More and more purchasing decisions are happening inside the dark funnel—parts of the buyer’s journey that are invisible to sales and marketing teams. According to Gartner, marketers lack visibility into at least 50% of the buying journey, making growth opportunities harder to influence. And, when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend less than a fifth (17%) of their time meeting with potential suppliers. 

The rise of the dark funnel means more sales processes are happening outside of a sales team’s control and that’s something many of us will balk at. Take software sales for example, more buyers than ever are conducting their research online before they even visit a provider’s website. Online reputation across review sites, social media platforms, discussion forums and events has become crucial in purchasing decisions. 

In this article, I explain more about the dark funnel and provide ideas on how you and your sales team can leverage this trend rather than succumb to its challenges.  

First, let’s talk more about the dark funnel

The dark funnel is a hidden space where prospects explore options, seek advice, and gather info through online research, reviews, social media, and more. Despite being hard to track and influence, the dark funnel is crucial in the rise of self-service culture and buyers wanting control. 

For sales teams, the challenge lies in identifying and understanding these invisible touchpoints, as well as finding ways to influence them positively. 

Now, we can dive deeper into how the sales landscape is changing

Self-service is transforming the way sales teams approach customer engagement. B2B buyers are taking matters into their own hands – research and shortlists are often compiled with little or no vendor interaction. 

Thanks to online retail, the B2C buying journey has evolved to the point where individuals shop around for the best prices,  meaning marketing and advertising channels need to work even harder for attention.  

For both groups, the dark funnel is appealing as buyers can avoid a hard sell and craft a buying journey on their terms. 

Traditional attribution metrics like email open rates and social media clicks are not as useful or significant as they once were. Customers are looking for products and services in places that sales teams often cannot influence – within the dark funnel. 

Using the dark funnel to support the sales cycle

For all its mystery, the dark funnel is not the enemy. Far from it. The propensity for buyers to self-serve means sales cycles can be shorter. This makes the dark funnel a positive support for the sales cycle. 

But that doesn’t mean that sales teams should sit back and let the dark funnel do the work. The onus is on businesses to get their content in front of their audience via the right channel. Podcasts, webinars and LinkedIn forums are all valuable tools of influence for today’s buyers and where content needs to be pushed. 

Companies must work hard to remain visible so sales teams can act when customers emerge from the dark funnel. 

The moment a customer emerges, sales reps can help buyers complete their purchase and feel confident in their decision. Sales teams stand out when they can provide additional insights and value that buyers can’t find on social media or in discussion forums.  

Tips for building influence inside the dark funnel

Sales teams may no longer make the first move but they need to make a good first impression. Since first impressions are made well before any interaction, sales leaders need to be prepared to build influence inside the dark funnel.  

The following strategies can support sales leaders in their efforts: 

• Invest in content marketing and thought leadership to attract potential customers during their pre-purchase research phase. Content such as blogs, whitepapers, videos, and webinars can help build credibility and trust. 
• Optimise SEO and online visibility and create content that answers common queries customers have during the research phase
• Use social media and influencer marketing to engage with prospects on platforms where they are active. Sales leaders who don’t post regularly on LinkedIn are missing out on great opportunities. 
• Consider retargeting and remarketing tactics to reach out to prospects who have already visited your website or engaged with your content. 
• Deploy personalisation and account-based marketing to address the specific needs and pain points of individual prospects. 

With the right strategies, you can make a positive impact on potential customers during this hidden phase of the buyer’s journey. Leveraging the dark funnel correctly will help your organisation stand out and establish a strong foundation for future sales interactions. 

The post Shining a Light on the Dark Funnel: How It Can Empower Your Sales Strategy 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.

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.

The blueprint for sales success in an enterprise company is unlikely to work for small business. Likewise, sales strategies for highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial service are unlikely to work for retail.

Opinions (and input) from external parties who have industry experience, matter. Your direct competitors might be well positioned to locate the missing pieces to the puzzle but the chances in having a competitor share sensitive information, is highly unlikely and more importantly anti-competitive.

‘Trial and error’ is an option adopted by many, although the opportunity cost of fixing an error or pivoting in a reactive manner, is high once you’ve committed time and resources to achieve plan A. Sometimes, there is no turning back or a suitable plan B.

