B2B Sales Effectiveness for Uncertain Times - New Insights & Emerging Best Practices

We are all familiar with the concept of FOMO, but have you heard of FOMU?

"Fear of Messing Up", credit to Ted McKenna for this wordsmithery, encapsulates a primary, let largely unrecognised and underleveraged factor in buying today.

There are so many options, the "tyranny of the OR", Fear Of Better Options FOBO e.g. so much me-too marketing and overlap between 15k martech vendors and 2.5k salestech vendors... how can you make a decision?

Ted and Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson , authors of the seminal Challenger Sales book, share new insights on the no-decision/status quo problem in their new book The Jolt Effect released on September 20th.

Like myself they believe conversations matter today in business, and that you must study what salespeople actually do rather than what they say they do...

So they analysed 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, spanning both transactional and complex sales.

Their findings debunk long-held sales beliefs and set new standards in outcomes-focussed and data-driven sales practice.

We’ve misunderstood?what really holds back buyers Daniel Pink , author of To Sell Is Human and The Power of Regret

Importantly, they speak to my direct experience over the last 20 years, and are corroborated through ConnectAndSell, Inc insights aggregated from millions of recorded and deeply analysed conversations.

Between 40% and 60% of deals today end up lost... despite customers expressing real intent to purchase, they ultimately fail to act - JOLT Effect

These customers will often go through the entire sales process — consuming valuable seller time and organisational resources, often engaging in extended proof-of-concept trials — only to end up not crossing the finish line.

More no-decision losses are because we didn’t dial down the FOMU, not because we didn’t dial up the FOMO - JOLT Effect

The data reveals that your potential customers are no longer nearly as motivated by failure to succeed:

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) accounts for 44% of customer inaction - JOLT Effect

What they really care about, the new primary driver, is

Fear of Messing Up (FOMU) accounts for 56% of customer inaction- JOLT Effect

Omission bias, long highlighted by?human psychology and behavioral economics, is a stronger factor than fear of missing out and yet very rarely incorporated into modern selling.

87% of sales opportunities contain either moderate or high levels of customer indecision. And it is toxic: as indecision increases, win rates plummet - Harvard Business Review

And with highly indecisive customers

high performers still convert well above average at 31% while core performers struggle mightily, bringing in only 6% of their opportunities - JOLT Effect

AHHHH. Long-established sales "best practices" are actively preventing sales pros from actually helping their prospects in their hour of need.

You need to update your playbook!

A well-executed sales process can improve the team's win rate by 24%, increase the average sale price by 15% and reduce your sales cycle length by 20% - Sales Benchmark Index

BUT executing the wrong playbook is devastatingly efficient at killing sales effectiveness.

Salespeople have long been taught their real enemy is the status quo...

Playbooks born of this assumption applied to a customer already struggling with indecision are proven to counter-productively induce more indecision and widen the GAP between intent and action...

Degrading win rates by 84% and dramatically increasing the odds that the deal will end up stalling, "maybe" / " I need to think about it" before in all probability dieing - JOLT Effect

How should you adapt to Chronic FOMU?

My take on how best to navigate and mitigate chronic levels of FOMU as an active sales leader in the trenches is necessarily more practical and action-focussed than the authors.

You can review Matt's perspective in this webinar recording on this topic ... What follows are my thoughts.

Sales pros MUST not think in terms of intensifying FUD

Traditionally, banging home “FUD” — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — has been used by sales pros to tap into the customer’s fear of missing out.

You show the customer what they stand to lose by doing nothing, sticking with the status quo, and not making the purchase ASAP.

I doubt fighting fear with fear is ever effective in sales at least?

In my experience, being pushy and artificially dialing up FUD is massively counterproductive today, as we have been at crazy levels of fear, uncertainty and doubt for far too long already.

To Keep People from Procrastinating, Don't Give Them a Deadline

Separate research highlighted by Harvard Business Review reveals that today the no-deadline tactic is more successful than putting a time-out deadline on contract sign-offs...

Reducing buying friction, not further adding to the stress of the process.

I believe there is very real need for

The B2B Trust Mandate

To Attract And Retain Buyers, B2B Leaders Must Understand How Trust And Risk Drive Decision-Making Forrester

Today sales success is more about instilling trust than ever.

