Human sales transformation

While fully digital sales rapidly grow in the most simplistic scenarios, for sales rep function to stay relevant, it’s important to empower themselves with something that will increase their conversion rate into the deals with the most sophisticated cases managed by people.

What could provide such an increase?

For me, there are two major components.

First is related to methodology of how the sales are done. While joining the sales meetings in B2B businesses, I rarely face a comprehensive plan of how we approach a particular sales opportunity. Stakeholder mapping, clients’ most important challenges, “who are economic/user/technical buyers and coaches?”, our key value that we are trying to communicate and sell - these things are seldomly present regardless of the industry I observe.

Even in B2B, we are still selling to humans, hence it’s dramatically relevant to have insights on our counterparts to address their needs and pains personally. It’s also important that people from various functions in the company that is trying to sell anything, would share the same mindset on how we approach the deals. In other words, sales methodology is a crucial factor to successfully reach your acquisition goals. An example of such methodology that I personally practiced is “Strategic Selling’ by Miller Heiman. Can recommend that one for sure.

Second component is leveraging what we know about what clients say, what they do and how our product proposition looks like to match their needs and deeds. This is a challenge for analytics.

To build a system that will generate relevant sales proposals assumes that all your research initiatives results, and other types of communications do stack up into coherent mental model of clients’ behavior.

It needs to incorporate current and foretasted financial state of the company who you are selling to, macro trends, company’s hurdles, clients and suppliers dynamics based on which you may find the right approach to summarize client’s most challenging problems and address them with your solutions.

Not an easy task to do. I call this to-be solution an “Internal Perplexity”. We are still figuring out how to build one.

Both sales methodology and client sales preparation tool are my areas of interest now. Reality check will show if my expectations are viable and feasible.