When formulating or choosing a strategy, using quantitative data will help to realign emotion and intuition reducing the need of navigating blindly and relying on guesswork. If your ‘gut feel’ is right at least 51% of the time (technically a majority win), the expected value from a coin toss will only deliver hope rather than certainty.

The global State of Sales 2020 report, conducted between 13 May to 30 June 2020, surveyed 5,951 full-time sales professionals across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East and – all respondents were third-party panelists (not limited to Salesforce customers).

The top four sales tactics for success over the next 12 months were:

1. Increased flexibility with customers

2. Improved data quality and accessibility

3. Simplified sales processes

4. Personalised outreach

Why is each strategy important and how sales leaders can do it better?

4. Personalising Outreach

Authored by Jo Schonheim, Head of Sales and Marketing of True Sydney.

By (my) definition, personalising outreach refers to the tailoring of targeted outbound marketing. It can be personalised either to the individual recipient or organisation, and in a myriad of ways. Either addressing something about the recipient (their name, their role, a personal attribute), the company or industry they’re in. Mission critical, it includes something specifically of value to them: an industry insight, a personalised offer or CTA (Call to Action).

The intention is to demonstrate empathy; so the recipient feels seen and understood. Two of the most important things us mere mortals crave. This is powerful in forging foundations of rapport and connection. 

It’s important as the more personalised it is, the more likely it is to resonate. The more powerfully it resonates, the more likely it is to have impact and elicit an emotional response in a prospect. Afterall, emotion drives behaviour. And behaviour drives action.

It’s also rare, meaning it stands out and cuts through the noise.

Can you remember receiving a personalised piece of Marketing?
What was your reaction?
What was your opinion of the organisation after reading it?
Did you sit up and pay more attention?

I’m guessing worst case, you lingered over it longer then you normally would, before fast filing it? And best case, it sparked enough curiosity causing you to act on the CTA, and click through?  Am I right?

All great outbound marketing shouldn’t be to try and SELL. And by great, I mean effective. It should be to pique enough CURIOSITY to move prospects to the NEXT STEP (through the CTA).

How Can Sales Leaders Can Do It Better? 

1. Less is more. Like time with family, it’s Quality over Quantity.
Gone are the days of “it’s a numbers game”. Volume is for spam.
And there’s no ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card if you get slapped with a Spam filter.
Niche your focus when building your Leads List so you can afford the time to personalise your marketing.

2. Precision is everything; without a target, you’re bound to hit it.
Get laser focused on not just WHO you want to target, but WHAT you want to achieve. What’s the Objective? Get clear on what success looks like for your outbound reach. 
Define the Outcome and reverse engineer achieving it.

3. One hour’s thinking, 5 minutes work – not 5 mins thinking, an hour’s work
Don’t be that douche that failed to plan. Think it through and craft your message (and yes, typos and poor grammar erode trust and credibility faster than one dares to imagine).
Slack input equals sloppy output, which will just see you work harder, to achieve less. 

4. Empathy: take time to know what you don’t know.
Research, prepare and share valuable insights. Insights could be talking to their pain points, developments in their industry or movement in their market. Your objective is to deliver value straight out of the gates; capturing their attention in the first few seconds. No more powerful way to do so, than to personalise with empathy, so it feels like you’re talking to them, about them in a personal human-to-human way. Remember, resonance drives action.

5. Being dry as toast is not going to land the lead.
You are not a robot. So bin the corporate speak. Remember, you are a human speaking to another human. Use a human voice, in a professional tone. Don’t be afraid to be a little cheeky; capturing attention is different to seeking attention.

The Golden Rule: Resonance is Everything.

3. Simplifying the Sales Process

Authored by Bill Beedie, Head of Sales ANZ at Houston We Have

Establishing a Sales Process in a sales organisation used to be fairly straight forward. The Sales Process was a set of repeatable steps that a sales person and business would undertake to move a prospective buyer from Suspect through to Client. Whilst allowing for industry/company variations the main stages would involve: Prospecting, Preparation and Approach, Demonstrations/Presentations, Negotiations, Close and Implementation.

It was ALL about The Seller’s Sales Process!. How we reached out, educated, persuaded and eventually won over the client.

