Graham Hawkins, Mark Micallef: Deep Selling

HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED

Of the eight billion people on the planet, 5.35 billion use the internet and there are more than 15 billion connected devices globally.

THE DIGITALISATION ARMS RACE

As of 2019, buyers already completed 87 percent of their purchasing journey before contacting a vendor salesperson.

The pre-digital technology era: before 1980 The pre-digital technology era was one where a salesperson would try to influence a buyer to purchase during sales encounters.

Throughout this era, buying approaches were situational and recognized that different buying situations carried different levels of risk.

The persuasive approaches of vendor salespeople often clashed with the situational, risk‐avoiding approaches of buyers, which resulted in an adversarial relationship between buyers and sellers.

The information technology era: 1980– 1995 After 1980, digital technology started to play a more significant role in selling and buying practice as personal computers and other information technologies were heavily adopted by both selling and buying organizations.

Selling and buying transitioned from transactional processes with adversarial buyer‐seller relationships to a more cooperative process whereby sales and buying centers worked together to solve problems for mutual benefit.

Access to the internet enabled buyers to search for information independently and revolutionized the relationship between buyers and vendor salespeople, as buyers no longer had to rely on salespeople for information.

The digital era: 2010– 2020 After 2010, more advanced digital technologies were adopted into B2B sales and buying practice, including next‐generation digital technologies like AI and advanced analytical, cloud and embedded technologies.

Digital technologies enabled sales and buying tasks to be performed without human involvement, with buyers simultaneously using multiple channels and completing multiple stages of the process at once.

The generative AI era: post 2020 After 2020, two major transformational events accelerated the digitalization of selling and buying approaches, namely the COVID‐19 pandemic and the introduction of generative AI technology.

First‐generation AI was based on machine learning technology that automated simple and repetitive tasks, and it was thought that these technologies would only replace humans for operational or transactional activities. The current generation of AI, however, is based on generative technologies, meaning they can generate new content based on training data. This technology can be easily adopted into selling and buying practice and can be used for far more complex tasks than the previous generation.

Even in cases where technologies are implemented for the right reasons or in the right way, many organizations are not aware of the organizational tension knots that arise from these transformations.

These tensions include:

Autonomy tensions: technology use can lead to higher autonomy but can also have the negative consequence of increased availability.
Innovation tensions: these arise when changing from existing to new ways of doing things.
Information tensions: these relate to situations where technology increases the amount of information available but reduces information quality and security.
Interaction tensions: these occur when technology changes the way individuals and teams interact within an organization and externally.
Resource tensions: these relate to situations where technology reduces costs or makes better use of human resources but can also result in negative consequences such as increased costs of implementation and management.
Control tensions: these are the tensions between improved transparency and increased surveillance.

RISE OF THE ROBOTS

According to research by McKinsey, AI automation technologies can be applied to nearly 40 per cent of an organization’s sales processes. With advancements in natural language processing, that could increase to more than 50 per cent.

First, AI can process, analyze and draw insights from large amounts of data. In sales, this means AI could identify prospects, communicate with them at the right time via the right channel, analyze prospect data, calculate the likelihood of closing a deal and recommend the best next steps in the sales process.

Second, AI can free your team from repetitive and administrative tasks such as data entry, data processing, planning, forecasting, analytics and research.

Third, generative AI can help vendor businesses, sales teams and sales individuals develop a deeper understanding of their buyers and their needs.

According to Gartner Research available at the time of writing, by 2025, AI avatars will support 70 per cent of digital and marketing communications, with 30 per cent of marketing content being created by generative AI.

AI infrastructure will continue to grow, with Nvidia’s high‐end chips consuming 13 797 GWh in 2024 (this is the same amount of energy as a small nation) and 80 per cent of data center power expected to be consumed by AI over the next 15 years.

Becoming a Deep‐Selling organization starts with the shift towards buyer centricity, and buyer centricity starts with understanding today’s buyers.

Welcome to the Age of the Buyer

Every sales professional is familiar with the buyer journey, which comprises the three broad stages of awareness, consideration and purchase. At the awareness stage, buyers become aware that they have a problem that needs solving.

Once they reach the consideration stage, they have narrowed their search to just a few solutions, or vendors, that they believe will be able to address their problem.

At the purchase stage, the buyer has decided to move forward with a particular solution.

The sales cycle has always run in parallel with the buying journey, and switched‐on salespeople understand and leverage this connection to ensure success.

Today, the buyer journey has changed significantly, and digitalization is one of the major culprits behind this change.

Digitalization has resulted in more decentralized and multi‐channel approaches, with the average B2B buyer using more than nine channels on their buying journey, including older channels like email and phone calls as well as newer ones like mobile apps and web chats.

Buyers still move through the three stages of awareness, consideration and purchase, but they no longer need the assistance of a vendor to enter the funnel or move through the stages.