Further stressing buyers through the FUD limbic brain levers is the wrong move

We are already at unworkable and unhealthy levels of these, and your role should be about removing FUD, not adding to

'Vicious cycle of distrust' - Edelman ’s 20-year Trust Barometer Study

To achieve any change, you need to move fast... before something else comes up, before someone else takes over the DMU...

It is more about leveraging that “trusted adviser” status so many have been self-proclaiming for so many years to make a credible recommendation for change... especially if you are 100% remote selling and so lack the easy relationship win of F2F client time.

Top performers are more likely to report being seen as “an expert in your field (51% of top performers vs. 37% of others).

They are less likely to be seen as a vendor (8% of top performers, vs. 24% of others)

or as a salesperson (7% of top performers vs. 20% of others)

Sales Insights Labs

Buyers / problem solvers truly need consultative, business savvy, and trustworthy advice today…?and despite self-service and more of the buyer journey being self-directed

83% of B2B buyers want to engage with a trusted advisor - Salesforce Data 2022

This is not new, but today you really must prioritise the seller experience and coaching, while in the good old days of 2018 Salesforce's Connected Consumer Report it was a strong 'nice to have'.

for 84% of business buyers, trust is a critical factor in choosing vendors

78% of business buyers seek salespeople that act as trusted advisors with knowledge of their needs and industry

And this is why I believe enlightened leaders are thinking deeply about trust today e.g. Manny Medina , CEO of Outreach in this post

BUT Even before the pandemic when it was far easier to sell for most, before failure to hit target really enhanced commission breath...

Sales professionals were already among the least trustworthy.

and engendered mostly negative associations

People are never more sensitive to selfishness than during a crisis Steli Efti

According to Bravado data: whopping 73% of sales reps missed quota in Q3. What did those 27% who hit target do differently?

Change messaging to match the moment - We talk a lot about empathy in sales. But most reps have no idea what that means. The ones who do are leaving the rest in the dust Sahil Mansuri

It does not surprise me at all that companies that are winning despite their categories failing

23% of high-growth B2B companies (of more than 1,000 employees and >20% annual revenue growth) plan to increase their reputation program budget by 10% or more Forrester’s 2022 B2B Marketing Survey

Not only do they plan to invest in brand but also in brand purpose, as this creates trust at an organisational level.

Recent research shows that?B2B buyers often seek safety ?over excellence when making purchase decisions. We also see that?trust declines ?during times of economic turmoil.

Brands with purpose innately?create trust ?because they activate care outside of things like sales — they commit to a cause that benefits all.

Sharpen your EQ & Soft Skills

Emotional connection… relationships cut through noise and overwhelm - Aaron Ross

This is something I am personally working on, as I had a client say my emails were tone-deaf. I am trying to learn how to read between the lines better to better understand the people involved in decisions.

Women achieve 8% higher quota attainment than men... soft skills are truly now a super-power - GTMnow

Sellers should never underestimate buyer's emotions, which are often the primary decision-making faculty that rational thinking is used to justify...

Status, reputation, job security... are in play, but in the corporate world often unspoken, unearthed and so harder to mitigate for.

So sellers must actively ask “what concerns do you personally have about this change programme / plan of action?

And let the buyer feel comfortable in sharing their discomfort and making it feel more manageable by framing it along the lines of...

The reason I ask is other leaders (of the same job title / in same sector / facing same challenges) are also genuinely worried about A, B, C, but they were able to overcome emotional self-sabotage once they realised these are universal worries, but nevertheless irrational.

Revealing and acknowledging fears often allows them to dissolve BUT unrealised fears are necessarily unaddressed and kill deals silently and without anyone knowing, as you don't know what you don't know after all.

Global job site Monster’s?The Future of Work 2021: Global Hiring Outlook ?revealed soft skills such as collaboration, dependability and flexibility are among the skills employers most prize in workers. Yet, executives report struggling with finding candidates who have well-developed soft skillsets – and?have for years .?

Be the missing piece in the way you work with your prospects and clients.

With Peak Uncertainty the Status Quo is no longer your enemy - FOMU dominates

In my experience, FOMU peaks when a leader, truly feels the weight of responsibility and knows this is the moment they were really hired for, where they must actually step.

They know they must do something…?they appreciate that

Business as usual / maintaining the status quo is no longer a safe space

68% of sales leaders failed to hit their target in August and >60% have missed theirs in 3 consecutive months - Pavillion EMEA data.