TODAY EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED – from Buyer Push to Customer Pull.

Sophisticated buyers of today do their own research online through a variety of digital and social platforms and by the time they reach your business they will likely know what they want, what you offer, and what price they want to move forward.

The “Buyers Journey” is now the start of the sales process and the implications of this are profound for sales operations not yet on board with this new paradigm.

Is the Modern Sales process now more or less complex? New processes may first appear daunting, complex and fragmented, however once the rules, processes and technology of the new game are embedded, it will prove to be simpler. We will get more done, using less resource, to reach target markets more effectively and do business faster.

How Can Sales Leaders Can Do It Better? 

1. Marketing and Sales need to work seamlessly to deliver high value experiences for new and current clients
2. Don’t focus on your product or service (no one cares), it’s what your solution or service does to assist clients with their problems, so do you really know your customer and your value proposition
3. If clients are researching online, can they find you, will they see value in how you profile your services, goods, and culture, will they be comfortable you can assist them in their business
4. When clients reach out for information is your business adding value to their investigation, i.e. quality digital assets, value add white papers, testimonials, etc
5. Are your sales team members skilled using online tools for investigation and know how to professionally contact and follow up
6. Are your sales people adding value to the clients “Journey”, clients are looking for things they don’t know: insights on business, their market, trends in the industry, examples of how you’ll make it work for them
7. Traditional soft sales skills in business, negotiating skills, relationship building, are still critical but now need to be applied in the new paradigm, is your sales team digitally enabled?

It’s an extraordinary time in B2B sales and business leaders and sales leaders alike need to stay on top of current trends and invest in technology and their people to stay abreast of the challenges and take full advantage of the benefits, the digital and social media age offer. 

2. Improved data quality and accessibility – Data breadth vs Data Depth

Authored by, David Christiansen,  Director, Sales and Marketing at ACP Solutions

As sales people, we are always after a sale made easier by a higher close probability and a shortened sales cycle. Sounds easy enough. Target the right person or people within your ideal customer profile and bang – they are ready to buy and they’ll pay what you propose. Wish it was that simple right? How do I get my hands on a list that has the right coverage with the right data elements which can then be fed to my SDR’s or even better, my CRM to support my pipeline requirements to cover 4X quota?

These questions have been the challenge for data sellers for years and where they choose to invest their resources in data build with breadth or depth continues to provide headaches for all sides. Do I buy the data set that has the coverage I am after or do I buy the smaller data set that has the data elements or data depth that I value?

For years this was a challenge I had in my role as a Director responsible for marketing data at a firm recognised as having the best data quality and data coverage in Australia. Building and maintaining data hygiene with the right elements, containing the right insights with high quality analytics appended is so expensive especially when these records may not be ordered by the clients I rely on to help me build them. How to price is them is a whole other discussion altogether.

We know that certain data elements in a business record do not change as often as other data elements. Addresses, company names, Chief Executive name and even their email address is pretty much publicly available. Additionally, these people are marketed to constantly and have filters protecting them against salespeople like us to stop them being bombarded.

Each person on earth will generate an average of about 1.7 MB of data per second. Daily smartphone and computer usage means that the volume of data is expanding rapidly. The average user shares dozens of media links daily, and all of that has to be stored somewhere. There is too much data to manage if you don’t have a plan to consume it.

How Can Sales Leaders Can Do It Better? 

1. Choose data depth and recency over data breadth.
2. Analytics, insights, and automation augment your ability, they don’t replace you.
3. Recognise the value of YOUR time and talent. Be smart with how you use data.
4. We all have a part to play building data and making it actionable.

1. Flexibility with customers – how flexible are your team?

Authored by, Charmaine Keegan, Sales and Mindset Training Specialist of Smarter Selling

Flexibility with customers is going to be the top skill required during 2021. This is going to the pivotal difference between winning a piece of business – or not.

Flexibility with customers, what does that even mean? It means you are engaging with your customers in a way that suits them, and not dictated by what suits you.

Many salespeople have ‘their way’ (their default if you will) of how they interact and engage with clients.  COVID saw many face-to-face reps unravel when they couldn’t conduct business in their ‘normal’ way. 

Their challenges were suddenly building up – the customer won’t return my call, I can’t see their reactions, they can’t see me, they don’t want to jump onto zoom etc.