Today’s buyers are highly educated and have access to huge amounts of information.

At the purchase stage, nearly 75 per cent of today’s buyers feel that buying from a website is more convenient than buying from a salesperson. Fifty‐nine per cent of buyers prefer not to interact with salespeople, and 93 per cent prefer to buy online when they have decided what to buy. As a result, the average buyer now completes up to 87 per cent of their buying process before even approaching a salesperson.

Buyers are doing huge amounts of research before they engage with vendor salespeople. Consequently, vendor salespeople no longer influence the buying journey as they once did. When a buyer does engage a vendor salesperson, their expectations are higher than ever before.

When it comes to product performance, 78 per cent of business buyers now expect to receive performance guarantees during the sales process.

When there are performance issues, 73 per cent of buyers want products that can self‐diagnose issues and automatically order parts.

Buyers’ expectations of value have increased. They don’t just want a product that works, they want one that will deliver value to their organization.

Further up the hierarchy, buyers will also be considering the individual value of choosing different solutions.

Finally, at the top of the values pyramid are those factors relating to purpose: the buyer’s overarching vision, hope and social responsibility.

Seventy‐two per cent of business buyers say they expect real‐time/always‐on customer service.

Self‐service is the norm, with many Millennials and Gen Zs saying that a phone call isn’t the best way to solve their problems.

Modern buyers also expect an omnichannel experience.

The final area where buyers have high expectations relates to the ongoing relationship they have with their vendors.

According to Bain and Company, while 80 per cent of vendors believe they deliver superior customer service, only 8 per cent of buyers believe they experience superior customer service.

In 56 per cent of deals, buyers want to move away from the status quo, but they are unable or unwilling to commit to a new approach.

More than 94 per cent of buyers have taken part in a buying process that ended in no decision, and when a decision is made, it takes twice as long as expected.

Why is this happening in an environment where buyers seem to hold all the cards?

First, there is the buyer struggle with information overload.
The second reason why deals are ending in ‘no decision’ outcomes is due to decreased risk tolerance in buying organizations.
The third factor contributing to this confidence crisis among your buyers is the rise in consensus buying. The issue today is that a single decision maker rarely exists.
The final factor brings us back to risk tolerance, but this is on the individual level rather than the organizational level. This is FOMU: the fear of messing up. Omission bias is the phenomenon where people prefer inaction (omission) over action (commission).

THE FALLING EFFECTIVENESS OF SALES TEAMS

Sales teams are facing the most challenging sales and buying landscape in history.

Less than one‐quarter chose vendor salespeople as a top‐three resource for solving business problems. More than half of buyers saw little difference between vendors, and 10.4 per cent saw no difference between them at all.

Buyers see salespeople as product representatives rather than advisers who can help solve business problems.

Seventy‐eight per cent of salespeople are underperforming.

Today’s buyers are actively looking for ways to avoid having any kind of personal relationship with salespeople.

Personal relationships in business are never as strong as we like to think they are. They are often built on very thin foundations that are misleading to salespeople, because it’s in the buyer’s best interest to coerce naïve salespeople into thinking that your relationship is important. As long as the buyer keeps receiving high value for a declining cost, the relationship continues. As soon as prices go up or value goes down, the relationship is over.

A modern buyer is not going to stay with a vendor just because they like them.

Where a traditional field salesperson’s role used to revolve around prospecting, building relationships with buyers in their territory and closing deals, today’s salespeople are expected to do far more than close sales.

There is an increasing demand for new skills among sales professionals, with 80 per cent of sales leaders ranking analytical and quantitative skills among the top capabilities for individual team members, and 85 per cent agreeing about the importance of solution selling as a core sales capability, requiring strong product knowledge and solution design as well as account‐planning skills.

The impact of long acquisition times and ongoing revenue models means that it is very easy for acquisition costs to blow out, especially when considering the high cost of traditional field sales forces.

We have entered a time when the relative cost of salespeople is higher than ever before.

The time required to bring a new hire to full productivity is longer than ever, with 65.2 per cent of businesses saying it takes at least seven months to bring new hires up to speed, and 28.8 per cent of businesses saying it takes at least one year.

Meanwhile, average tenure has dropped to 1.4 years (or 16.8 months).

Add this to the growing length of sales cycles, ranging from six to twelve months in B2B technology sectors, and the fully trained salesperson only has time for a single sales cycle before they are off to their next job.

Vendor organizations have reached a crisis point where traditional sales is both more expensive and less effective than ever before.

Sadly, so much of the modern sales role runs in a fog of automatic and habitual behavior due to outdated leadership that has failed to recognize the new, buyer‐led era.

The successful sales teams of the future will be digitally driven, socially connected, subject‐matter experts with deep domain knowledge that can offer their buyers unique perspectives and commercial insights.

