Here are key insights from the study.

1. A Clear Brand Promise.

People often make a buying decision with their heart, and then try to justify it with logic afterwards. In sales emotions matter and it is important that we send out a very clear message to our prospects about our customers’ experience.

60% of respondents do not have a clear brand promise.

2. Well-defined Products And Services

Sales organisations have trouble articulating to their customers exactly what they are trying to sell to them. Half of all respondents do not have a clear definition of their products or services which poses the question – are we confident that our Prospects and Customers understand our products and services right from the start?

Half of all respondents do not have a clear definition of their products or services.

3. A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) And Killer Business Introduction (KBI).

Your value proposition must be more than a mere motherhood statement, such as: “We really care”. Instead, it needs to be hugely credible and must easily distinguish your business from that of your competitors, and you need to be able to back your statement up with evidence.

80% of respondents do not have an effective selling proposition with which to attract and engage their ideal customers. This often creates a huge top-of-the funnel problem with insufficient sales leads and poor conversion rates.

80% of respondents do not have an effective selling proposition.

What is your Unique Selling Proposition? I.e. can we clearly state what makes our business and its offerings unique, and why a buyer should absolutely be interested in what we do? What makes us and our business different from that of our competitors?

4. Who is my ideal customer?

Just under half of all respondents are unsure of who their ideal customers are. This often results in poor prospecting results and wasted lead generation efforts, leading to frustrations and low morale.

Just under half of all respondents are unsure of who their ideal customers are.

There is little point in engaging with the wrong kind of prospects. You are better off engaging with the right kind instead.

How clear are we on what our ideal customers look like, in terms of industry sector, size of their business, their geographic location, job title, their challenges, their opportunities, their ambitions and motivations, etc.?

5. Where do I find an ideal prospect?

More than 60% of respondents are unsure of WHERE to find their ideal clients. This creates problems with prospect engagement, poor sales quota attainment and loss of market share.

More than 60% of respondents are unsure of WHERE to find their ideal clients.

6. Access and engage the effectively.

A combined total of more than 80% of respondents do not know HOW to engage their ideal customers in a sales conversation. This is THE KEY CHALLENGE IN SALES TODAY. Ineffective prospect engagement kills your pipeline, waists your sales leads and creates an army of unimpressed prospects for your brand.

More than 80% of respondents do not know HOW to engage their ideal customers in a sales conversation.

Once you know WHO your ideal customers are, and WHERE you can find them, the question turns to HOW to engage them in a meaningful way that draws them into a sales conversation.

7. Skills to eliminate competitors

More than 70% of respondents say they are ill-equipped to fend off their competitors. This results in too many lost deals that should have been won, unpredictable forecasting and messy pipelines.

More than 70% of respondents say they are ill-equipped to fend off their competitors.

Let’s say you successfully engaged with a prospect. You are in the running now to win this deal. However, very rarely will you be the only seller in this race. Instead, you will most likely have to beat off any number of competitors.

How good are we at fending off our competitors, and ending up our Buyers’ one and only choice?

8. Using a sales proposal process to close more deals

There is often a degree of confusion between the sales proposal content and the sales proposal process. Sure, what goes into a sales proposal is important, but the way it is presented is also critical to its success.

More than 70% of respondents say they do not have a sales proposal process to help them win more business.

9. A superior pre, during and post-purchase customer experience

Most businesses understand how mission-critical the customer experience is to the success of a business at every step of the way. But do we really know how well, or how poorly, we are doing in that regard?

70% of respondents don’t seem to be fully focused on their customers.

Is this something they just don’t take seriously in their business? Is it a matter of culture? Is it a matter of leadership? Are the wrong KPIs and metrics driving this behaviour?

10. Keep customers loyal, win repeat business and to turn them into advocates

The experience our customers have with us does not end with a purchase or a transaction. The post-sale experience is critical insofar as it will determine whether they will choose to come back to do more business with us, or not.

Just under 60% of respondents admit that they do not have the ability to turn their turn customers into repeat customers and advocates who refer new business.

Will your customers rave about you, or will they rant? Is their experience a pleasant one that will make them recommend you to their friends and colleagues? Or is it one that will more likely make them warn people off doing business with you?

Conclusion

No business should rest on its laurels, there is always room for improvement.

Real leaders are not afraid to admit they don’t know something and that they can always learn something new.

Real leaders are not afraid to ask for external help, advice and guidance.

The report clearly shows that there are enormous untapped opportunities for improvement, to lift sales, to give customers a better experience, and to grow the business.

What are you going to do about it?

The post 10 Costly Mistakes In Sales Engagement appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Unfortunately, they still mean different things to different people. And they have been misused for too long.

“The greatest inhibitor to sales effectiveness is the seller’s inability to communicate a VALUE message.” — SiriusDecisions

To me, a value proposition is a means to communicate succinctly to a Prospect or to a Buyer what’s in it for them when they deal with us.

A value proposition is a means to communicate succinctly to a Prospect or to a Buyer what’s in it for them when they deal with us.

It should be that simple, but organizations have tied themselves into knots coming up with ones that work for them.

What’s worse, too many organizations are still inward-looking and product-focused when they should be customer-centric, i.e. they should “do everything with the customer in mind”, as Jeff Bezos put it for his company Amazon.

So, to me (and to Jeff, I guess) the only value proposition that counts is the one that engages your customers.

The only value proposition that counts is the one that engages your customer.

Why is that important?

Because if you get it wrong it can have horrible consequences for your business. One of my pet grievances is when marketers put up a value proposition that is completely focused on the wrong thing: on their organization.

Not only does it wreak havoc with how prospects view your website, but your sales people will start using it in their prospecting and customer interactions, too.

Here are some actual real-life examples of what I am talking about:

This is a cold email that landed in my in-tray and didn’t get caught by the spam filter

“Dear Peter,

Greetings from (name withheld)! I am reaching out to introduce (name withheld). We are a cross channel ad management and optimization platform. Our advanced algorithmic solutions automate & optimize your digital marketing process to give you a better ROAS. We have deep integration into various digital channels and analytics into a unified dash board. This equips you to easily manage and optimise all your social marketing campaigns. Attached is an introductory deck which showcases our product features. I would love to get on a quick 10-minute introductory call to discuss how our automation platform can add value to your digital marketing efforts. 

