Innovation Isn’t Hard, Breaking Old Habits Is
There were thousands of companies that went out of business when the shifts in consumer behavior and the Internet took over the way we purchase.
The speed at which we are able to consume whatever it is we buy continues to get closer and closer to real time. Convenience and speed are nearly the same thing today.
The B2B sales process must innovate to keep pace. Some of the sales methodologies over time:
- 1967 Sandler Selling System
- 1978 Miller-Heiman, Strategic Planning
- 1988 Solution Selling (SPI)
- 1988 SPIN Selling
- 1991 Value Selling (as Value Vision Associates)
- 1993 Customer-Centric Selling
- 2002 RAIN Selling
- 2005 Baseline Selling
- 2011 The Challenger Sale
MEDDIC was introduced in 1996.
Introducing the 4 Cs of Modern Sales Transformation
52% of sales leaders believe that their team need to improve their adaptability skills.
The 4 Cs of Innovative Selling:
- Commitment to technology and AI proficiency.
- Current go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
- Customized sales journey.
- Consistent performance optimization.
Each principle has three tactical pillars that anyone can focus on individually to master.
Commitment to Technology and AI Proficiency. A staggering 63 % of sales organizations are increasing their technology investments to stay competitive. However, 74% of sales professionals say they spend too much time on tasks, which detracts from their selling time. Three pillars:
- Engineering technology to match customer behavior changes.
- Ensuring technology and process are intertwined.
- Habits to stay at the forefront.
Current Go-to-Market Strategy. Three pillars:
- Marketing and lead generation alignment.
- Focus on outcomes and not on volume metrics only.
- Hyper-customized touchpoints in outbound.
Over 306 billion emails are sent every day. 57 % of sales reps expected to miss their quotas in 2023. The future of teams is tracking a lower volume of activities and a shift in focusing on results-based KPIs.
Customized Sales Journey. Principle three is focused on building a sales journey based on who customers want to buy. Three pillars:
- The customer journey is mapped and optimized for the ideal experience at each step.
- Options are included for customers to learn more without calls.
- Plans exist to move customers who are high intent to later stages quickly.
86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience. According to Salesforce, 84% of buyers are more likely to buy from a salesperson who understands their goals, but 57% say sales reps don’t know enough about their industry.
Consistent Performance Optimization. Many B2B sales teams optimize their outbound process every 6-12 months and their sales process every two to three years. We have to optimize consistently to align to rapidly changing buyer behavior. The three pillars are:
- Know what to measure and when.
- Have a mechanism for infusing improvements without disruption.
- Build ways to break the status quo.
The First C: Commitment to Technology and AI Proficiency: People, Process, and Technology
The salesperson and organizations who knows how to use tools and data will do exponentially better than the average high-performing salesperson and team who doesn’t.
Sellers today only spend 28% of their time selling.
Every revenue blocker boils down to a gap in the process and not a specific technology need. The reality is there can be only bottleneck by definition. Regardless, many organizations start tackling a variety of problems that never unclog the main issue to revenue growth. Getting that right is the key to success.
After solving the process identify the technology needed to solve the process challenge and cross-functional action team.
Implementation ends at power usage, not training.
Building a habit:
- 80 %: I spend 80 % of my time focused on activities that will affect my life and business in the next one to three months.
- 15 %: I spend 15 % of my time focused on activities that will affect my life in the next six months.
- 5 %: I spend 5 % of my time focused on activities that will affect my life in years to come.
The Second C: Current Outbound and GTM Strategy: Pillars 1 and 2
Social media wasn’t just for marketing teams; it needed to be integrated with sales.
Only 23.1 % of sales professionals said sales and marketing are strongly aligned.
To win the customer of tomorrow, you need to have integrated teams. You can use the following tactics to start the process:
- Align incentives and compensation.
- Be responsible for the entire customer lifecycle.
After you create an integrated marketing and sales plan, the next step is establishing the lead indicators for sales success that both sides can track and align on.