THE AGE OF DEEP SELLING

Deep Selling is foremost about buyer centricity, buyer success and buyer experience.

Buyers can now diagnose their own problems and prescribe an online purchase to solve those problems, meaning they no longer need salespeople the way that they once did.

Simply, the needs and wants of the modern buyer have changed.

This leaves vendor organizations needing to fight commoditization, declining prices and margins. To achieve this, 65 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity has switched from production to services as the main revenue source as vendors attempt to shift from being product centric to buyer centric, offering buyers solutions instead of simply manufacturing products.

Deep Selling is a new sales approach where vendor organizations leverage data‐driven insights to sell more value to their buyers. Deep Selling involves the strategic use of technology to uncover data and derive actionable insights about your buyers, which can be used to drive buyer‐centric sales behaviors and success measures.

Research tells us that only 3 per cent of buyers are in a buying window at any point in time.

Deep‐Selling experts waste less effort on buyers who don’t want to purchase, and more time developing deep and mutually beneficial relationships with buyers who need their solutions.

Product‐centric organizations are focused on capturing value from their buyers and measure success based on internal outcomes such as growth in new products, profitability per product and market share.

Deep‐Selling organizations prioritize buyer value creation and improving buyer success. These organizations are relationship oriented, centering on serving their buyers over the long term.

Fewer than 9 per cent of organizations are buyer centric.

When it comes to buyer perceptions, even though 75 per cent of organizations believe themselves to be buyer centric, only 30 per cent of buyers agree.

Deep‐Selling excellence requires an organization‐wide commitment to delivering buyer‐based outcomes through the mastery of four key elements.

The first is people, spanning an organization’s team, structure and culture. In order to become a Deep‐Selling organization, a vendor’s culture must be held together by the central value that every decision begins and ends with your buyer.

The second element is technology. Successful Deep‐Selling organizations have a deeply developed and integrated tech stack.

The third element is your organization’s success metrics. The right metrics drive the right behaviors, as reconfiguring the organization’s definition of success means the team is rewarded for truly buyer‐centric behaviors.

The final element is strategy. Deep‐selling organizations require deeply developed sales processes, measures and methodologies that support buyer success and value creation.

To measure your organization’s current status and your progress towards Deep‐Selling excellence, we use a four‐stage maturity model.

Organizations in stage 1 of the maturity model are what we would consider to be Shallow organizations. These organizations have a product‐centric culture and no defined buyer success strategy.
At stage 2, organizations are Emerging. Emerging organizations have developed a vision for a buyer‐centric culture, have audited their processes and supporting technologies, and have developed a roadmap for change.
Stage 3 organizations are Exploring the world of Deep Selling. At this stage, a Deep sales strategy has been developed, approved and is supported by the organization, from frontline employees to senior leadership.
The final stage of the maturity model is when organizations become Deep‐Selling organizations. In stage 4, organizations have a strong, buyer‐centric culture, strategy and process.

THE ROADMAP TO DEEP‐SELLING EXCELLENCE

SHALLOW TO EMERGING

To start building your organization’s Deep‐Selling strategy, the first step is to take stock of where you are now. This doesn’t just mean having awareness of industry‐wide changes, but also the challenges confronting your organization, your position as a sales leader and the performance of your sales team.

Three exercises: The buyer‐centricity audit, The digital‐readiness audit, The tech‐stack audit. After completing each audit, you will have a numerical score for each of the elements of Deep Selling, which you can then use to plot your position in the Deep‐Selling maturity model.

Buyer‐centric organizations have buyer‐centric cultures, people, strategies and metrics.

People:

People Vision. To what extent does the organization have a defined buyer vision, with everyone in sync and working towards its achievement?
Culture. To what extent does the organization enthusiastically pursue superior quality buyer relationships and emphasize buyer and market issues?
Structure. To what extent does the organization’s structure enable it to focus on and commit resources to prioritizing buyer outcomes?
Skills. To what extent does the organization have the required level of skills, experience and willingness of employees to create superior buyer value?
Leadership. What is the extent of leadership commitment to buyer value creation and buyer success?

Strategies:

Strategy Processes. To what extent do business processes support and adapt to provide quality and efficient buyer interactions?
Governance. To what extent does the organization adopt clear standards and regulations regarding everyone’s role and responsibilities for supporting buyer success?
Innovation. To what extent does the organization have defined innovation processes, use agile innovation methods and have a willingness to change?
Products and services. To what extent does the organization develop and deploy smart, connected or digitalized product and service offerings?
Business model. To what extent has the business model been digitalized, and what is the level of its use of digital technologies to create or capture value?