So is FOMO Dead?

NO! FOMO and FOMU are both in play and sellers need to recognise and leverage both to better help your prospects and clients.?

Today FOMO has been over-emphasised and FOMU largely ignored.

“you've got to do both. Dial up the FOMO to overcome the status quo bias, deal with the FOMU to overcome the omission bias” - JOLT Effect

Now is the Time to be Brave. Fail Fast & Learn

Don’t worry about failing…the majority of sales leaders are failing

Help your contacts make a considered bet on what will best truly move the needle, and they may just win big, when most are failing, and so there is a huge opportunity cost upside.

A major theme we’re seeing from the best sales and enablement leaders is a?bias for action

This is not a time to indulge your atychiphobia... fear of failure and retreat into protection mindsets that don’t help you when you need to do something new, when you need to be creative and innovate.?

Lean into failure... for the first time in many leaders' careers, failure is the industry norm, and failure is the status quo.

Now’s the time to take risks and try new things, not to be conservative

Audit your current sales strategy.?Beware of sacred cows, and be willing to crack some eggs.?Does your current strategy really address the new marketplace effectively??What needs to be changed?

Future-proof Your Career

Sales leader tenure is now under 15 months in EMEA... a very real discussion today, especially in VC and PE circles:

Is sales, as a career, dead with PLG, marketing-lead inbound only, P2P referrals, SDRaaS AI and automation… is an expensive sales team really necessary?

My 2p/2c...

When you really help someone in their time of need, you will never be redundant or replaceable.

You will be the difference that buyers want.

You will have earned it by shining when it was darkest.

And while I believe sales must become more insights and data-driven moving forward, it will always be very much about people and the transmission of confidence, and especially so now.

So I embrace both

65% of B2B sales organizations are predicted to transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making by 2026 - Gartner

AND

Steli Efti 's Energetic Empathy

The whole challenger body of work is built on this very simple concept of empathy: getting inside someone’s head and understanding how they see their world - Brent Adamson , Global Head of Research & Communities at Ecosystems

I embrace the cost efficiencies of AI in sales and understand

75% of B2B sales organizations will adopt AI tools by 2025 to better analyze data and further develop best practices - Gartner

I warn you not to replace the truly human moments with machines, as then you lose in these hypercompetitive times, saving pennies on the pound, cents on the dollar. A truly false economy.

I encourage sales leaders to empower their existing people to do more, increasing their capacity rather relying on lazy strategy of headcount hiring, as 75% of CEOs plan to both put hiring freezes and make layoffs in 2023.

And if you must hire, then recognise that the best talent is remote-first, but even by embracing the new prevalent norm of Hybrid selling, you can

"drive up to 50 percent more revenue by enabling broader, deeper customer engagement and unlocking a more diverse talent pool than more traditional models" McKinsey

And more cost-effectively too!

My personal takeaways from the JOLT Effect

Risk mitigation is key to sales effectiveness today, and more than ever your prospect needs to be heard... be their business shrink.

Forget about your sales process, do not let it be a straight-jacket that prevents you from doing what will best serves your prospect and that is having an open and honest conversation sooner rather than later. That's the hack...

75% say leadership has prioritised structure over collaboration - HR News

Never has it been more important for sellers to get under the skin of all buying criteria and decision-making.

Active listening cannot be paid lip service any longer. I am sure I am guilty of this too.

93% of customers on demos/calls believe the salesperson is not listening to them and talking past them - JOLT Effect

And yet...

It is unforgivable if you solve a real problem that you allow

53% of all demos or conversations to end in a no-decision - so not a rejection but a no-decision - JOLT Effect

Kevin "KD" Dorsey eloquently said

If you KNOW your prospects have a problem you solve...

Then you OWE it to them to reach out.

You OWE it to them to ask better question.

You OWE it to them to listen

You OWE it to them to make a recommendation

You OWE it to them to help them buy

You OWE it to them to make sure they see the impact from the product they were looking for

Perhaps paraphrasing?

If you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need, it is your moral obligation to sell it - Zig Ziglar

Buyers have grown weary of high-pressure, hard-selling tactics that seem manipulative, that seem combative and exist within a rigid sales approach.