Succeeding in sales today relies on the quality of your touchpoints.
Instead of tracking raw activity as a leading indicator, focus on meaningful conversations as the first outcome. Manage people to outcomes first, then if they can’t get there, look at activity.
Successful outbound and prospecting teams realize that not everybody is ready to buy right now and that many people need to be nurtured.
The Second C: Current Outbound and GTM Strategy: Pillars 3
According to Aberdeen, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14 % and conversions by 10%.
The enemy of personalization has been a simple phrase: personalized approaches aren’t scalable. Personalization in B2B sales is about understanding individual business concerns of the prospects, their industry, and what their role goes through every day.
There are three main elements to creating a scalable process for B2B personalization: mindset, buyer personas, and technology.
Organizations that are successful today have a simple mindset: they are trying to get a meeting with one specific person and will do what it takes to get it.
Using buyer personas in an email campaign doubled open rates and improved click-through rates five times over.
If the team does not know whom they sell to, including the groups typically involved and all the elements of the persona, the team cannot make personalization at scale happen.
Snippets are smaller sections, usually two to four sentences, that can be added to any template per personas, industries, or other customization. Companies create snippets based on subindustries and the size of companies, with persona-based templates.
Buyer personas provide insights into potential customers’ preferences, needs, and concerns.
The Third C: Customized Sales Experience
To build customized sales experiences, you have to start by mapping the customer journey. This is the process for how your take various buyer personas withing your ideal customer base through the process based on their preferred ways to interact.
Currently, 65 % of the workforce consists of Millennials and Gen-Zers, who are digital-first buyers. They want to find information on their own, try product before buying, and validate marketing and sales claims with trusted customer proof.
Most B2B sales have a similar rhythm. That process includes the following stages:
- Discovery
- Initial evaluation
- Formal evaluation or pilot if applicable
- Onboarding
- Initial adoption
- Power usage and growth
- Renewal
A sales methodology that is only focused on the initial sales process is going to miss every time. The sales experience must meet each person where they are in the process and guide them along appropriately.
Engineering Your Sales Process for Speed
There is a significant amount of friction in the B2B buying process.
The “qualification” call is solely for the benefit of the selling company, but what happens when the buyer is three steps ahead and comes in close to the finish line?
Imagine having multiple paths of the customer journey based on intent.
Vetted Customers. They must have performed at least five of these actions in order to be considered vetted.
- Meet the competition or review their offerings.
- Have used the product in the previous company.
- Have researched your offer.
- Have an understanding of the pricing.
- Have a clear business outcome in mind.
- Have a clear timeline.
- Have already defined the evaluation process.
Educated Customers. They must have completed at least the three actions to be considered.
- Have researched your offer.
- Have a clear business outcome in mind.
- Have a clear timeline.
Cold Customers. The goal of interacting with them is to educate them before you meet them. Use digital as much as possible.
According to McKinsey study, companies that personalize their sales experience based on the customer’s journey see an average increase in sales of 10-15 %.
Product lead growth (PLG) has become major go-to-market strategy. In PLG motion, the goal is to have the product become sticky via its own utility and marketing, and then once it reaches a critical number of users, the company has sales reach out to key pockets to see about a roll-up in that group.
When you define the ideal customer profile and match the right journey to each persona with intent levels, you give your customers the best sales experience based on their desired journey.
Adapt your sales tactics based on customer entry points.
Mapping Your Sales Experience – the Early Stages
Innovative Seller Methodology. Without a process, you can’t provide an ideal sales experience because there will be wild variability from salesperson to salesperson.
- Stages of the sale: These are the big leaps in the customer journey.
- Steps in each stage: These are the actions that happen in each stage of the sale.
Many sales organizations are still set up to qualify people when many customers have already done their research. So they are qualifying buyers when these buyers are already signaling intent.