Buyer centricity:

Buyer‐focus of metrics. To what extent does the vendor organization focus on and reward its salesforce for external buyer outcomes (rather than sales or internal financial outcomes)?
Buyer prioritization. To what extent are buyer outcomes prioritized over sales or internal financial outcomes?
Visibility of metrics. To what extent are buyer outcomes represented on a performance scorecard visible to the entire organization?
Transparency of metrics. To what extent would the organization be comfortable discussing or showing its metrics to its buyers?
Buyer insight. To what extent does the firm engage its buyers in developing and contributing to its metrics?

While buyer centricity is essential for Deep‐Selling success, in this data‐driven, technology‐led era, simply being buyer centric isn’t enough. Going Deep requires the use of technology and data to deliver the best possible buyer experience. This is required for vendor organizations and sales individuals to position themselves as trusted advisers; to meet buyer expectations of a personalized, omnichannel buyer journey; to co‐create value with their buyers; and to accurately measure the value their buyers are receiving as a result of their relationship.

Different organizations have different levels of digital readiness stemming from their current levels of digital maturity.

Digital readiness.
Digital readiness/ maturity.
Digital strategy. Does the organization have a digital roadmap linked to the achievement of long‐term business objectives?
Digital culture. To what extent do behaviors and attributes support and enhance digitalization efforts (e.g. risk‐taking, no‐blame culture)?
Technology (tools). To what extent does the organization have available and effective digital tools and support for the sales team?
Operations and processes. To what extent are the organization’s processes supported by technology?
Digital ecosystem. To what extent are the digital systems and processes integrated (vertically and horizontally), enabling everyone to work within the same digital ecosystem?

Where digital readiness and maturity look at how technology is implemented across your organization, including your organization’s ability to continue to evolve, the tech‐stack audit looks at what technology is implemented across your organization.

Digital tools are the key to sales productivity, funnel efficiency, effective market research and targeting, lead nurturing, and sales conversions.

To help you assess your organization’s current tech stack, we have mapped out the typical technologies that can assist with each of the following stages: buyer understanding awareness consideration purchase buyer success sales enablement.

Simply combine your scores from the previous three exercises to get your total score: people: score of 5– 25 from the buyer‐centricity audit strategy: score of 5– 25 from the buyer‐centricity audit metrics: score of 5– 25 from the buyer‐centricity audit technology: this combines your digital readiness score of 5– 25, and your tech stack score from 6– 24.

EMERGING TO EXPLORING

Buyer obsession is the key to Deep Selling: placing your buyer at the core of your business strategy, including aligning your organizational structure, execution models, culture and metrics to the goal of delivering value to your buyers, and leveraging technology to optimize the experience.

While many vendor organizations strive to become valued business partners of their buyers, in reality, most buyers will categorize vendors based on the strategic importance of our solutions to their businesses.

Simply, the importance of each vendor is dictated by how strategic the vendor is to the operation of the buying organization, and how easy it is to acquire the vendor’s solutions from other suppliers.

The vendor positioning matrix:

The matrix categorizes items into four groups — strategic, leverage, bottleneck and non‐critical items — indication of where you sit on the scale of strategic importance. This will provide you with a starting point for analyzing your ideal sales model,

Proper segmentation and prioritization of buyers is an important determinant of a vendor organization’s success.

Many B2B vendors struggle to understand their buyers. Effectively, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding who their most important buyers are. There are several reasons for this:

The rationality of B2B buyers. This makes it more challenging for vendors to identify buyer needs, as there are fewer behavioral and needs‐based segments, and this often results in segmentation based on superficial factors such as business size and turnover.
The complexity of B2B products. This raises the question of whether segmentation is even possible in some markets: if each buyer’s needs are unique, how does a vendor group them in meaningful ways?
The size of B2B markets. B2B customers are long‐term buyers. A long‐term buying environment means the buyers in that environment are less likely to churn.
The increasing number of decision makers in any B2B sale.

Because of these challenges, vendor organizations have typically left segmentation to chance.

Deep‐Selling organizations leverage technologies such as social media, dynamic CRM systems and AI to identify, categorize and monitor their buyers in real time.

Just some of the capabilities now available to Deep‐Selling organizations are:

monitoring and analyzing lead actions
buyer intent data
digital footprint

Having a coordinated digital footprint across an organization creates a consistent experience for buyers who perform independent research online before contacting a vendor.

LinkedIn’s platform is just one example of a technology that enables better information and data synergy between firms,

Leading software website G2. com lists social listening platforms that are available to sales organizations to help them listen to market trends, identify buzz words, find and monitor potential buyers and more. Captiv8, Scout and Konnect Insights are just a few of the social listening tools available to modern sales and marketing teams that can help organizations to better understand their buyers.

There is also a growing number of AI‐based sales intelligence tools that organizations can use. Apollo.ai and Zoominfo are just two of the dozens of platforms that have these advanced functions.

Buyer segmentation relates to the process of aggregating buyers into groups based on common needs, or how buyers respond to your organization’s products or solutions.

