Frictionless Sales Motions

Todays’ B2B tech buyers look and operate a lot differently to those from ten to fifteen years ago. They want options, they want flexibility, and in most cases, they want it all - yesterday. Above all, they want outcomes from their investments and don’t want to be distracted by the procurement of these investments. The purchase decision is becoming less and less about the technology itself (features, functions) and more about value and how easy your business is to deal with.

One way your business can keep up with current and future customer expectations and buyer behaviour is to reduce as much friction from your sales process as possible. In this blog, I will offer practical advice on how it can be applied within your business based on the best practices I have observed.

The first step, is to identify the points of friction within your processes. And by friction, I mean anything which can interrupt or slow down the flow of a sale. Consider every customer lifecycle stage, from Land right through to Renewal or End of Life/Service.

To help you out, I have listed common areas of friction I often witness when speaking with technology companies around the world:

• Data collection and maintenance
• Quoting (net-new and renewal)
• Revenue expansion (cross-sell and upsell)
• Renewals process management
• Payment processing/collection

Eliminating friction from any of the above requires two things - accurate, appropriate data and the help of automation. Let’s take a look at how this can be achieved for each specific area.

Data collection, maintenance

The problem:?Siloed data, manual entry/re-entry. Lack of data integrity and intelligence.

The solution:?Create a single repository which can consolidate, validate and rearrange your sales and product data. Ensure ongoing accuracy by enabling API integrations into all of your existing data sources and systems.

Quoting

The problem:?Extremely slow, manual quoting. Channel dynamics add extra complexities.

The solution:?Speed up quoting with an ecosystem CPQ, which can automatically generate and populate quotes using parameters such as price lists, margins, and/or pricing logic. It must allow bulk configurations or pricing updates and create new quote versions that are ready to send. For distributors and VARs/SPs, there is also the added complexity of piecing together multiple vendors into one quote. With an ecosystem CPQ, this can be achieved in a matter of minutes.

Expansion initiatives

The problem:?Manual data analysis. Slow, ad hoc campaigns misaligned with customer needs.

The solution:?Your expansion efforts should be running on an?ongoing?basis, not in the form of ad hoc campaigns. You need to get the right offer, to the right customer, at the right time. To do this, you need an intelligent platform that will proactively identify expansion opportunities based on customer purchase history and then go one step further by automatically create pre-priced proposals, ready to send.

Renewals management

The problem:?Time consuming renewal processes. Low value renewals are overlooked.

The solution:?For renewals to be frictionless you need to automate as much of the process as possible, especially for renewals that are lower in value. And to do this effectively you need to implement the right technology - not your CRM, ERP or traditional CPQ. Simply having reminders in place alerting your customer success team of a renewal isn’t enough. True, frictionless renewals require a renewals engine that can also automatically generate pre-priced quotes ready to send to your customers, with minimal human intervention.

An ecosystem CPQ will automate not only the renewal but subscription upgrades and reference architecture matches to achieve that all important outcome of maximising the return on technology investments. You can find out more in our definitive?guide?to renewals management.

Payment processing

The problem:?Manual payment processing. Difficulty with global transactions.

The solution:?Use a merchant of record model that offers quote-to-cart capabilities where the end customer can make payment at their own convenience. This is particularly useful for low value renewals where you want to keep it as frictionless as possible and also for cross-border transactions which require localization. See more about this in my recent?interview?with Doug Caviness from cleverbridge.

If my future predictions are accurate, those that win in next three to five years will be the businesses that are embracing friction-free sales motions and doing something about it right now. And by doing something, I don’t mean spending the next 2-3 years trying to build a custom platform and wasting precious time, resources and money. Everything I have covered in this blog can be achieved using?existing technology?which can be up and running in no time.