How does anytime this week look for you? Let me know when I can set up the call.

Best,

(name withheld), Product Manager”

Did you notice how many sentences above start with “Our”, with “I” or with “We”? What is this email about? Is it about the company and its products, or is it about what they can do for their customers?

So, I say that any value proposition that begins with “I” or “We” leads you down the wrong path because it leads yo to talking about yourself, not what’s in it for your customers.

Here is an example from the ABOUT US page of a vendor website:

“(name withheld) is a fully managed IT services company that focuses its time and energy on developing, maintaining, and supporting technology systems for growing businesses, implementing ERP systems and custom application development. 

(name withheld) has distinguished themselves by working for and with leading companies and service organizations acquiring vast experience with, and on, a wide range of complex, mission-critical and high-volume information systems platforms and roll outs for high profile organizations.”

How customer-centric is this information? What value does it convey?

So, have a look at your own business. On your company website does the ABOUT US page talk about you, or about what you do for your customers?

Check how your sales reps and SDRs: How do they introduce your organization every day?

Does your ABOUT US web page talk about you? How do your sales reps and SDRs introduce your organization?

Sales executives that I deal with tell me that prospects now decide in the first few seconds of a cold call whether they are interested, or not. Once they have lost interest it is VERY difficult to get their interest back. So we only have a few seconds to make a positive impression and to capture the imagination of our prospects.

We have to make our value proposition immediately engage our customers and prospects.

We have to make our value proposition immediately engage our Customers and our Prospects.

So, how customer-focused in your value proposition? How do you get yours right?

It’s easy: just consider everything you do from your customers’ perspective and convey clearly what’s in it for them.

The post How Customer-Centric Is Your Value Proposition? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

It’s funny then that, according to research by Lee Resource and IBM, 80% of companies surveyed claimed that they offer superior customer service, but only 8% of their customers agreed with them. Ouch!

80% of companies surveyed claimed that they offer superior customer service, but only 8% of their customers agreed with them. Ouch!

It is undisputed that negative customer experiences cost your bottom line. Have a look at these CX statistics:

For every customer complaint, there are 26 other customers who have remained silent. (source: Lee Resource Inc)

A dissatisfied consumer will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience, while about 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. (source: Lee Resource Inc)

Attracting a new customer costs 5-times as much as keeping an existing one. (source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC)

Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4 to 6 people about their positive experience. (source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC)

86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience. (source: Harris Interactive, Customer Experience Impact Report)

It’s no wonder then that customer-centricity and customer experience (CX) are hot topics in business right now. But just saying so is not enough. What about your business? Just how customer-centric is it?

Just how Customer-Centric is Your Business?

Before I go on I’d like to clear up a question I get asked a lot: What is the difference between customer-centricity and customer experience?

It’s simple, really.

Customer-Centricity creates positive Customer Experiences. In other words, for customers to perceive a business as being customer-focused it needs to be structured and managed like Jeff Bezos says, i.e. with the customer in mind. So, to be customer-centric, at every touch point in the organization you need to ask: “What does that look like from the customer’s point of view?” and then adjust your processes, KPIs and culture to do the right thing to create that positive customer experience.

So, how Customer-Centric is Your Business?

I propose that there are 10 Critical Customer Touch Points in the customer’s buying journey that can make or break your business.

These ten Touch Points are:

1. A Brand that Differentiates Your Business

I don’t mean that you have to be a household name or that your logo needs to be a certain color. The main thing is that you have a distinct brand that customers can recognize and identify you by. Most businesses should have this under control.

2. A well-defined Product and/or Service to Sell

How well can you articulate your product or service? How clearly can you explain to your prospects and customers the benefits of your product or service? Will your customers understand what it does for them, i.e. what’s in it for them? Or do you mostly talk about how it works?

3. A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) And A Killer Introduction That Engages Your Ideal Buyers And Makes Them Want To Know More About You

This is critical: It can’t be a motherhood statement such as “We really care for our customers.” It needs to be credible and you need to be able to back it up. What is your unique value proposition? I.e. can you clearly state what makes your business and its offerings unique and why a prospect should be interested in you? What makes you different from any other business out there?

And then, how do you convey that difference at the first point of contact with a new prospect? How can you intrigue and engage them right from your opening introduction? How do you get them to lean forward and say: “Tell me more.”?

4. A Clear Understanding Of Who Your Ideal Customers And Prospects Are

You would agree with me that there is little point in engaging with the wrong kind of prospects. You are better off dealing with the right kind instead, right? So, how clear are you on what your ideal customers look like?

5. The knowledge Of Where To Find Them

Once you know who your ideal Buyers are you need to know where they hang out. Do you know where to find your ideal prospects and customers?

6. The Understanding To Access And Engage Them Effectively

It’s not enough to know where to find your ideal Buyers. You need to know how to get to them and get them interested in your goods or services. How effective and scalable is your sales process? How well does it leverage your unique value proposition (see Point 3 above)?

7. The Know-How To Eliminate Your Competitors

Rarely will you be the only one in the race to a deal. Instead, you will most likely have to beat off any number of competitors. So, how do you fend them off and becomes your Buyer’s final and only choice?

8. The Skills To Create Effective Sales Proposals That Close Deals

In most B2B sales situations you are likely to be asked to submit a sales proposal to your Buyer. Do you get excited by the fact that the Buyer asked for a proposal and send it off to them asap? Or is there a better, smarter way? Further, how can you ensure that a) your proposal covers exactly what the Buyer needs, and b) that you have maximized your chances of your proposal being the last one standing, the one that gets accepted?

9. A Superior Pre, During and Post-Purchase Customer Experience

If you reflect on the customer experience statistics at the beginning of this article you will understand just how mission-critical your customers’ perceptions and experiences are to the success of your business at every step of the way. So, how successfully are you managing your Buyer’s interactions with your business?