Most vendors base their segmentation process on macro‐level criteria such as business size or location.

By gaining a deeper understanding of your buyers using the technologies and techniques described, we can now consider more relevant and informative micro‐level characteristics such as:

purchasing behavior
benefits sought

Consider:

current problems/ pain points
potential risks
potential opportunities
existing plans for growth/ development
buyer interaction preferences
preferred mode of interaction
buyer needs
similarity to previous successful buyers

When creating your buyer personas, you want to create two versions for each of your target buyers. The first version is your ideal buyer — someone who not only meets all of your organization’s requirements but exceeds them.

Some factors to consider include:

the solution required
their budget
their time frame
their priorities
potential upside
lifetime buyer value
their attitudes/ behavior
your current capabilities

In every organization, and for every product, the definition of an ideal buyer should rest at the intersection of your organization’s goals, the buyer’s requirements and goals, and the buyer’s ways of working,

Once you have defined what is an ideal buyer for your organization, the second persona to consider is your minimum buyer. This is a buyer that meets the base criteria for your products or services, but they fall short of the ideal.

Using generative AI, sales teams can now generate authentic buyer personas and interact with them as though they are real people. This provides more authentic and dynamic predictions of a persona’s pain points across the buyer journey, and enables the organization to derive more interesting and holistic insights into how a buyer will react in different situations.

The buyer journey has evolved to be much longer than before. The stages of the new buyer journey are:

status quo and the window of discontent
awareness
consideration
purchase
success and loyalty
advocacy

Most vendor organizations track buyer progress through their sales and marketing funnel, often with clearly mapped out top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel activities. Unfortunately, the majority of these organizations have detached the internal sales process from the buyer journey.

Sales resources, processes and technology all need to be structured around the buyer journey and how buyers want to buy, rather than trying to retrofit the buyer’s preferences into existing sales processes.

The first step towards creating a buyer‐aligned sales process is determining the key questions, concerns and goals that your ideal buyers have at each stage of the journey, as well as the sources they use to find more information.

What are the top questions your ideal buyer has in their status quo and window of discontent? What are the top concerns/issues they have at this stage? What are their most pressing goals at this stage? Which information sources do they use to answer these questions?

We recommend setting up a series of workshops with the teams involved at each stage of the journey:

Before the sale (status quo, window of discontent, awareness): marketing, marketing analytics.
During the sales process (consideration, purchase): inside sales, core sales.
After the sale (success, advocacy): customer success, customer support.

Problems with internal processes are usually related to information lost during handover.

To address internal process issues, it is important to involve representatives of the team that is responsible for the activities before the issue occurs (meaning, before handover) and the one experiencing the issue (after handover).

To achieve Deep‐Selling excellence, your entire organization needs to take a systematic approach to improving the buyer experience and helping your buyers get the best value from your products and services.

By mapping out the ideal buyer experience, everybody (not just the sales team) across the vendor organization will know what is expected at each stage and your buyers will have a better experience overall. This map should include all process stages, steps and possible communication channels that buyers can use across their buying journey.

Understanding your buyers is the cornerstone of making the shift to becoming a Deep‐Selling organization.

For more than 140 years, sales teams have been made up of autonomous agents who effectively own and operate an entire territory or set of accounts, regardless of their skill set, knowledge or experience. 286 As more vendors are starting to realize, this model no longer works in the buyer‐led era.

First, field salespeople are expected to perform each and every role required to close a deal
Second, individual salespeople have limited capacity to manage concurrent opportunities.

Total sales capacity = total possible sales cycles × max. concurrent opportunities × number of sales resources

Third, running a traditional field sales force is one of the most expensive fixed (and variable) costs on every vendor’s balance sheet.

From the perspectives of both sales enablement and buyer centricity, the structure of vendor organizations needs to evolve to one where all functional activities are integrated and aligned to deliver superior value to their buyers.

As the cornerstone of Deep Selling is having Deep buyer understanding, the logical place to start with team structure is the buyer journey.

When it comes to sales effectiveness, the most effective sales structure for both acquisition and retention will be one that mirrors this journey, delivering buyers the information and experience they want, through the channels they want, when they want it.

If we consider structure in terms of core functions throughout the buyer journey, we can extrapolate the following:

Awareness: demand generation is the core function. In most organizations, this sits with marketing,
Consideration: lead nurturing and qualification are the core functions. They sit with marketing and sales development.
Purchase: this is where core sales functions sit; or account executives,
Success, loyalty, advocacy: this is the customer success function, where customer success managers ensure buyers get the most value

Product development: product development becomes a circular process, where customer success and customer support provide feedback on product utilization, effectiveness and value delivered to buyers; marketing provides insight on interest in marketing campaigns, which could highlight blue‐ocean areas for investment; and finance feeds into product development by highlighting products that generate the highest ROI through average order value, lifetime buyer value, repeat orders and referral data.

