Fixing the Mess We Have Made Out of the Complex B2B Sale.

It is hard to believe the state of B2B sales is where it is. What a mess! What’s wrong? Just about everything! You must ask yourself what has caused such a loss of productivity and increase of expense when you sell B2B in the complex sale.

I used to think it was technology and frankly I am sure that technology is what has made the situation worse. But logically technology should make it better. Technology allows you to automate across just about any industry or process that it is applied to. Historically the result is more productivity at a lower cost. However, all the technology like the internet, Websites, CRM, Cadence tools, Video Tools, Intent tools, Email, Mobile Apps, and most recently AI have had little to no impact on sales productivity or performance. With this much technology and automation you would think that by now we would be selling ten times what we used to at one tenth the cost! Yet the reality is that it costs as much or more to sell about the same amount of product that it did twenty years ago!

Once you look at the facts and you realize that the technology should be the enabler and not the disabler you get the real reason it’s all such a mess! The reason is that few understand enough of the fundamentals of B2B sales and the complex sale to make the technology effective. Therefore, they use the technology to automate process that do not work or at best are highly suboptimal. Hence the technology is helping and guiding salespeople to automate the wrong actions faster. This is why the technology is sub-optimizing performance and driving the cost of sale higher.

Let’s dive in and discuss the fundamentals of selling B2B to see what is wrong and how to fix it!

Let’s start with the fundamental way companies and people buy things. All people no matter what they buy use emotion and then support the buy decision with logic. We as salespeople and marketeers tend to appeal to logic vs emotion and that is generally where the mistakes start. The emotions or things you must do as a salesperson or organization are.

1.? Get People aware of you and curious about you.

2.? Get them Interested in what you sell.

3.? Make them want to solve their problem with a solution like yours.

4.? Get them to want to solve with your solution.

5.? Close them.

Fundamentally this is what all sales is about. Yet we do very little correctly to make any of this happen! Prior to all the technology this is what salespeople and marketing organizations did. These days this is still what salespeople must do and good salespeople try and do. However, the technology automates none of this and in most cases gets in the way! But, if you just keep the fundamentals above in mind and use the technology to automate those fundamentals what a different world we would live in!

Let’s take each one and break them down and talk about what we do today and what we should do!

We now have the internet and our websites and marketing tools to create awareness and curiosity. The reality is that we do a pretty good job of creating awareness and educating the masses. But where it goes off track is that we try and create interest with the website. Perhaps we think you can do that with a website or a product commercial, but we cannot do that very much at all and certainly not to scale. The reason is that your prospects do not give a darn about your company or your product. They care about themselves, their problems and their challenges as well as how and if they should address them. The objective of all your marketing should not be the creation of interest or over education about your company or product. The objective of your marketing should be to get the prospect to reach out to you out of curiosity. They don’t become curious about how your product works and then reach out. They become curious about whether you can address their problems and challenges and how you think about that and go about that. The product is an afterthought!

This means you must focus most of your marketing on the personas of those you are trying to reach as well as the problems and challenges they face. Also, you should discuss how you view the issues and as such get the prospect curious about your approach and value rather than your product. This means a big change to the way we market. But let me tell you why that change is critical and why you must make it.? When you advertise your product and services as the primary focus you are trying to generate interest in your product and not curiosity. We know that when a prospect is interested, and they contact us that they are already on the road to a decision. This means that your marketing is primarily designed to find interested buyers. Otherwise, why on earth would they be researching your type of solution in the first place! No one is on the internet looking for solutions to problems they are not ready to address!? The active buyer market is no more than five percent of the market at any given time. This means your marketing is built primarily to reach a whopping five percent of the market. How on earth are you going to increase revenue and reduce cost of sale marketing to only five percent of the market!

You will say that this is why we do cold outreach and why we have SDR’s. Ha! No, it’s not! Everything you do with cold outreach and SDR’s is meant to find the active buyers in the five percent of the market you may have missed with your marketing. For the most part they use the same campaigns with the same messages that you publish on your website. These are product commercials! Then what do they do when they get a lead? Yup! They try and do a demo and or a product pitch. This means you have the most inexperienced sales resource you have taking the first conversation with a prospect. This also means the salesperson is probably meeting the client for the first time at the demo. This practice violates every basic rule of selling there is!