The discovery stage. Sales teams must determine how educated this potential customer is. Don’t just qualify but consult with a goal of understanding many factors including intent and education. Sometimes discovery should happen not on a call but on the buyer’s timeline. Some questions are: whom am I talking to, and how do they fit in the organization, what is their level of education of the problem, and what are their key challenges? Learn about the decision-making path and intent level. In the discovery stage find out about the level of knowledge, customer needs, and who else makes purchasing decisions.
The initial evaluation stage is where you and the customer agree that there might be potential alignment. The move from this stage to formal evaluation is where companies struggle, either because the sales process becomes too complex for their internal team to handle or the customer realizes the complexity of the solution and chooses to do nothing.
Customers don’t care about signed contracts like salespeople; they care about outcomes and solved problems.
In a true customer-centric approach, you must focus on the experience of all the stakeholders – their various intent level and unique concerns.
It is important to think about digital touchpoints. Only 17% of the buying process happens between the buyer and seller, so what are we doing during the other 83%.
Sellers are the linchpins in propelling the sales process and liaising with all parties involved.
Mapping Your Sales Experience – During the Late Stages
The biggest bear of B2B buyers is making the wrong decision.
The contract is a milestone in the process, but it’s not the end goal for the buyer.
During this stage, discussing the onboarding, initial usage, and power usage phases of the sales process are just as critical as price negotiations.
In today’s digital world, most buyers expect quick responses from businesses they want to work with.
For companies to be successful in the formal evaluation process they need to make sure their sales experience conveys the following:
- A clear business case that allows them to show value and impact in real terms.
- A clear plan for implementation.
- Their role in helping during each step of the process.
You should avoid proof of concept if there isn’t much room to grow past the initial sale. The product is not annual subscription based.
Signing the contract is not the end game for buyers – it’s the beginning.
In order to move to the onboarding phase, you need to focus on having two actions verified:
- Scheduling plan for subsequent training or onboarding with various stakeholders.
- Schedule for key reviews of the business value and return.
Mapping Your Sales Experience – to Current Customers
50 % of B2B customers change their priorities within 12 months of purchase.
Overpromising and poor handoffs to internal team members can prevent buyers from utilizing the full value of your purchase.
From the onboarding stage you should have established key utilization and usage metrics that signal a client is ready to manage part of the usage on their own.
Power users account for 25 % of all usage of a product or service, but they generate 75 % of the value.
The Renewal Process or Mastering the 120-Day Renewal Plan. This is the last step you will typically map to your sales experience.
- 120-day mark – you conduct the yearly review.
- 90-day mark – you recap the issues and create an outline for next year’s plan.
- 60-day mark – after working on budget from days 90 to 60, you should be ready to review final draft.
- 30-day mark – contract signature.
The Fourth C: Consistent Performance Optimization
Many B2B organization do not have a consistent process in place to optimize their sales experience from pipeline generation through the renewal process.
You should track inbound lead metrics and outbound opportunity metrics. Inbound is about time from lead to reaction, ratio of qualified and unqualified leads, landing page conversion rates. Outbound is about sequence steps performance, conversion rates of type of content, generation of opportunities.
There are three key areas for every organization to address to create this always-optimizing culture and mindset in their teams. Establish your review schedule. Establish the team. Develop a governance process for reps to try new experiments and innovations.
Small, regular improvements yield better long-term results than infrequent overhauls.
The Future of Sales: Generative AI and the Changing Role of Sales
Technology, AI, consumer preferences, and employment preferences are all rapidly changing. The 4Cs can help to serve as a guide that you can consult throughout your own journey and evolution as a seller, no matter what the market throws at you.
Every seller will have a Generative AI copilot. Using AI for general training, individual research, or company research will be standard practice.
There is no reason to send bulk spam when high-quality insights are so easy to find and apply to amazing messaging.
By 2025, 80 % of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur through digital channels.
Sales reps in the future will have to add value and create unique solutions for clients because buyers can find the basic fit on their own. Added value has to come in the form of expertise and creativity.
