B2B Selling is Ripe for Redefinition

In just a few days, I’ll hit my 90-day mark since joining LinkedIn. It’s been a crazy-busy, wonderful and wondrous three months with lots of transformational work, co-created with my new colleagues. In this post-pandemic, economically-challenged era, B2B has morphed to meet the needs of sellers and buyers. As we march toward the start of our new fiscal year in July, I’d like to share a bit about how these changing dynamics will drive the focus of our Sales Solutions business and the organizational value we can bring to sales leaders and their teams.?

B2B selling has never been easy, but since March 2020, the transformation from in-person to 100% remote to now hybrid selling has changed the function permanently. In today’s environment, sellers face significant challenges, accelerated by massive movement of their prospects from one company to another, reflected in the Great Reshuffle. The power balance has shifted, too: With so much information at their fingertips, buyers educate themselves in advance of talking to a vendor, so they look for sellers who they can truly collaborate with to make purchase decisions instead of being constantly being sold to.?

In chatting with others in the B2B orbit, it’s clear that sales leaders and professionals know that what they’ve always done to reach customers is no longer effective, but they’re unsure of the alternative. In fact, sales professionals are spending 70 percent of their time on non-selling activities, heads down administering data in their rapidly growing tech stacks, according to our 2022 global State of Sales report, to be released later in June.?

As we look at the trends in our recent report and based on conversations with many of our customers and influencers, we know it’s time to retire old B2B sales playbooks and chart new paths that focus on what’s most important to grow and close deals - bringing together account intelligence, relationship intelligence and intent signals to reach active buyers at the right time. I think most sellers would agree that the best sales cycles occur when account teams have warm relationships and sufficient intelligence to understand their prospective customer’s buying committee and their unique needs. This helps them engage with a relevant, data-driven pitch and product recommendations that show how they can best address the business needs of the company.?

I was lucky enough to witness how our Sales Solutions tools enable sales teams to connect with buyers in this way because I was a customer before joining LinkedIn. My prior success with our products largely drove my decision to join earlier this year (along with our unsurpassed company culture!).?

It’s an exciting time to be in B2B sales. Our world has been transformed by the pandemic. Buyers have more knowledge (and knowledge is power) so invasive outreach by ill-informed, aggressive salespeople has become a turn-off. There has never been a better moment to engage buyers in the way they want to buy. At LinkedIn we’re here to help sellers do just that, starting with today’s announcement of new B2B products and services .?

My hope is that when I look back nine months from now on my first anniversary at LinkedIn, B2B selling will look vastly different, redefined by our team and some exciting plans we have up our sleeves for the coming months. Stay tuned for more. #watchuswork ?