10. The Ability To Keep Your Customers Loyal And To Win Their Repeat Business

Your customers’ experience does not end with a transaction. In fact, their post-sale experience is so critical that it will determine whether they will choose to come to do more business with you, or not. So, how do your prospects and customers perceive their interactions with your business at every touch point? Is their experience a pleasant one that will make them rave to their friends and colleagues about your business, or is it one that will more likely make them warn people off you?

There you have it. The 10 critical customer touch points that make or break your business.

The post 10 Touch Points That Make Or Break Sales appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Many sales organizations these days are struggling to achieve organic sales revenue and profit growth.

According to the TAS Group, 67 per cent of salespeople do not achieve their sales targets.

Thanks to the internet, buyers now have more information available to them than ever before. This easy access to knowledge is putting sales reps into a weak position, as it empowers buyers to take charge of the sales process. Buyers now carry out extensive online research before feel ready to contact a vendor. Thus, now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the buyer even existed. Yes, we are in the era of the buyers journey.

Now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the Buyer even existed.

As illustrated below, there are three distinct windows of opportunity in the buyers journey to influence the buyer towards our brand and our goods/services:

1. Opportunity To Create Desire

In the early stage of their buyers journey sellers have the opportunity to create desire in the buyers’ mind to consider our offerings, whether it be a new car, a new pair of shoes, or a complex IT system.

2. Opportunity To Influence The Buyer

Later, we have the opportunity to influence their decision-making and lure them away from competitors and towards our brand and offerings.

3. Too Late To Influence The Buyer

But, unfortunately, once they have made up their mind about what they want to buy and which vendor they want to buy it from, there is little opportunity left for vendors to change the buyers’ mind. They simply have come too far down the track towards making their buying decision to change tack now. Unless, that is, you have a very compelling argument or information that they had not considered (see the section on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling below).

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a buyer is not a great sales strategy. We need something more pro-active, and we need to focus on the first two windows of opportunity that I mentioned above.

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy.

Over time, several options have become available to restock the sales and marketing arsenal that has been depleted by the buying journey and by the modern buyers. They can be used in any combination to help you reach your sales targets. Here are some of the more commonly used ones:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Selling
4. Storytelling
5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)
6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

Let’s now look at the above options in more detail:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling

A lot of articles have been written about the pros and cons of cold calling. Tony J. Hughes, has written extensively on the subject, largely promoting cold calling as an effective sales technique. Personally, I am not a huge fan of calling somebody out of the blue, interrupting whatever they are doing and expecting them to drop everything to listen to your sales pitch. The only time this has half a chance of working is if you really have something significant up your sleeve that is of vital importance to them and to their business. If you have something like this then please feel free to go straight on to the section below on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling.

Otherwise, my recommendation is to stay away from cold calling. Instead, warm up your prospect with Content Marketing or Social Selling (both described below) before making direct contact. In this way, at least they know who you are and that you have something that is worthy of their time, or not.

2. Content Marketing

This strategy requires marketing to issue content that entices and compels buyers to our business. This content is usually published to the website and online generally, and complementary material is issued to the sales team. Content may comprise white papers, thought leadership articles, client success stories and lead generation campaigns. The key to success is that marketing continuously monitors the performance of its content and actively seeks feedback from the sales team about how prospects and customers react to it. Equally, sales reps must actively provide their front line intelligence to marketing so that the performance of marketing content can continuously be improved.

Success depends largely on a highly collaborative feedback loop between sales at the customer-facing front and marketing at the online front.

3. Social Selling

This is a specialist version of content marketing which is practiced by individual sales reps. The idea is that we want to attract buyers not only to our brand but also to individual reps who have built a reputation of being subject matter experts.

The way it works in many organisations is that marketing provides the right content to the sales force for them to promote their personal subject matter expertise on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. In other words, individual sales reps attract the buyer through their personal brand, as well as their employer’s brand.

Again, the success of this initiative largely depends on close collaboration between marketing and sales, if the content is to match the individual, and vice versa.

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is very powerful. Ever since humans were living in caves we sat around the campfire and told stories. Before the written word was invented stories were the way that we acquired information and learned new skills, such as how to hunt, gather and grow food. Even today, us humans remember stories much better than mere facts or figures.

When salespeople engage with a prospect or client they will have much deeper impact when they convey their information through a story. Storytelling also has the advantage that it doesn’t feel like selling. Just telling a story or an anecdote feels less intrusive to both the buyer and the rep. So, go ahead and tell the story of how a past client found themselves in a similar situation to your current prospect and how your solution helped them to overcome their challenges and to succeed.

Your marketing team should arm your sales force with stories to regale your prospects and customers.

5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is nothing new, but modern sales and marketing technology has elevated it to the latest “must-have”. The reason is that it can be very powerful, if executed well. Imagine you want to win a new key account or retain a major client that is at risk of moving on to a competitor. Wouldn’t you want to give them the attention they need to help secure or retain their business ? So, you create a specialist team, let’s call them a “hit squad”, to identify the key stakeholders in your account, i.e. the decision makers, influencers and gate keepers, and you identify what makes each of them tick, their likes and dislikes, challenges and opportunities. Then you provide each of them individually, through whatever means necessary, with the information that they need to make an informed decision on why they should buy from your organization. This is so that when they all meet to decide which vendor to go with, they will discover that they all miraculously agree that they should go with your business.

This “hit squad” must consist of a multi-disciplinary team, comprised of marketing, sales, product management and communications experts. So, once again, close collaboration between marketing and sales is the key to success here, too.

6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

I have previously written about this type of selling and why it is not suitable for every rep. However, if your sales force has people with the stature to challenge your prospects’ or clients’ thinking then it can be very effective. The idea is that you disrupt their thinking with some new information that they either did not previously possess, or that they had not yet considered. Something that stops them in their tracks. The neat thing is that, because this particular insight was brought to them by you and only you, it gives you instant credibility over and above your competitors and turns you into a trusted adviser. It should be easy from there on to close the deal.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a myriad of options to engage your prospects and clients, but waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy. And, given the myriad of alternatives, there is also no need for cold calling.

