
New thinking in B2B sales!? Part 2
Back to basics cuts the clutter of performance improvement
By Evan Reminick, Integrated Sales Strategies
In Part 1, we looked at the history of organizational sales development to see why so it’s easy to get caught up in advancements. But one thing that will never change in sales is customers. In Part 2, we’ll look at the limits of chasing sales technology and what getting back to the basics really means.
Pulling back from the limits
Competitive edge — we say it all the time in sales. We strive for it because…just because. Performance means acceleration. More, faster. That’s the kind of jocks we are. But if we slow down a moment and think about what that means, if we bring our environment into sharp focus, we might notice things that hardly seem to register in the stretched-to-vanishing blur of goal attainment. An edge is a limit, and if innovation wants to keep us there, we’re in constant danger of wipeout. We’re over-leveraged, out of balance in relation to our core: customers.
Here are some typical ways we end up losing by sales development that pushes performance at the limits:
Tactical limits: When technology and compliance become the point, rather than the means, of sales activity, organizations leave little or no room for creativity and negotiation. On the other hand, when each seller is left to his or her own creative devices, there is no provision for organizational improvement. Result: inhibited growth.
Strategic limits: When limited to technology and technique, sales development skims the business without engaging its core. The hardest team to improve is the team lacking clarity on its alignment with customers. Result: uneven performance.
What business am I in?
Does your company’s sales development address this core question of customer relationship? This is a question of purpose and gives sellers a moral measure in addition to a substantial one. If sales approaches can be crap or substantial as a measure of customer engagement, they can also be good and evil. In this context, good sales development has the goal of improving the customer’s fortune. Evil sales development schemes to advance the seller’s fortune at the customer’s expense.
Crap, substantial, good, evil. This puts us into a 4-square framework for evaluating the body of productivity approaches and tools.
What kind of business are you in? What are you offering? What are you doing to substantiate those answers? To achieve effective, managed, improvable performance, strategic sales organizations make their way forward by getting back to basics.
Customers are basic
Most of a salesperson’s time is given to non-selling activities. Most of their engagements result in a loss. A high percentage of those losses were never viable and should have been qualified out. Etc. etc. We needn’t string out the list of performance challenges. In my experience, lack of customer knowledge–not lack of product knowledge or lack of market knowledge or lack of sales knowledge–is the most fundamental and least addressed problem in corporate sales development.
Developing around customers
How to develop sales productivity around customers? Ask them! If this advice sounds glib, you’d better adjust your hearing. Who in your business is primarily concerned with understanding customers’ business situations, external and internal? If your B2B company has no visibility beyond transactions, no ability to anticipate behavior at the customer (as opposed to market) level, then no amount of skills training or CRM implementation is going to move the needle on your team’s sales performance.
To some degree, everyone in sales needs to understand customers as part of the job. Insights on individual accounts aggregate to market insights and better offerings. If your people are developing those insights, your company owns the core competitive edge that no CRM or blue sheet will rival on their own.
Brought down to sales operations, if you don’t know what your customer values, you can’t sell it. Strategic sales organizations treat RFPs and quote requests as the back half, not the beginning, of the sales cycle. Their goal is not to answer these requests, but to write them for their customers. That’s impossible without knowing the business gears that turn the buying gears.
By seeking business insight directly from customers, you are able to create critical value messages and help you establish a differentiated position. Insight should be basic to your sales process, sales enablement, AND sales development. All the rest is additive, and can be subtracted if it can’t demonstrably advance and/or direct the conversion of customer insights to account growth.