Quite simply they have never had to exercise the prescribed skills. They are not used to being flexible.

Yet others embraced the opportunity to increase and enhance their skills, recognising that adopting different approaches was going to better their position.

This realisation that customers need us to work with them in different ways, and our need to be flexible, starts with that very first interaction when you are trying to convert them into a customer.

Learning how to handle clients preferring, for example, to only communicate through live chat or email, we as salespeople need to be able to foremost accept (not begrudge) these different communication methods to then be highly skilled in handling multiple ways of engaging, so that we are able to form a relationship, get the intel required, position ourselves as the trusted advisor and then put forward a compelling reason for that client to buy into us and ultimately get positive results.

What can a leader do to help their team be more flexible?

As a leader you can drive this by essentially being flexible yourself. Not complaining when a client asks to email rather than speak on the phone.  Adjusting positively to the ‘new normal’ (you over that term yet?).  Getting your team highly skilled on live chat, how to handle enquires exclusively through email. How to be polished on video conferencing. How to be resilient and adaptable and of course, arming them on how to professionally give the client a reason as to why jumping on a VC or seeing you face-to-face will be of benefit to them – but never assuming that that is the only way to communicate.

Flexibility in sales means acquiring a sophisticated, intelligent approach where you adjust your method to suit the client, and at all times, regardless of how you are engaging with them, you position yourself as the trusted advisor and solution provider.  It’s about being open to adjusting your approach, style and manner befitting to your client.

We call it ‘the dance’ i.e. You shouldn’t be forcing the client into dancing your way but adjust your footwork to match theirs. After all, our jobs as salespeople is to make the interaction seamless and easy – make it easy for the client to buy of you.

Keep up that fancy footwork.

Publisher’s note – I thank Jo Schonheim, Bill Beedie, David Christiansen and Charmaine Keegan for sharing their views and I encourage you to connect with them on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer – you can download the State of Sales report as it details drivers for business growth and resilience based on statistical feedback from thousands of sales professionals who will encounter many of the same challenges as your organisation.

This article is not a sponsored post and has been written independently of commercial influence. Head Of Sales is funded by advertising from many organisations including Salesforce.

The post 4 Sales Strategies That Expedite Growth And Recovery appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The consumer demographic has shifted with Millennials and Gen X now representing 64% of U.S. online shoppers. With customers getting younger, buying priorities and expectations have changed – and retailers need to be able to maneuver quickly.

This article helps brands to understand consumer sentiments across the buying journey and leverage insights that can feed top line growth in the coming year. It covers factors influencing customer behaviour, buying patterns, the impact of a global recession. The various stages in the consumer buying journey and the ever-evolving role of digital and omni-channel in altering the wants and needs of today’s consumers.

It took 10 years for online shopping to grow from 5.6% to 16% of total retail sales – but in the days following the quarantine, e-commerce buying surpassed all records, growing more than 10% in just 8 weeks, to 27%, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, May 2020. Even as stores start to reopen their doors, our most recent survey suggests that 82% shoppers plan to continue shopping online.

Online consumers demographics and the buying journey

The customer demographic has shifted rapidly in the last decade, first with Millennials forming a huge buyer population and then with Generation Z accounting for almost 40% of the total global consumer base.

The online consumer today references multiple digital touch points before making a purchase decision. Retailers need to create strategies that engage their potential customers at every stage of their buying journey – from discovery to decision making. The below infographic gives a closer look at the buyer journey of an online shopper. With the right set of retail and marketing tools, competitive intelligence, and automated processes, retailers can get a competitive advantage by engaging with online shoppers across their buying journeys.

The online shopper is constantly comparing prices

94% of online shoppers compare prices at least some time, to get the best deal. This shows that price is a critical factor while making buying decisions online and shoppers should take steps in monitoring competitor prices and adjusting their prices accordingly.

28% of respondents said they often abandon a purchase due to high shipping costs while 56% others said they sometimes abandon purchase due to the shipping costs. These numbers show that shipping costs are a key deciding factor for many online consumers.

Retailers must take into account these consumer sentiments and upgrade their logistics and supply chain to offer fast and affordable delivery options and not lose interested customers on account of delivery charges.