Implementing a sales and marketing structure

Function 1: demand generation.

It is often challenging to discuss the demand generation function with sales leaders, simply because most of the responsibilities seem to rest outside the traditional sales role.

According to Chet Holmes, author of The ultimate sales machine, only 3 per cent of your target addressable market is open to a vendor message at any given point in time (these are the active buyers who are already looking for a solution to a problem).

While the traditional mainstay of the sales role was prospecting — chasing and interrupting buyers with a blanket message to get their attention — the days of chasing buyers are over. Now, it’s all about attracting buyers with buying stage‐appropriate messages to create inbound leads.

These new buyer‐facing teams will comprise a combination of traditional sales types and specialist marketing people, and a range of product‐management experts.

Function 2: lead nurturing and qualification.

Market response focuses on qualifying inbound leads — namely those that reach out to the vendor through their website or phone, specifically enquiring about a product or service. For every 400 leads per month that require human attention, a company needs at least one market response representative.

Function 3: core sales.

With marketing and sales development representatives focused on generating and qualifying leads, account executives are free to focus on moving qualified opportunities from the consideration stage of the buyer journey to close.

When inside sales forces are properly utilized, they reduce the cost of sales by 40 to 90 per cent relative to field sales.

Function 4: customer success

Deep‐Selling organizations need to focus on lifetime buyer value.

Customer success is the function at a company responsible for managing the ongoing relationship between a vendor and its buyers. The goal of customer success is simply to create the most valuable outcomes throughout the buyer lifecycle in order to make the buyer as successful as possible which, in turn, improves lifetime buyer value.

The 2022 State of Sales Enablement Report found that 80 per cent of organizations surveyed had had a sales enablement process in place for more than two years, and those organizations experienced a 7 per cent increase in sales win rates over organizations that had had sales enablement processes in place for less than two years.

With the four core functions in place (demand generation, lead nurturing and qualification, core sales and customer success), your organization is addressing all the key stages of the modern buyer journey.

In other words, sales enablement is the process of providing a vendor organization with information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.

We recommend making sales enablement a shared marketing and sales function

To create a skills matrix, start by defining the skills required to support buyers along the buyer journey. These might include: product knowledge, prospecting, networking, building rapport, creating buyer consensus, active listening, social selling, content creation, communication, lead qualification, objection handling, presentation skills, closing techniques, onboarding, customer support, up‐selling and cross‐selling, time management, management coaching.

The traditional sales execution model starts when a prospect becomes aware of a vendor organization or its products,

With no overarching ownership of the buyer journey and no alignment on metrics, is it any wonder buyers are growing increasingly frustrated and sales teams are struggling to get results?

The secret with all process design is to begin with the desired output in mind. What should the process produce? In this case, we want the sales approach to produce sales performance improvement: put simply, more buyers, more value provided to those buyers, greater lifetime buyer value and more sustainable long‐term revenue growth. In other words, the sales process must understand, align with, adapt to and support the buyer journey.

If outbound is dead, and inbound is withering on the vine, where does that leave vendor organizations?

Nearbound is being described as a new way of sourcing business opportunities. However, nearbound is in effect a new term for an old concept known more broadly as ‘partner ecosystems’ or ‘channel partners’ — that is, partners that a vendor organization uses to reach its target buyers.

By fostering long‐term, trust‐based relationships, sharing resources and knowledge, and creating financial interdependencies, organizations can build a strong, resilient network that benefits all members.

We are now witnessing the emergence of a range of tech players who are focused on enhancing and optimizing channel partnerships by providing a collaborative, data‐sharing ecosystem.

Crossbeam is just one of many platforms that are now addressing various elements of nearbound.
PartnerStack provides a platform for managing and scaling partner programs.
Allbound offers a partner relationship management (PRM) platform.
Impartner is a comprehensive PRM platform.
WorkSpan is a collaborative platform specifically designed for managing joint go‐to‐market initiatives.
Channeltivity offers a PRM solution.
LogicBay provides a PRM.
And we can’t forget LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

The old‐world, vendor‐push era focused on value in exchange, where the value of a product or service is exchanged at the time of purchase. By contrast, the new‐world, buyer‐led era focuses on value in use, where the true value is received by the buyer when they are using the product or service, not at the point of purchase.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the four selling models.

