The future of B2B selling will be relevant, digital, and recurring.
The future of B2B selling will be relevant, digital, and recurring. What do I mean by that?
- Relevant stands for selling based on knowledge of customers, the ability to match offered solutions with customer challenges and problems, and creating needed outcomes for customers’ success.
- Digital stands for the ability to use digital tools to improve the efficiency of the sales process on both levels: the level of a whole sales organization and the individual level of every salesperson.
- Recurring stands for the adjustment of sales practices to support the creation and maintenance of recurring revenue streams.
Selling technology solutions in the old way, talking about features and functionalities, spending long hours in building relationships, and ghosting your customer once the transaction is done, should be left to the past. And as we all know, the past is dead, we either move forward, or we will die with it.
Customer today
Building a modern sales organization requires you to understand that customer today:
- Has the ability to get the information he/she needs. 57 %[1] of purchasing process is already done, once the customer reaches out to the seller.
- Is looking for outcomes, not features and functionality.
- Has global not local solution searching horizons.
- Is not willing to take all the risk in the purchasing transaction. They don’t want to pay and hope that they bought the appropriate solution, instead, they want to start small, or even try before, and expand if they get the expected value.
- Are willing to give some time only to sellers, who understand them/their business. Why, because time is the new currency, and we are all broke.
- Have access to high-tech solutions as consumers and they are only choosing consumer solutions that are easy to get and use. So, they expect even better solutions and services in their roles inside B2B processes.
- They expect to invest capex money into building products and growth activities and not in providing support infrastructure for running day-to-day business.
The future of B2B selling and sales organization
The task of sales managers together with the rest of the management team is to get ready for this transformation. In order to do that, they should adjust sales processes, so that:
- The top of the sales funnel is covered with sales automation.
- F2F organization includes A-players with great customer knowledge and the ability to define and solve main customer problems.
- After-sales organization is transformed into a customer landing and a customer success focused operating unit.
The future of B2B selling and what sales manager can do
They can do that with:
- Using sales automation tools and defining clear engagement rules (not only for automation activities but also for defining ICP and targeted segments).
- Investing into digital readiness of sales force.
- Investing into industry knowledge and problem-solving abilities of at least F2F and customer success sales force.
- Working together with marketing teams to create proper digital materials, so that customers will engage with it in the first phases of the purchasing process (remember 57 % of it is done without you).
- Create consistent after-sales practices, with a focus on expanding value creation for the customers not on error-resolution activities.
- Build internally connected revenue generation activities, that will connect product/service development, with marketing and sales activities and after-sales customer support.
The future is already here, it is just spread unevenly. Make sure, you are on the right side of that spread.
[1] CEB research