Regardless of which of the above sales techniques you choose to go with, much of your sales performance and success will depend on how well your marketing and sales teams work together to engage the Buyer and to differentiate your business from that of your competitors.

Ideally, your teams will collaborate across the entire 360 degrees, as illustrated here.

You are invited to talk to us about your business challenges and we’ll do our best to help, if we can. Go ahead, what have you got to lose ?

The post Six Sales Prospecting Methods, Including Cold Calling. appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Digital disruption has pretty much forced both sales and marketing departments to adjust to the new world that both sellers and buyers now inhabit.

“The sales profession is in the midst of a radical change. Simple sales are inexorably moving to the Internet. The selling that remains is sophisticated and demanding. The salesperson of the future will become a business equal of the customer, a creative problem-solver and a value creator. These changes demand a high level of professionalism.”

Professor Neil Rackham, one of the pioneers of modern research into sales performance and methodology.

This means that the tried and true sales methods of old are being overthrown in favor of softer, advisory approaches. At the same time, hitherto proven marketing techniques – especially those that relied on print media to communicate with customers – are adapting in ever-changing ways to massively popular digital platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and others, as well as some new ones that are still emerging.

This change to the way that marketing is conducted has profoundly influenced the way that sales are made as well. In particular, it has created a new class of customers that is more responsive to the techniques that used to be applied almost exclusively in the B2C (business-to-consumer, or retail) world. These techniques are now becoming more prevalent in the B2B (business to-business or corporate) world. Combine this with the advent of data-driven marketing and big data analytics – both of which are also being felt in both sales and marketing departments – and you have a myriad of changes that are rippling through today’s vendor organizations.

Charting a course through these unclear waters has resulted in a wide range of experimentation into sometimes-unconventional practices – some of them successful and some of them not. Not the least among them is the practice of extending the paradigm of process-specific alignment to a more holistic paradigm of true collaboration between Sales and Marketing.

As Sales and Marketing adapt to new market realities and opportunities, they are often presented with a choice regarding their operational structure: either they continue to operate in discrete silos or they adapt to cooperate in ways that will not only make them more alert to their changing markets and customers, but will also allow them to become increasingly nimble in terms of adapting to the shifting market trends of the future. Organizations that use collaborative strategies to address the long-standing complaints of Sales about Marketing and vice versa will be powerfully equipped to compete in, and even dominate, their markets in the years and decades to come.

Those who doggedly refuse to release their grip on the sales methodology and terminology of yesteryear (which we’ll turn to next) will be those that will be left in their more nimble competitors’ dust.

The Gradual Obsolescence of the Old Sales Cycle

Previously, whether a customer would buy from an organization or its competitor depended almost entirely on the sales rep and his or her ability to build and maintain relationships with potential customers. The best salespeople were those who were able to constantly expand and persuade those within this sphere of influence. Salespeople thus propelled the selling process forward (or, in the case of poor salespeople, stalled the process or even sent it backwards).

We used diagrams such as the one here to describe the stages in this process that we called either the Sales Cycle or the Selling Cycle.

We liked to describe it as a cycle because we thought that as soon as we had finished making a sale, a new potential customer (a ‘suspect’) would be waiting at the top of the cycle and we would begin an identical customer-winning process with them, thus converting them into a new prospect. Also, when upselling was a possibility, the same customer could go through the sales cycle multiple times so that their potential as a customer could be maximized.

We also used these descriptors to measure sales progress and estimate the likely interval between stages in the cycle for reporting and forecasting purposes – otherwise known as the ‘Contact to Cash’ process. Potential customers are re-named at each stage: initially, they are targeted within their pre-defined market segment as ‘suspects’, approached by salespeople as ‘prospects’, and, once they have made their first purchase, they are, of course, customers’. You are probably familiar with the concept of the Sales Funnel or the Leaky Funnel: suspects are fed into the wide end of the funnel; some leak out, leaving the prospects behind. Some of these leak out again; finally, the remainder become buyers.

The Sales Cycle, with its organizationally inside-out perspective and language, was utterly vendor-centric. The power to move the sales process through its various stages was largely attributed to the sales rep, not to the prospect. Consequently, sales consultants and sales training vendors offered a myriad of sales techniques that could, they said, rapidly accelerate the sales cycle.

This was the halcyon era of “objection handling” and of “closing techniques,” and of more comprehensive, market-research-based programs, such as Neil Rackham’s “SPIN Selling” and Miller-Heiman’s “Blue Sheet,” “Gold Sheet,” etc. plans. But informed buyers and their online research have disrupted the old Selling Cycle, creating a new purchasing paradigm, to which twenty-first-century sellers must adapt. Let’s turn now to this new purchasing paradigm – the Buyer’s Journey.

The Buyer’s Journey (Buyer’s Perspective)

As the illustration below makes clear, when it comes to the Buyer’s Journey there is distinct criticality for the vendor around the timing of contact and the messaging to the suspect or prospect. In other words, it is now critical to be proactive, to send the right messages and information and, importantly, to do so at precisely the right time. Vendors now need to be seen by buyers as experts in their field and they need to stand out from the crowd in order to be noticed and accepted by the buyer on their journey.

Early in the Buyer’s Journey, vendors have a narrow window of opportunity to create a sense of desire/demand/need for their offering in a suspect’s mind. This is the time where Marketing is most likely to play the biggest part in attracting new business as it can utilize its armory of channels and positioning messages to help suspects to discover our products and services over those of our competitors.

In the days of the Sales Cycle, a suspect contacted sales reps to obtain more information on a product or service. However, in the era of the Buyer’s Journey, the buyer follows a very different trajectory. They are most likely to go online to conduct their own research, examining – often in meticulous detail – what the market is offering. Promotional materials (marketing collateral) play a part in this, but so do independent reviews and test reports.

