge becomes tougher if your company, product or service is not perceived as a “must have” to solve the business problems that executives grapple with daily. Perhaps that accounts for the focus on tightening sales and marketing alignment and the rise of sales enablement in the last few years.
With 50% of sales teams continuing to miss quota, there is a disconnect between what buyers want and how most companies sell.
This statistic is alarming on its own, but the big question is why has it been a pervasive problem every year for almost a decade? In a word – denial. We have CEO’s and sales leaders who deny that times have changed. They deny that following a sales process that focuses on the “right” activities matter. They deny that buyers can buy from anyone anywhere in the world, and that buyers are savvy enough to see through the cheap tricks and attempts to manipulate them. They deny that sellers – if taught how to do it right – can reach buyers in new ways and on new turf through digital and social channels. And they deny that the better product doesn’t always win the sale. As Richard Tedlow writes in his book Denial, “denial may be the biggest and potentially most ruinous problem that businesses face, from start-ups to mature, powerful corporations.”
Companies of all sizes must consistently execute marketing campaigns that build brand awareness at local, regional, national and global levels. At the same time, they need to articulate the unique value of their products to drive measurable results for the customers who buy them.
On the sales side, sellers need to be consultative in their approach, have excellent communication and problem solving skills, as well as the organizational agility and navigational skills of Magellan to win over multiple people in different roles, business divisions and geographies who often have competing interests or expectations when a purchase is being considered. Gone are the days when one primary decision maker was all any salesperson really had to worry about.
Competition is tough and the better mousetrap does not always win!
Any leader or salesperson worth their salt must wake up every day believing their company and product is better than anything else on the market. That fervent belief helps to reduce the sting of the inevitable disappointment when things go wrong. That belief also sparks our passion and motivation to do what we do every day. But when that belief clouds a leader’s ability to consider how times have changed and how their solution is perceived from the “buyer’s point of view”, that blind spot becomes a barrier to smart decisions about everything from messaging to sales process to activity to pricing to product delivery and support.
The people making the buying decision consider multiple factors, and as many a salesperson can tell you – that includes me – buyers don’t always buy the “better product”. When buyers are making decisions they consider things like do I trust this company and the people, does the product solve our business problem, is it priced right, is the buying process easy or difficult to navigate, what is the after purchase support like, can we integrate the solution easily with what we have now, what additional training is required for us to realize the benefits quickly, how will we measure results, and more.
When revenue doesn’t measure up stop denying that process and activity weren’t part of the problem.
Revenue results that missed the mark don’t answer the question – what went wrong? That’s because the revenue results today simply identify a painful problem created by past behavior. To figure out why revenue is going south, you must look at people, process and activity.
People – today’s successful sellers have a vastly different selling profile than was required in the past. As colleague Dave Kurlan puts it… do they have the right Sales DNA to succeed? Order takers and demo dollies are out. Consultative problem solvers are in.
Process and activity – if your marketing is working, you’ve got the right salespeople in place, and a product that solves problems buyers will pay to solve, the next thing you must dig into are the sales process and activities leading to where you are now. Today’s revenue results correlate to what did or did not happen in the months leading up to your present reality. No sales process or one that is inconsistently acted on is pervasive in many sales organizations, and it is an even bigger problem in smaller companies where CEO’s believe that being small means a process isn’t needed. Couple that flawed thinking with the common but misguided sales leadership belief that any activity must be the right activity to drive sales results, and the hole being dug gets deeper.
Are you learning, adapting and leading or simply getting in the way?
HOW sales teams sell is ultimately more important than WHAT they sell, and if you lead a team how you lead matters too! Are you encouraging a culture of daily learning that starts with you? Are you making the required investments in training and coaching your sellers to succeed in a world that is no longer the same, or are you simply denying that you need too?