Old-fashioned, pushy sales methods don’t work in today’s unstable market - Sales Insights Lab

Sellers must?buy for, not?sell to, the customer

OR sell with and not to, if you prefer.

You've got to make the buyer journey bearable... you've got to be B4B not B2B.

ACTIONS TO TAKE

• Target more narrowly and judge the level?and causes?of indecision through active listening.

Qualify based “ability to buy” but also on their “ability to decide.”

You need to identify adaptive leaders. This goes well beyond mere psychographic and emergent intent targeting.

Adaptive leaders play up to meet the moment we’re in rather than playing down to fear and the lowest common denominator. They see change as an opportunity to create new solutions, pivot, and adjust based on what’s happening in the world. Ryan Roslansky , CEO at LinkedIn

Resilience is bouncing back, but

[Adaptability] is much more important now than it has been in a generation... You need to be both willing and able to adjust your mentality and behaviour so you can participate effectively in that new reality - Dorie Clark , Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business

Adaptability is bouncing forwards

Adaptability is the New Stability Reid Hoffman

Also revaluate your the Ideal Customer Profile / Personas and intersection of fit: Market ? Product ? Channel ? Model... not just Product-Market Fit.

More than ever Top-Down selling is vital, as no matter how many champions and influencers you have, if the problem is at the top, then all was in vain.

So pick up the phone and get it unfiltered from the horse's mouth from a CXO.

Engage with ultimate decision-makers early in the process and maintain executive buy-in, as their priorities and initiatives are also changing, and your proposition will always have the best chance of being a win-win when it is contextualised within what matters to economic buyers.

80% of B2B buyers reject sellers who fail to personalize the buying experience - Allego & Sales Enablement Society

What is more personal than a telephone call?

Tip... Ask your champion(s) “Which priority do you think we best align to? Who is responsible for the success of that priority?”

BUT paradoxically, you should also speak to as many stakeholders as possible within ever expanding / democratising decision-making units DMUs.

But start at the top, as you might well save yourself a lot of unnecessary work.

50% of your prospects are not a good fit for what you sell - Sales Insights Labs 2022

Only 27% of leads are sales-ready - Marketing Sherpa 2022

Sidenote... remove pushy salesmanship and align sales and marketing...

Only 34% of companies have a lead nurturing strategy - Webbiquity

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more leads at a third of the cost - Invesp

• Offer ameliorative recommendations Stop asking the customer what they want to buy AND tell them what they should buy. Help them make an intelligent decision quickly.

Experience counts now. More than ever buyers are open to being educated and directed by a trusted advisor.

And the best-sellers are not blaming factors they cannot control, they take accountability for their failings as a trusted advisor.

Historically, the key to closing deals was diagnosing customer needs. BUT

Where reps relied solely on diagnosis skills (and offered no recommendation), win rates are well below average at only 14%. But, when they were able to combine diagnosis with a strong personal recommendation, win rates were 36% - JOLT Effect

Know your buyer. Their DMU, their internal politics, their buying criteria, their concerns, their short-term and long-term goals...

Find out how your prospects are coping with the current crisis.

Understand how their business is impacted and what problems are facing.

Deals are won and lost in discovery - not in presentations, asking for the sale, handling objections or negotiation. To close sales in a crisis you must discover better - Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times Jeb Blount (released this month)

Be truly consultative and connect solutions to top-of-mind issues and topics that will have traction or lend momentum to existing executive priorities.

• THEN make a strong recommendation.

Deep selling is needed, and especially as your ACV increases.

Regardless of sales method or model, Sense Making is an effective sales approach.?

Sense Making can be learned and scaled.

Only 23% of B2B buyers see salespeople as a resource to solve business problems

It's critical to know how your customers make a purchase decision... opportunity to stand out by simplifying your customer journey - Gartner

Shorten planning and comms program

We can’t be sure of what events lie ahead of us, so it’s unwise to plan over the long-term.

To achieve action and counteract sales cycles increasing, your sales approach should be condensed counter-intuitively...

Optimise deals for speed, not for total deal value

Overcome the agency dilemma or the customer’s belief that the salesperson is trying to oversell them (for instance, by telling the customer what they should not buy).

Make it as easy as possible for their DMU to say yes to your low commitment, fast to deploy POC.