Content marketing (which I’ll discuss in much greater detail in the next chapter when we take a closer look at the Marketing landscape) is playing a large and still-expanding role in these early stages of the Buyer’s Journey, and these effects are passing downstream to Sales. Sales reps who answer the phone are no longer expected to inform the client, at least not to the degree they once did. What the potential customer is seeking is not broad strokes but clarification. This means that sales reps are now expected to possess not only high-level selling skills but also a wide range of subject matter knowledge.

Any reluctance or inability on the part of the sales rep to provide the information that the buyer is after (i.e. instant value-add) will likely lead to the buyer continuing their journey with another organization.

The Buyer’s Journey is, make no mistake, far less predictable and controllable than any of the purchasing paradigms that predate it. Just one disgruntled buyer is enough to spread the message far and wide and to poison the well. Bad reputations go viral in a heartbeat and the entire organization may have to expend untold energies on damage control.

Numerous studies have shown that by the time a buyer is ready to contact a vendor they have completed somewhere between 60% and 90% of their decision-making process. That means that by this time they have already whittled down their list of prospective vendors to a short-list. It is absolutely crucial that, at this time of the buyer transitioning from focusing on Marketing’s messaging to sales rep contact, the handover is seamless and that both Sales and Marketing speak with one and the same voice. So much as a sniff of inconsistency and credibility can be damaged and the sale can be lost.

Let me make this point in no uncertain terms:

Sales+Marketing Collaboration has become mission-critical.

Allowing Sales and Marketing to speak different languages with buyers and the market at large can put the financial security of the entire organization at risk. Without collaboration, buyers lose respect for, and interest in, the vendor. When they walk, through the power of social media they can (and often will) motivate other to do the same. It’s game over.

Now that we’ve looked at the Buyer’s Journey from the buyer’s perspective, let’s turn to the same journey, but this time from the perspective of the vendor.

The Buyer’s Journey (Vendors’ Perspective)

The most obvious difference in the way that vendors are approaching today’s buyers is where vendors are attempting to intercept buyers in the midst of their journey. Visibility is not as easy to find as it once was (when, for instance, print media could be relied upon to reach a wide swath of potential customers). Niche markets and segments are the new targets for visibility – particularly when these areas are rich in customers in the early stages of their journey. These are the buyers that today’s vendors are focusing all of their efforts to intercept. Effective and on-point messaging all the way from the epiphany stage (i.e. their identification of a need or requirement) to the end of the consideration/research process is now seen as the best way to win (and keep) their attention.

Back in 2012, ITSMA reported that over 68% of B2B technology buyers identified this stage as the one in which they preferred to be contacted by sales reps (https://www.itsma.com/research/results-from-itsma-how-buyers-consume-information-survey-2012/). This is where salespeople can take on the crucial advisory role that sophisticated buyers are responding to, and are even actively seeking. While they were assembling research for their recent, cutting-edge sales manual, The Collaborative Sale Keith M. Eades and Timothy T. Sullivan found that vendors who engage with buyers at these early stages in their journey were five times more likely to win business than those who waited for buyers to initiate contact (http://www.amazon.com/The-Collaborative-Sale-Solution-Selling/dp/1118872428).  Simply put, informed customers are raising the bar that they then expect vendor company reps to clear for them. As shown in the illustration vendors need to become more proactive in charting the journey for the buyer to follow all the way to a successful sale, and beyond.

Since salespeople used to be the ones who were most immediately engaging with their customers in the age of the Sales Cycle, they have now been the first to experience the challenges of this newly raised bar. The vendors who are having the most success are those who increase the run-up to this bar by shifting their focus to catching buyers’ attention early in their journey. When it is a high-value product or a complex solution that is on the table, sales have never been easy to make, but increasingly informed buyers have compounded this difficulty for salespeople. One thing is sure: addressing savvy twenty-first-century customers requires sales techniques that are more sophisticated by far than those that were successful as little as a decade or two ago.

The relatively recent vocabulary shift to the Buyer’s Journey underscores the need for a sales process that empathizes with the customer – seeing the sales process through their eyes – and fortifies the points at which the customer engages with sales reps or marketing-generated content. Digital Age buyers are armed with a different set of questions, some of which are catching unprepared organizations off guard:

• Do you know what my challenges are?
• What do you know about my competitors?
• What do you know about your competitors and my relationships with them?
• What ROI (Return on Investment) can I expect?
• What don’t I know?
• Besides ROI, how are you adding value?

Each one of these questions represents an opportunity for sales reps to demonstrate the consultative and customer-centric approach that buyers are now looking for. However, while the Buyer’s Journey offers opportunities, it also harbors its own set of challenges.

First of these is being able to gather, assess and act upon customer feedback. A 2014 research report by Aberdeen Group showed that best-in-class performers were those that consistently focused their resources in a customer-centric way, i.e. the ones that are opening feedback channels and who are meticulously managing the actionable data that lies therein.

According to Accenture in a very interesting paper, called “Connecting The Dots On Sales Performance” 67% of these best-in-class performers enabled and encouraged customer feedback at every touch point, whereas only 46% of leader-trailing organizations did the same. The importance of the new customer’s voice cannot be overstated. More than anything, the new customer wants to feel that their feedback influences the way they are approached, addressed and acted upon by the seller.

Others put this figure as high as 80%, meaning that by the time the buyer makes first contact with the vendor the customer has often already covered most of the ground that used to be the territory of salespeople. Buyers are initiating contact with sales reps merely to verify what they’ve learned through their own research. It’s no surprise, therefore, that as much as 63% of sales are going to the first vendor with which customers are engaging.

According to Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point, today’s time-poor buyers are beginning to feel that yesterday’s sales model is a waste of their time (http://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/67962/B2B-Sales-and-Marketing-Is-Misalignment-Taking-10-Off-Your-Sales):

• 33 percent say they are regularly presented with too much information that is not useful to their search for a solution that suits their needs
• 29 percent complain about a lack of relevance to their specific situation
• 24 percent say that the information provided fails to address the needs of all the members of the buying team
• 23 percent feel that there simply isn’t enough truly educational content
• 23 percent believe that the information provided isn’t in a form they can share with others

Not only are vendors finding new customers an increasingly rare species in competitive markets, customer loyalty is harder than ever to obtain. The reasons for this change are, for the most part, reasonably predictable.