Transactional selling. The transactional selling model involves products where there is a low investment from both the buyer and the vendor. These organizations are the ones that are downsizing their traditional sales forces. There is little value in the added expense of a traditional sales force on either side of the value equation: for the buyer, a traditional sales force will only make the end product more expensive, and for the vendor, this cost will eat into profit margins.
Packaged solution selling. As the name suggests, the packaged solution selling model involves selling a packaged solution to a buyer. Because the solution doesn’t change, the sales model is fairly simple. If a salesperson is involved, they will usually be following a script or following a guided selling model.
Consultative selling. The consultative selling approach involves the salesperson gaining a strong understanding of a buyer’s problems and needs and recommending the best solution to fix them. Because the solution is often tailored to the buyer’s needs, a great deal of consultation will be involved throughout the sales process to determine the buyer’s requirements, hence the name of the model.
Value‐based selling. Consultative selling is first and foremost about solving, not selling. Value‐based selling, then, takes this a step further, moving beyond simply solving problems to creating value. This goes beyond creating value for the buyer alone, as in many cases you are helping them create value for their buyers.

The best sales model for any vendor organization will be informed by several factors. However, the most important ones are the requirements of your buyers and the product or service being sold.

Deep‐Selling excellence leverages people, technology, metrics and strategy to create value for buyers.

If a buyer wants a transactional relationship, a Deep‐Selling organization will facilitate it through a mix of self‐service and simplified vendor touchpoints. If a buyer needs a more customized approach, the vendor organization will use a more consultative or value‐based model.

Three ways to sell value in B2B markets by Joona Keränen, Harri Terho and Antti Saurama, which we highly recommend reading for a deeper look at value‐based selling.

The first approach to value‐based selling is leading with benefits.
The next approach looks at buyer process optimization. Instead of selling a product, this sales approach focuses on enabling improvements in processes within the buyer organization, which will then lead to measurable benefits such as increased productivity and cost reduction.
The final approach is when the vendor commits to buyer performance outcomes.

To determine the best model for your organization, Keränen, Terho and Saurama recommend a four‐step process. Work with your strengths. Is your organization’s strength in building exceptional products, expertise in process optimization or delivering buyer performance improvements?

Identify existing value creation opportunities. What are the key profit drivers in your buyers’ business models? These might include costs, revenues or tied‐up capital,

Analyze the required internal adaptations. Value‐based selling can be an organization‐level exercise that requires the commitment of multiple departments.

Find buyers who are willing to buy value. Not all buyers are willing to buy value, particularly when it comes to those with simple needs who are comfortable using out‐of‐the‐box solutions.

Depending on your sales model, you might have a zero‐touch, light‐touch or heavy‐touch playbook:

The zero‐touch playbook is one where there is no human involvement. The buyer’s journey is completely automated and the buyer is able to complete transactions independently.
In a light‐touch playbook, much of the manual work that was performed by the traditional field salesperson has been replaced by automated technologies.
The heavy‐touch playbook is the traditional, enterprise go‐to‐market model, where a person is required to lead most steps in the process.

The key consideration is that your playbook should be reflective of the value being delivered.

Let’s look at the steps for building your sales playbook.

Condense the buyer journey map into key touchpoints. Add objectives, content and owners. Once you have outlined each of the sales flows for your organization, the next task is to identify the objectives of each step, the key information that needs to be shared at each step and which team owns each step. Objective: What should be achieved in this step in the flow? Content: What information should be shared? Owner: Who owns this step in the process? Identify the tools required to succeed.

While we are advocates for co‐creating value with your buyers, going Deep is really about choosing the model that meets your buyers’ needs.

If you do take a value‐based approach, though, part of your responsibility as a vendor organization becomes educating your buyers on true value, as success doesn’t just rely on your sales team’s ability to sell value, but your buyers’ ability to understand and recognize it.

EXPLORING TO DEEP

Culture is the behavior an organization tolerates. This means it is impossible to put a strategy in place without addressing organizational culture: if an organization’s leaders say that the organization is buyer centric, yet they continue to accept and reward product‐centric behaviors, then the organization isn’t truly buyer centric.

In buyer‐centric organizations, every decision begins with the buyer and opportunities to create more value for them.

High‐performance cultures are built around clear objectives. Leaders cannot expect any team, let alone a sales team, to achieve high performance if there is not total clarity around what they are expected to achieve.

The old‐world, product‐centric model focused on push selling with a short‐term focus.

Measuring the success of this approach looks at the number of sales, the size of those sales, and revenue resulting from those sales, which feeds into the higher-level objectives of the C‐suite and board: increasing share price or growing market share. For sales teams, this is all condensed into quotas.

In this age, sales teams must shift from the typical, vendor‐push model of chasing buyers to a buyer‐pull model, where the focus is attracting buyers.

In the Age of the Buyer, vendor business models are service oriented, not product oriented.

Management often sets quotas knowing they are impossible to achieve, based on an arbitrary growth uplift from the previous year’s quota as opposed to actual results.

Making revenue quotas the key objective for sales performance makes it almost impossible to cultivate a buyer‐obsessed, high‐performance culture.

There are two components to buyer‐centric measurement and management:

How to reward teams for acquiring new buyers.
How to reward teams for developing and retaining existing buyers.