Decision-making energy is a limited resource. Every decision that you make, however small and insignificant it may seem at the time, diminishes that day’s available pool of decision-making capability - Roy J. Baumeister, co-author of?Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength?

• Limit the customer’s endless research

Next big challenge: the swamp of information and anxiety/change out there is taxing everyone’s energy - Aaron Ross

Buyer self-service... whereby 70% of "a sale" / their buyer journey is complete before they even speak to a salesperson, exacerbates FOMU.

If you are a research-first personality, and especially if you are an online search-first leader, typically born post-1985, you are even more vulnerable to over-researching.

Your sales reps have roughly 5% of a customer’s time during their B2B buying journey - Gartner B2B Buyer Journey Insights

So while "sales enablement" is a new top priority today...

I applaud this as retaining and empowering your existing, already ramped, sales team to be as productive as possible has ALWAYS been better than hiring, ramping, firing, re-hiring madness of a sales playbook that doesn't even qualify as strategy to me.

What you really need to think about is "buyer enablement" if you truly want to execute a customer-first sales strategy.

There reason. for this is that buying has never been harder...

There are so many options, so much me-too marketing, real budgetary and job risk pressure... and more decision makers are involved in making decisions, often virtually, than ever before, meaning lines of communiction are multiplying and are often async

And here less is more:

Sales reps that continue to indulge the customer’s requests for additional information across the course of the sale, win rates are only in the 16% range - JOLT Effect

In order to convince the customer that they are in good hands — that their rep will guide them to the best decision possible — best reps look to demonstrate their own expertise and credibility (for instance, by avoiding the temptation to introduce additional subject matter experts to the sales conversation and by anticipating and addressing unstated customer objections)

The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers? each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must deconflict with the group.?At the same time, the set of options and solutions buying groups can consider is expanding as new technologies, products, suppliers and services emerge. Gartner

Insights-driven selling is great IF you engage buyers by leading with their priorities, not yours, otherwise you just add to the noise and analysis paralysis inducing mental masturbation.

Make sure your champions have ONLY the truly necessary exec summary data they need to convince buying committees.

The sheer volume of high-quality information presents a problem for customers: First, there is too much of it and second, customers find that information from different suppliers is often trustworthy but contradictory - Neha Ahuja, Senior Principal, Research & Advisory, Gartner

In a tough economy, data-driven insights that make an objective case for your solution are even more important than usual.?

BUT paradoxically, we also need to

Help to forestall superfluous information requests and increase win rates by more than 42% - JOLT Effect

To help customers evaluate information so they can prioritize sources, quantify trade-offs and reconcile conflicting information.?

• Connect to relevant resources.?Diagnose customers’ information needs and provide curated sources and tools to help customers feel they know all the relevant information.
• Clarify information complexity.?Reduce the complexity ?of the information environment by filtering and processing information for customers.?
• Collaborate on customer learning.?Help customers evaluate the quality of information and arrive at their own understanding of difficult issues.

Take risk off the table

The only way to create buyer urgency today is ultimately to reduce / remove perceived buyer risk of change and quantify the cost of inaction and very real risk of inaction.

Simple opt-out clauses to complex, tailored contract structures instill buyer confidence in their decision and mitigate outcome uncertainty.

You should also leverage the Ambiguity Effect when selling something new... so find a way of presenting the way forward as an extension of what they are already doing, showing continuity and coherence... an angle that makes it feel familiar.

N.B. Discounting does not derisk a situation, it just means you have not communicated value properly.

When reps offer no options for limiting downside risk, they experience win rates in the 22% range as compared to the 46% conversion rate when they do - JOLT Effect

Failing to recognise, respect, and integrate the potentially serious consequences for buyers into your communication increases the chances that your prospect ultimately makes no decision.

So, tackle it head-on, and position customer success, onboarding, and support to minimise FOMU to make the first steps, perhaps still motivated by FOMO, achievable and manageable.

Risk Mitigation increases win rates by 109% BUT setting proper expectations, helping buyers navigate the future, achieves a whopping 155% improvement - JOLT Effect

• Free resources to enact the Jolt Effect in your business

Sorry this became a bit of a long rant, and I apologise for my poor writing skills.

Nevertheless, I truly hope this helps my fellow sales leaders to better serve your customers and employees...

Making sales less a numbers game pressure cooker exercise in failure.

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