This means that there obviously needs to be a great deal of strategic alignment between what Sales and Marketing promise and what the organization delivers.

This consistency is expected in follow-up, but it is also demanded at every touch point in the pipeline. Organizations that can deliver a uniform experience from first touch point to last are those that are most likely to pull away from their competitors in leaps and bounds. Whether it is the sales experience, the marketing presence, or their after-sale service, new customers are highly attuned to corporate culture, and they want to feel that, from the top down, every facet of the organization is aligned, and aligned to their needs at that. Even a slight deviation is often enough to make prospects and customers start exploring other options. Ubiquitous vendors and abundant choice brought on by the Internet means that just one bad customer experience at any of the touch points – or even the perception of a bad experience – has viral potential.

We now understand that a single mismanaged touch point, one poorly aligned Marketing to Sales hand-off, even an off-message rep can poison the well in an instant. Effective inter-departmental alignment can dramatically reduce or even eliminate such inconsistent customer experiences and thus avoid disaster.

Finally, the new breed of tech-savvy customers demand a technologically sophisticated, convenient and information-rich interface from the organizations they are considering doing business with. This is putting substantial pressure on vendors to respond to these expectations with an expanded social media presence, mobility options, data analytics, and cloud capability (SMAC), but also on the new breed of sales rep, who are as much subject matter experts as they are company representatives and solution-oriented salespeople.

As we will see later on, technology is not in itself the answer, but it is definitely one of the doors through which customers might beat a hasty retreat if vendors should fail to meet their expectations.

Digital-age customers undoubtedly expect sophistication, but the higher the purchase price, the more they expect that sophistication to manifest itself in organizational service, not just in technology per se. The longer the likely tenure of the post-sale relationship (e.g. when buying a new IT backend system or outsourcing service), the more scrutiny the vendor will come under and the more they will need to respond with timely and relevant information and personalized service. It is easy to see how there is a fine balance to be struck here and that every organization may strike it differently.

The most successful organizations that I have encountered are invariably those that have adapted their people, practices and technologies so that they can look authoritative at every stage of the Buyer’s Journey and with a high degree of uniformity. In large organizations, it is not unusual for management to devote entire teams to ‘CX’ or Customer Experience. These organizations can boast people and technologies that are nimble and adaptable; they are able to deliver a consistently high-quality customer experience, and their customers are rewarding their efforts.

Read part 2 – The Evolution of The Buyer’s Journey (Part 2)

The post The Evolution Of The Buyer’s Journey (Part 1) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Less than ten seconds is all the time executives now take before they decide whether a sales rep is worth spending their time with, or not.

Seasoned salespeople tell me that, ten years ago, they used to have 30 minutes, or even longer, to establish rapport with a new Prospect or Buyer. During the 2010s, this time shrank down to just a few minutes. The latest feedback is that this window of opportunity has now shrunk even further and is now down to less than ten seconds.

That’s all the time executives now take before they decide whether a new sales rep is worth spending their time with, or not. This anecdotal evidence is also backed up by research. In fact, the hardest part of the sales cycle now is no longer to close a deal, but to gain traction and engagement with a Prospect in the first place. Or, put another way: While it is easy to reach out to your ideal customers, it is now VERY difficult to draw them into a meaningful sales conversation.”

Further, Sirius Decisions tells us: “The greatest inhibitor to sales effectiveness is the seller’s inability to communicate a VALUE message.”

Add to this Forrester’s research findings, saying that “85 percent of sales interactions fail to meet the expectations of buyers” and you can see how the old linear method of introducing ourselves and our business first, before moving on to our products, services or solutions and related customer pain points, is well and truly passé.

Possessing an effective and professional business introduction that spells out clearly and succinctly the benefits that we bring to our buyers is now more essential than ever. If those benefits are also quantified then that’s even better.

So, why do many businesses and their salespeople turn off their prospects, right from the first contact?

Let me give you a concrete example:

The other day, I was asked by a senior executive in an international technology company to facilitate an introduction to a CMO whom I know personally.

I was happy to make the introduction and asked the executive to send me just a short paragraph with a synopsis on their business for me to make the introduction with. Let’s call them xyz IT Company to protect their true identity.

Here is an anonymized version of what I then received:

“xyz IT Company is a US-based technology company founded in 2013, we provide a cloud-based application, designed for enterprise businesses who are committed to B2B and B2C sales transformation, and interested in automating the preparation of bespoke presentations to increase productivity and drive revenue growth, along with reporting and analytics to surface the most effective presentations. 

xyz IT Company integrates deeply with CRM’s, BI tools and any data sources to fuse company data and approved content, delivering a high quality, interactive experience. These automatically generated presentations save a sales (or account management) teams significant preparation time; meaning they can spend longer with their customers and prospects doing what they do best: selling. The presentations themselves are developed as web pages at a slide level, so there’s unlimited flexibility in how content is designed and the way data is visualized.

 xyz IT Company currently works with organizations across a range of industry verticals and company sizes, clients such as (customer brands removed) and we’re also in the process of launching pilots with companies such as (brand names withheld).”

Did you understand it? Did you read even past the first paragraph?

I know the company well, but even I couldn’t make sense of their introduction. Now imagine what the poor CMO (whom I was meant to introduce) would have thought both of XYZ Company and of me, as the referrer.

I get it that it is human nature to want to talk about ourselves and our business and how important and great we and our products or services are.

For a quick exercise go to your website and take a good look at the ABOUT US page.

For a quick exercise go to your business website and take a good look at your ABOUT US page. If that web page is really all about you then get it changed. Get it changed to ABOUT WHAT WE DO FOR YOU. Only then will it be more likely to engage buyers.

Let’s see how it looks from the other side.

