How Sales can address the new B2B Paradigm

This week I have been writing about a new sales and marketing paradigm that we are facing. We have all seen the stats, 70-90% of the sales process is happening before we even get a chance to talk to our customers. Leaving very little space for us to perform our sales duties for our clients. Yesterday, I gave some advice on how marketing needs to react to these changes, today let's talk about the sales teams.

A lot of what we have taught our sales teams over the past few years no longer fits in the new model. So our techniques will continue to diminish in effectiveness unless we take a different view of how we approach our prospects and customers. Remember this first, it is not an adversarial relationship. Your customer is not a "target," they are someone who has a problem that they need to solve and they believe that your company and solve that problem for them. Beyond that, despite all of the research, they are neither expert in your company nor your competition...this is your advantage.

With that in mind, let's break this down into the sales stages and talk about the mindset that is needed in each stage.

1. Do not be afraid to ask questions of the prospect. Whether you are reaching out to the customer or they are reaching into your company, it is ok to qualify the customer. Even if a customer is requesting a demo, you should spend time asking them questions about what they are attempting to solve and what parts of your software would be of interest to them. Understanding the customer's issues and tailoring your conversation to those issues is a critical to higher close rates. Why...because your job as a sales person is to guide your customer to a resolution of their problem, it's not to make a sale.
2. Tailor your demos and your conversations to the needs of the customer. Early in my career I was a Sales Engineer/Solutions Consultant. As a team, we used to say, "The only thing that a demo can do is lose you a customer." Why, because the demo is when your customer starts to form their opinion of your software and/or your company. It was a reminder to us that we needed to focus the presentation on things that mattered to the customer and not bore them with details that did not matter. It forced us to customize the demonstrations that we did to the customer's needs...and that often made all of the difference in advancing the sales process.
3. Constantly re-qualify and re-verify the customers business problem. This is especially true if there is multiple decision makers in the process. The very best sales people that I have ever worked with are masters at getting the customer to verify the business problem over and over again. The reason that this is done is that it helps the sales person verify the business case with the prospect and help define the path to success. When you can map your resolution to the customers business pain so well, negotiation becomes much easier and straight forward for you. Doing this early and often is essentially what makes the sales process go faster.
4. Your sales process is not sacred, the customer's buying process is. Every company in the world has some sort of sales process built into their salesforce automation tool. And most sales people are robotically following that process. This is important for forecasting purposes within a business. But it is not how a customer buys. It is important to note that the process is often fluid. For example, let's say that you are moving along in a sales process and you have it post demonstration moving into selection and negotiation. Your coach now introduces you to their boss, who is essentially the signatory on the deal. You are no longer in the selection stage, you just got pushed all the way back to qualification and you are going to need to re-verify the business need with this new player.
5. Listen more than you speak. I know that you hear this in every sales training the you have ever taken...listening is the most important skill a sales person has. It is also the most difficult to hone and (speaking as a buyer here) rarely is done well. As I mentioned previously your job is to help guide a customer to a resolution of their problem. That cannot be done effectively if you do not understand the problem fully. You need to make sure that you listen to a customer well and not make assumptions about what their problem is. Understand their goals, the goal behind the goal and what they are trying to do to solve the problem without you. Why they need this to be solved and what it will do for them as a business and personally. If you do this well, your success as a sales person will be immense.

As a buyer, I get sold to a lot. It is frustrating to me when I get a sales person who sees me as an adversary that they are attempting to extract money from rather than a partner working to define a mutually beneficial relationship from. I love the sales efforts and love working with good sales people. I also know that it is rare to find one, so when I do, I tend to keep those relationships close and keep on going back to them as a buyer. With the changes in the buying process that we are seeing today, being a great sales person is more critical than ever.

Sales friends...what else am I missing here?