You are doing a demo with little understanding of how the prospects, the key influencers and the organization as a whole view their challenges and problems. You don’t know because they have not told you. You probably do not even know who the key players are. Do you really think seeing a great demo is going to make them tell you? Its not! What will make them tell you is the trust they have in you and the credibility you have with them. You earn trust through conversation with them and about them, not with a product pitch! This means the main objective of an SDR organization should be to build campaigns that are focused on creating curiosity such that the prospect engages in some way that ultimately leads to a conversation. When you get that conversation make sure that you have a process that engages the salesperson not the SDR.

When you follow this process, you get a sale off to the right start and the right process. When you do not, you start on the wrong road, and it just gets worse from there. The most important thing is that when you build credibility and trust you get to influence the bias of the prospect before they are interested and actively looking. This means you get to build business in the other ninety five percent of the market. You are now selling to a market that is twenty times the size of the one you are currently addressing!

Once we have created awareness and curiosity, we can now create interest. Remember that you have been talking to them about them, their problems, and their challenges. When they become interested, they are going to tell you. They will ask for a demo or presentation. But they are signaling something else to you as a salesperson that most salespeople miss! They are telling you that they trust you. This is the reason you do not want to cram a presentation and demo down their throats. When a prospect asks you to present your solution to them and their peers or managers, they trust you not to embarrass them within their organizations. This means you have earned the right to ask them more detailed qualifying questions about dollars, timeframes, influencers, decision makers, etc.? This is the information you need to set the rest of the sales cycle up correctly and to defeat your competition.

When you do not earn the trust and credibility with your prospect you lose the ability to get the information you need to win the business.? When you don’t start with their views of the problem you lose the ability to influence to create the bias towards your solution. These are two death knells to the success of a sales effort!

The main takeaway so far should be that curiosity and interest are created through conversation with credible and trustworthy salespeople. I know you all want to do this digitally. Sorry but you can’t at least not yet. ?What you can do digitally is create awareness and just enough curiosity to get a prospect to engage. But again, to do that you must create different marketing materials and campaigns than you have today!

The creation of a desire to solve the problem you have uncovered is the next phase. This is an inflection point where you are elevating latent pain to acute pain. There is a specific method to do this. But again, fewer and fewer salespeople and marketeers are able to do this!

The tool you use here is a presentation and demo. But how you structure that is critical to it effectiveness and your ability to make latent pain acute.? Here is the structure:

Result of Discovery- Tell them what you heard.

Pain Slide- illustrate the problem and pain it causes.

Pain Slide- illustrate the problem and pain it causes.

Pain Slide- illustrate the problem and pain it causes.

Hope Slide- Show them a solution picture that solves the problem (not your product but what a solution that would solve the problem should look like).

Hope Slide- Show them a solution picture that solves the problem (not your product but what a solution that would solve the problem would look like)

Pause- to get agreement that the problem and requirements to solve are agreed by all.

Rescue Slides- Your Solution.

Demo.

Summary of benefits.

Next Steps.

Q and A.

What I see at best typically is a discovery slide, a generic problem slide then a presentation and demo.? Not very effective!

When you do it right your conversations about their problem allow you to influence their vision and outlook on the problem. If you are a smart salesperson, you are influencing their problem vision towards the unique features and value your product delivers. (Impossible to do when you have an SDR do a presentation before you really get started).

Let me give you an example of what I outlined above. When SAP came to market, they did discovery around the process for bringing product to market. They met the prospect where they lived and got their views of the problem. Then they redefined the root cause of the pain to be the lack of integration of disparate tools to support the manufacturing process. These were?their pain slides. The hope slides highlighted the benefits and pain relief that would come from an integrated approach. The rescue was a presentation and demonstration of an integrated solution.? The rest is history! Companies threw out millions of dollars of technology and investment and replaced it will millions more of SAP and investment in same.

When you have elevated latent pain to acute pain and accomplished getting the prospect to want to solve the problem with a product like yours you have reached the critical inflection point in the deal. This is where you must build a strategy to win the deal or walk away. You are going to invest the most time, resource and money from here forward, so you must win. Loss means not only no sale, but limited opportunity given the time and resource you have left to make up for the loss.

Here again we see in cycles that are executed today a huge waste of resources. When you start wrong if you get to this point in the cycle, you are unlikely to have the information needed to close the business. You may not have access to the power, the money or the key influences. The way the average salesperson solves for that today is that they do all the work they would ordinarily do in the way of a business case, ROI, proof of concept etc. but they do it for their coach or champion in the hopes that they will then give access to the power, influence and information required to close a deal. This of course fails far more often than it succeeds. But you can hear the resource suck for miles!?