Just put yourself into your prospects’, clients’ and customers’ shoes and imagine this:

If I were in their position, would I want to hear all about you and your company, how long you have been around, how many employees you have, in how many countries you operate, what products you have and the logos of your customers?

Or, would I first and foremost want to hear what’s in it for me (WIIFM)?

I like to break the process of starting a new business conversation down into three parts:

1. Answering WIIFM
2. Answering HOW we do it
3. Answering where we have done it before

Let me elaborate:

1. Answering WIIFM

If we spell out the exact business benefits in qualitative and quantitative terms then a buyer can decide very quickly whether they are interested in finding out more, or not. After, all for a sales rep it is just as important to qualify a prospects OUT, as it is to qualify them IN. It saves a rep a lot of time NOT to pursue a prospect who is not interested.

2. Answering HOW we do it

Once we have established active interest in our buyer’s mind they will want more information. Information such as how we deliver the benefits, what they need to do from their end to be successful and how our product, service or solution may apply to their business.

3. Answering WHERE we have done it before

So, they know what’s in it for them and how we deliver the outcome. Now, our buyer will want to be assured that this result can also be delivered to their business and that they are not a lab rat or Guinea pig. They want proof that what we can deliver what we promise. So at this 3rd stage they want customer success stories and testimonials.

All the above, however, depends on gaining that buyer’s interest in the first six seconds. So, how is your business introduction doing?

The post I Have 10 Seconds To Make An Impression? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Today’s information-rich buyers are increasingly unresponsive to yesterday’s sales techniques. This is making it more difficult than ever for salespeople to get through to prospects and decision makers on the phone, let alone to get them to attend physical business events or trade shows. Yet, without that person-to-person contact, they are unable to gauge prospects’ level of interest through traditional means such as body language and other non-verbal cues.

As so many salespeople watch their performance numbers ebb, they face a dilemma: either they adjust to the market by learning an entirely new set of skills (including how to work in concert with Marketing), or they continue to rely on those customers (an endangered species) who still seek out pre-millennial, old-fashioned pitchmen. Naturally, the wise money is on the former.

To put it mildly, the information-saturated, point-and-click world that is the Internet has forever changed customers and their buying behaviors. The buyer has taken control of the buying process away from the traditional sales rep. In the days of the Sales Cycle, it was the sales rep who was in a hurry to close the sale and move on. These days the buyer and the sales rep have swapped places. Today’s buyer is the one who is in a hurry to get to the satisfaction point of a purchase – once, that is, they have identified a need and researched their vendor options.

Sales training vendors have reacted to the new paradigm with a myriad of supposedly new training programs. To be fair, twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century sales training programs – thorough products of their time – worked well in the days of the Sales Cycle (provided they were implemented and managed appropriately). Now that the paradigm has shifted, there has been no small amount of scrambling on the part of sales trainers, who are doing their level best to hammer some old square pegs into some very new round holes. Yesterday’s techniques are being rebranded or adapted to supposedly suit the market’s new realities, but the changes seem mostly at the level of language.

In their essence, sales strategies (some of them now decades old) have remained unchanged. At the risk of potentially doing my sales training peers a disservice, it is my perception that the supposedly new and disruptive sales techniques are really little more than reinvented variants of yesteryears’ methods. A little more modishly dressed up, presented and packaged, but essentially the same. To me they look suspiciously like they are still channeling the basic elements of Neil Rackham’s SPIN method from 30 years ago. The difference being that we no longer expect our prospects to answer a multitude of situation-exploring questions before we attempt to sell them something. Prospects these days are far less patient and they expect modern reps who have done their homework.

The days of the charismatic but tactical salesperson are getting behind us, particularly in B2B sales. A winning personality still goes a long way, but today’s buyers aren’t looking for slick pitchmen. What they are looking for is a subject matter expert, somebody who knows exactly why buyers are solution-hunting in the first place, someone who has insight into their situation and solutions that are tailored to their most pressing issues. They don’t want to hear, “I’ll get back to you on that.” They want answers, and they want them now. Buyers are no longer looking for a sales rep; they are looking for an advisor. After they have conducted all their own research, they want to deal with someone who knows even more than they do about the problem they are trying to solve and the offering that they are most interested in. A poorly prepared or under-informed sales rep is likely to get very short shrift indeed. Don’t get me wrong, there are still buyers out there – particularly B2C buyers – who prefer to walk into a shop and buy from a sales rep on the shop floor. However, the trend is moving away from this long-familiar scenario.

During a guest lecture to the Executive MBA class of the Sydney Business School, I posed the following question to the attendees: How did you conduct your last major purchase? One of them described how he bought a big screen TV simply by walking into a popular retail store and asking the first rep sell them one. A small handful of other respondents cited similar or identical buying behaviors, all of them in a B2C context.

The vast majority of attendees, however, followed a very different path. To cite a single example, one lady in the front of the room said she had recently purchased a new family car. She described how she first went online to explore which cars were available that covered her needs within her price range. Then she went on to look at online vehicle test report sites and checked her impressions against the opinions of her friends, acquaintances and peers. Finally, she looked online at the personal perceptions and experiences of people who had previously purchased the same model that she was now considering.

By the time she was ready to speak to a sales rep she had already decided, not only what brand and model she wanted, but also what color it was to be, what options she required and what price she was prepared to pay. She told the class that she would have been quite prepared to even order the car online if that option had been available to her and that pretty much the only reason she and her husband visited a dealership was to take a test-drive in the car that they had decided to buy.

In summary, she had completed far more than 80% of her decision-making process before she contacted the car dealership. All that the salesperson could do was to take her order and to deliver the car. Can you see how the poor rep in the showroom had next to no control over the sale? All the power remained in the hands of the buyer. That is the power of the Buyer’s Journey.

We are now seeing signs that the above B2C mindset is starting to infiltrate the B2B sales world. Storytelling and sales presentations remain important pillars of the selling game, but they are increasingly trumped by situationally adept consultational skills that are complemented by extensive market insight and specialist solution expertise.