The Impact of Potential Recession on Consumer Spending Patterns

Shoppers spend cautiously when threatened by recession:

Yes, I am cutting back on spending 51%
No, I am not concerned about my spending habits 24%

In the event of a global recession, respondents are most likely to splurge on essentials like food & grocery over other categories – a similar trend seen at the peak of COVID-19 crisis as well. Shoppers have been exercising caution while making purchase decisions. They are concentrating on increasing savings and are cutting down on spending on non-essentials like apparel, footwear, home furnishings, electronics, etc.

What items are you most likely to cut costs on in the event of a global recession?

35% Phones, Laptops and Tablets
40% Clothing, Footwear and Accessories
35% Home Décor
19% Home and Kitchen Electronics
19% Toys, Gaming Equipment
15% Sport & Fitness Equipment
5% Pet Supplies
20% General Grocery
11% Book, Stationary & Office
13% Makeup & Skincare
19% None of the above

In order to optimize growth, retailers may want to consider how they can leverage the categories that shoppers are more likely to “splurge on” during a recession. General grocery, pet supplies, and skincare appear to be in the safe zone in case of further economic deterioration.

The Pandemic and the Birth of the New Online Shopper

Within a few weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has had the entire world in its grips. Most countries enforced strict regulations, restricting business for non-essential shops and forcing many retailers to shutter their stores. Social distancing coaxed people into buying online, some for the very first time, creating a new sense of confidence and an increased level of comfort in the e-commerce channel. From our findings we can infer that this switch to online channels is here to stay even after things get back to normal. Retailers need to jump on this opportunity and adapt to convert these shoppers with little or no cost of acquisition.

We saw varied reactions from shoppers to the crisis. Yet, one common thread across the survey was that the younger generation was more opinionated on how brands were promoting themselves, and were keener on choosing local brands to help drive business or brands that were extending help to fight the crisis.

Brands need to be cautious while promoting products during crisis as 24% of online consumer do not want to be sold to during COVID.

What is your response to retailers continuing to market their products to you as usual during the COVID-19 outbreak?

• I still want to hear from brands, but only those that I normally shop at 18%
• It doesn’t bother me 55%
• I only want to hear from brands doing something to help in the COVID-19 crisis 11%
• I find it insensitive 11%
• I do not want to be marketed to at this time 13%

The younger demographic wants to see brands extend help during the crisis

It is interesting to see that the younger demographic is paying overwhelming attention to what brands are being socially responsible and this could in turn reflect in their purchases. 52% said they are paying attention to what brands are being proactive about helping and plan to buy from them after the pandemic. 71% of consumers in the 18-24 age group and 70% in the 25-34 age group say they have been paying attention to which brands are pitching in to help.

Consumers plan on shifting spends towards small and local businesses

During the COVID-19 crisis, are you more likely to shop at small business retailers to help these businesses stay afloat?

• Yes, I have or plan to shift my spending towards small or local businesses (48%)
• No, I will not change where I shop (33%)
• Undecided (19%)

Looking ahead

Consumers are more cautious about their buying decisions in these difficult times, often taking into account how brands and retailers are helping with the fight against COVID-19. They expect retailers to exercise caution while promoting their brands and expect them to contribute in combating the crisis.

With consumers increasingly looking to buy from brands that align with their beliefs and purposes, brands are making strides to represent social and environmental causes and incorporate sustainability and fair trade across their value chain.

The current e-commerce boom is here to stay, with 82% saying they will continue shopping online even as stores open up. Additionally, with many first-time online shoppers having crossed the barrier of the unknown during the pandemic, retailers have a unique opportunity to onboard these with little to no cost of acquisition.

In summary, the retail industry is going through a wave of transformation and will never be the same.

Unprecedented external factors have contributed to this turn of events and have carved a sure-shot path for a data-driven, digital first, unified future of retail. Retailers and brands need to embrace this change and ride this transformative wave to win in the age of Amazon. They need to unify compelling online and instore experiences and weave them throughout the consumer buying journey to reel in consumers at every stage and win market share.

Survey methodology – Intelligence Node in partnership with Dynata, conducted six consumer surveys to study and analyse the U.S. consumer buying behaviour across all major retail sectors.

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