It is crucial for vendor organizations to move beyond acquisition metrics as a measure for success, and instead focus on long‐term buyer health. Buyer health is a simple and effective measure that can be used to supplement traditional sales measures such as revenue, profit, growth and market share. Buyer health comprises data points that track the quality of the buyer relationship, the level of product usage and the value realized by the buyer.

‘Customer Success Management, Customer Health, and Retention in B2B Industries’ by Bryan Hochstein, Clay M Voorhees, Alexander B Pratt, Deva Rangarajan, Duane M Nagel and Vijay Mehrotra.

We have four key result areas:

Buyer acquisition.
Buyer relationship quality.
Product feature usage.
Buyer value realization.

You have now identified the metrics you will need to track in order to achieve Deep‐Selling excellence. These should be a combination of buyer acquisition, buyer health and traditional financial metrics.

Define success. Choosing the metrics you want to track is only the first piece of the performance puzzle. The next piece is setting targets for those metrics. Beyond understanding the team’s current level of performance, you will want to understand industry benchmarks for your metrics in order to gain a competitive edge. Forrester Research found that typical B2B retention rates are between 76 per cent and 81 per cent, while HubSpot found that the average sales close rate was 29 per cent. It is only by considering your team’s current performance, industry benchmarks for sales performance and the break‐even requirements of your organization that you can set targets that will be achievable and that will drive results.

Create a success profile. You want to look at individual performance within the team. Note that this success profile will draw heavily on the skills matrix you completed.

Performance improvement. The next step is to develop a plan to improve performance across all sales functions.

The most effective teams nearly always find a way to maximize individual strengths while simultaneously limiting or covering individual weaknesses.

Quotas, like commissions, are also an outdated, ineffective approach when it comes to motivating salespeople, not to mention that this approach is completely at odds with the modern vendor’s objective of buyer success.

Treating sales as a win/lose game increases the chances of post purchase dissonance, where buyers feel like they have been misled by a salesperson who has over‐promised and then under‐delivered. If one side of a business transaction is the losing side, then it’s only a matter of time before the ‘winning’ side loses those buyers.

Take a 2014 incentives study that investigated whether salespeople had universal reward preferences, broadly basing the preferences investigated on those in the Four Drives Theory of Motivation, which lists the four drives as: to acquire, to bond, to defend and to learn.

When it comes to how incentives lead to motivation, we can see this in the motivation model created by Professor Victor Vroom of Yale University,

In brief, a person decides how much effort to expend based on the expectation that the effort will translate into acceptable performance. If the performance is acceptable, they must believe that it will turn into rewards. Finally, the person must value those rewards.

Sales compensation recommendations:

Base KPIs and performance metrics on buyer health. Buyer success outcomes, retention rates, loyalty and that all‐important buyer advocacy are what make vendor organizations sustainable.
Don’t abandon existing incentives (yet).
Improve intrinsic motivations for the sales team. If your sales team is entirely motivated by commissions, it’s time to take a hard look at the intrinsic motivators offered by their roles.
Look at your sales leaders. If you work at an organization where there is a layer of sales leaders in between you and the people on the ground, review how those leaders approach managing their teams.
Take a holistic approach. Focusing on just intrinsic or just extrinsic rewards leaves salespeople unfulfilled and increases attrition.
Consider a team‐based approach. When considering team structure in relation to the buyer journey, it’s also important to consider the concept of compensation across the various buyer‐facing functions, rather than just in core sales roles.

Modern bookkeeping then emerged in the 1400s when businesses used ledgers to track income and expenses. However, financial metrics truly started being used as a sign of business health in the 1800s, when corporations began publishing balance sheets as a way of attracting investors.

In short, financial metrics alone aren’t enough for long‐term Deep‐Selling success.

When operational improvements fail to lead to financial benefits, it usually comes down to one of two problems. Either the organization is failing to capitalize on the improvements it has made, or the organization has made incorrect assumptions about the value of the operational improvements that need revisiting. This is why neither financial nor operational metrics alone is the answer.

Measuring multiple metrics allows you to bring together distinct parts of the organization.

The balanced scorecard is a concept developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1992. In Kaplan and Norton’s model, the scorecard included financial measures, customer measures, internal business measures, and innovation and learning measures.

The Deep‐Selling balanced scorecard builds on the original model proposed by Kaplan and Norton, focusing on the metrics that are most important for Deep‐Selling excellence. These include:

Financial metrics: These might include revenue, profit, gross margin, market share and more.

Sales metrics: Some examples include cost of acquisition, pipeline conversion rate, average order value, lifetime buyer value.

Buyer metrics: They include buyer relationship quality, product usage and buyer value realization.

Transformation metrics: buyer centricity, digital readiness and tech‐stack maturity.