Modern information-rich pre-sales consultants are driving future sales. Even call centers are adjusting the way that their telemarketers or tele-prospectors work. Having traditionally been the light infantry of sales teams, they are changing their tactics, honing in on breaks in the line opened up, not so much by cold calling, but by highly targeted marketing campaigns. There is focus like never before on working the trigger points, i.e. those points at which the prospects’ buying journey and the vendors’ sales content or expert staff intersect.

At these intersections, the savviest of today’s vendors are erecting what I call ‘beacons of expertise’, which vendors are using to attract buyers during the online research phase of their journey. These take a variety of shapes: webinars, white papers, interviews, and sophisticated multi-channel social media engagements. While in the past these have largely been the exclusive domains of marketers, more and more salespeople are beginning to cross into these unfamiliar but bountiful waters. At the very least, salespeople are learning to turn their own familiarity with the same materials that their customers are encountering online to their advantage, especially when the prospect reaches out and initiates contact, perhaps with questions that relate to this content. If the salesperson is able to display much more than just a passing familiarity with the subject matter, they can start to assist the prospect through the final stages of the Buyer’s Journey and direct them away from competitor offerings towards their own.

However, not all salespeople are ready to adjust to the new world order. As sales managers who have been around since the days of Palo Alto Laboratories and the innovations that arrived in the 1970s can tell you, the reality is that many senior salespeople are little inclined to adjust their methods or mindset to fit new paradigms. This reluctance to metamorphose into the new sales environment is a substantial factor in the diminishing bottom line for many sales-based organizations.

Many of my executive clients tell me that they need to evolve from a product-centric organization to a customer-centric, solutions-oriented one, but that their own reps are unable or unwilling to make that transition.

In one of the largest technology vendor organizations that I have worked with, management had come to realize that future sales margins were going to come from selling solutions, not hardware. They tried, as gently as possible, to move their sales reps into pushing software to go with the hardware as a kind of ‘thin end of the wedge’, something that could slowly but surely transition their selling practices more towards solution-selling. The prevailing attitude of the died-in-the-wool hardware sales reps, though, was that, “Software is only 10% of the revenue, but it is 90% of the trouble. I’d rather sell another piece of hardware (colloquially referred to as a ‘box’) than any software.” The sad reality for this organization was that fewer than 20% of their reps were realistically capable of adapting to the new solution-selling paradigm. In no time at all, they were left without options. They were forced to transition out about 80% of their reps and sales managers and replace them with new blood. There’s no way to sugarcoat this: the financial and emotional costs were immense.

Drastic as the move may have seemed to the terminated staff or to uninformed outsiders, it was absolutely necessary for the future prosperity of the organization. For the organization in question, adapting to the new paradigm meant an almost complete overhaul of their sales department.

The alternative is worse. Old-school sales techniques being applied to new-school customers manifests itself in closure rates plummeting, too many sales leads remaining unattended, and too may ‘stuck deals’ in the sales pipeline that are not moving forward.

Here are three things the most successful of the new-school salespeople are doing consistently and are doing well:

Here are three things the most successful of the new-school salespeople are doing consistently and are doing well:

1)     They are using social listening and in-depth research to catch buyers during their discovery and consideration phases

2)     They are surprising and delighting potential buyers with data or insights that interrupt or divert their journey away from competitors

3)     They are positioning themselves as subject matter experts and trusted advisors, rather than as sales reps

The first of these requires world-class communication between sales and marketing teams; the second demands significant dedication and flexibility on the part of salespeople, who need to broaden and deepen their scope if they are to adapt to today’s customers and their needs; the third requires the ongoing development of new skills and aptitudes. The demand for sales consultants who fit this mold is far outstripping supply, making it more difficult than ever for organizations to get out ahead of the rapidly swinging pendulum, which is swinging towards a vital new breed of sales reps who are as much subject matter experts and consultative solution salesperson as they are company representatives. These twenty-first-century salespeople are the avant garde in the ongoing revolution of sales practices.

Takeaway

The world of Sales has changed significantly over the last few years, and the boundaries to Marketing are beginning to blur.

Clearly, significant challenges abound and only a collaborative mindset is the way of a successful future.

Read part 1 – The Evolution of The Buyer’s Journey (Part 1)

Note from author – this is an excerpt from Peter Strohkorb’s book “The OneTEAM Method”.

The post The Evolution Of The Buyer’s Journey (Part 2) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

This article is about how you can take that concept to a whole new level and win more sales.

Here is an example: I recently spoke with the CEO of a chemical supply company. They sell specialist cleaning products to commercial and industrial businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, schools, automotive workshops, etc. The sales team is selling the products old-school door to door by visiting potential client sites and by promoting the features, specs and efficacy of the cleaning products.

The CEO came to me looking for new ideas for revenue growth and on how to sell more of the slow-moving but high-margin items.

I asked him whether he had considered selling what I call “The benefits of the benefits”.

Selling the Benefits of the Benefits.

What did I mean by that?

Let’s say, you sell a can of graffiti remover to a high school. What do you actually sell?

Are you selling the can, or the removal of the graffiti?

If you answered “the removal of the graffiti” then you need to read on. If you answered “the can”, then you really need to read on.

Are you selling the can, or the removal of the graffiti?

Let’s examine the Benefits of the Benefits

What could be the positive consequences for the school of the graffiti being removed?

1. The school will no longer look like it had been taken over by a crime gang.

2. The cleaner image will improve the reputation of the school in the community.

3. The teachers, the staff and the principal will enjoy a better reputation.

4. Parents will more readily send their kids to this school because it now looks and feels safe.

5. With a cleaner image and an improved reputation the school will attract higher-quality teachers.

6. Higher quality teachers will attract more students.

It’s happiness all around.

So, coming back to my question to the CEO of the cleaning products company: Think about it. What are you really selling?

What are you really selling?

Are you selling a can of graffiti-remover, or are you selling a better school in a happier community?

So, next time you are on a sales call, think about selling more than just a product or a service, consider selling the benefits of the benefits.

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