The right way to instrument this is to build the business case and the ROI based on the agreed on problem and solution. Then the business case is presented to the key influencers and the funding source such that you gain agreement that if the solution can be proven in concept to deliver the value that it will be purchased. This is when you start the contracting process as well. You and your champions assume you will be successful.

When you start the prove phase you know that if you succeed you win. This is a far better use of resources than the speculative efforts most companies allow their salespeople to execute these days. When you execute the proof remember that you must orchestrate the process to be the process that will allow you to show the product value. When a prospect evaluates a new kind of technology or product that takes a different approach, chances are they will need a different evaluation process than any they have used in the past. This means you are going to have to tell them how the evaluation needs to be done. When you have not built trust and credibility in the sales process you have no chance of doing that. This increases the chances they will do it their way and the solution will not prove the business case. Again, a very unfortunate position to be in.

When you execute a cycle as stated above the close will happen. I hear so much blabber around the prospect does not know how to buy, you must show them. Blah blah blah. The truth is the prospect does not know how to buy it based on the way you have tried to sell it! What they do not know how to do is sell it internally. Yeah, well why are they doing the selling internally in the first place. They are doing it because you did not build the trust and credibility with the key influencers and stakeholders to be able to do it yourself! When you have sold a solution correctly you are told the ways they get deals done and you help them expedite it!

Perhaps after reading this, you can see how far afield we are from building efficient, productive and scalable sales process! In case you’re wondering if this works, we have ramped multiple start-up companies faster and, on less cash, than any of the PE/VC models have been able to. When we brought this approach to a very established B2B enterprise sales organization it grew sixty three percent the first year and eighty six percent the second year. The growth rate of the core company was five percent. The resource cost that was used when compared to other costs to generate a dollar of revenue was massively less expensive.

In order to do this in the digital world of today you need some different technologies than you have and different processes for some of the technologies that you do have.

You need technologies that help you profile and audience the correct targets. You need technologies that help you generate field digital based campaigns that target the prospect persona and the issues and challenges they may have. You need blogs and events that help clients help themselves. This is where AI can really help you!

Secondly stop the sales training madness. Yes, salespeople need training. But the training almost all salespeople need today is training on how to have a conversation. You want to train them in how to have a productive conversation with a prospect that builds trust and credibility and steers them in the direction you want them to go. Again, there are now some good AI tools here.

When it comes to your CRM you need an overhaul!? The one thing you do not need is AI tools that update your CRM. Does anyone realize that SFDC makes its money to a large degree on how much information you store. The problem everyone seems to have is that because they execute the wrong sales process which struggles to build trust and credibility they don’t have the critical information to get deals progressed and close. The remedy for this in most managers minds seems to be to have all the information from everyone that has ever conversed or touched the account in the CRM. What a Joke. This does not solve the problem. The problem is that you do not have a sales process that builds trust and credibility, so no one has the critical pieces of information you need to begin with!

The key is to build a sales process set of stages in your CRM that are the buyer’s stages as outlined at the beginning of this article. Then you should map the activities and resources to execute those activities to those stages. You will see a significant increase in productivity and decrease in cost when you do this! You will be simplifying the heck out of your CRM and require less than half the data you do now!?

Finally, this enables you to set up a strong deal review and forecasting methodology that is far more accurate and easier to understand than anything you have today.?

I have built the automation that you need to implement the initiatives and processes outlined above. I can implement all of them or some of them with you. I can start in any area that you believe is the most pressing or I can work with multiple departments in a coordinated effort.

When you look for a CRO the things outlined herein are the things that person needs to enable. There are many CRO’s out there that do not fully understand the processes outlined. I am happy to help them, and other sales leaders learn and implement. There are also many CRO’s that do understand what is written herein. However, they need someone that can help their teams implement and enable. Again, please do not hesitate to reach out.

We need to recapture our ability to sell from the automation that is being used to do it incorrectly. We can influence clients before they contact us, we can build trust and credibility, we can build biases towards our solutions. We can benefit from the latent market and not just the active market, we can increase revenue and decrease expense. The know-how and technology to do it exists. But in order to accomplish our goals we must automate the right processes and instrument the right sales cycles with the right technologies used in the correct manner! ?

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