Channel-Market-Fit: Go-To-Market Moneyball; Most effective sales channel: underused

22% businesses lost sales as a result of poor communication in 2022 -?“State of Business Communication” ?- Grammarly / Harris Poll

This article will reveal

1. The top B2B sales channel in terms of effectiveness
2. Why it works so well - a true deep dive with some of the latest research
3. How to operationalise it for next-level sales productivity and TAM coverage / penetration, and align sales and marketing in doing so.

Sales leaders who need to hit the ground running in 2023 and cannot waste time reading...

Book in a time to next-level operationalise this channel... https://lnkd.in/efp6zCiy

Majority of business leaders (82%) say “I am concerned about effective communication with remote or hybrid working models in the future.”

The Telephone is the Top B2B Sales Channel for 2023

What? Really? With all this omnichannel sexiness and trendy new stuff around?

Read on... the business case is bulletproof.

Channel-Market-Fit differentiates the most effective sales organisations today.

The smart money is all heavily on the humble telephone - it is an open secret.

Forrester’s “Call Commerce” Research

• Outbound calls provide a more immediate return on your investment converting 30% faster than other channels... time-to-value
• 84% higher conversion rates compared to other forms of engagement
• 41% of organisations report having increased phone conversion rates by 25% or more in the past 12 months
• Phone calls are often the most valuable conversions with larger order value (AOV) compared to other forms of engagement
• Get smarter insights into customers and make more informed decisions to drive efficiency
• When you tailor experiences based on the content of their phone conversations, you better meet their needs and earn their loyalty
• Call-sourced clients are retained at 28% higher rate than inbound web leads
• 85% of marketers believe phone conversations are now a key component of their organisation’s digital-first strategy

Buyers do actually want to speak on the phone

76% of B2B new buyers appreciate speaking to someone on the phone and even 15% of repeat buyers - McKinsey

87% of respondents said talking to a person on the phone to answer questions made them feel more confident in making high-consideration purchases - Invoca Research

82% of buyers who have answered ?a cold call say they’ve accepted a sales meeting.

The Phone is the Most Effective Sales Channel

My Linkedin poll above exactly echoes HubSpot's own research (who are naturally email-biased?)

44% of sales professionals who sell remotely say phone calls are the most effective channel for remote selling… over double email or video - HubSpot 2022?

And is very much in line with Rain Sales Consulting's research.

Telephone is still the most productive sales tool for 41.2% of salespeople is their phone. Between cold calls, warm calls, and hashing out details, calling prospects continues to be the best means of communication - Rain Sales Consulting

Phone is not just for cold calling...

You don't believe in cold calling?

Neither do I.

Any call should be at least a warm call, where you have something relevant that is worth saying / hearing...

Nevertheless...

Organisations that don’t cold call experienced 42% less growth than those who used the tactic - Crunchbase

Sure individual salespeople have their channel superpowers / preferences, but it makes sense to pay attention the wisdom of crowds.

Top sales performers make 82% more cold calls and send 24% less email - McKinsey Survey of 43000 sales reps 2021

Strongly suggest you don't fight the data on this.

You've got to Moneyball to do more with less... calling must the central part of your GTM channel mix.

Why does the Phone beat any other channel in B2B sales today e.g. Video and Email?

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Nobel Prize winning playwright George Bernard Shaw...?

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other so that we can have some conversation - Mark Twain

Most of our mistakes originate from not having an honest conversation sooner -?Steven Bartlett

Trust is the fiat currency in sales.

And trust in the sales profession is at an all-time low and so there is a true?trust mandate, a need to counteract the chronic mistrust of salespeople ?and yet

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

Oracy matters... it creates what is now known as ‘reciprocation of confidences’ or prosociality

The things we say and how we say them can inform, influence, inspire and motivate others and express our empathy, understanding and creativity. It is our ability to communicate that enables us to build positive relationships and collaborate for common purpose - British Council

A reliable and productive conversation leads to improved customer satisfaction, faster response times, increased loyalty to brands, and reduced effort from the customer - Ritu Jyoti, Group?VP, Worldwide Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation Research?- IDC

Voice-only communication elicits greater empathy, emotional connection and trust than a video call -?Yale University?

Our brain is hard-wired for Voice

We all know that decisions are made emotionally and rationalised thereafter.

Emotions expressed only in spoken words are processed quickly with a ‘fast route’ to the amygdala, which is the integrative centre for motivation and emotional behaviour.

Voice remains a dominant channel... In a digital age, live voice contacts matter even more in providing a high-quality customer experience -?McKinsey 2022

How a sales message is communicated is as important as what is communicated with respect to output sales performance. Differentiating buyer experience and?emotional connection is the new-age CX key.

The medium is the message. The medium for your message is as important (if not more) than the message itself - Marshal McLuhan

95% of that information is emotional information. It's carried in the tone. It's carried in the pace. It's carried in things we can't even really put a finger on, but we feel it.

Surprisingly, video conferencing?mutes ?mirror neurons ?(which help us understand and empathize with others) and confounds our?Global Positioning System neurons ?(which code our location).?

When on a live call, you are more in sync: effective collaboration is easier

Audio-only interactions have higher synchrony and more collective intelligence - Maria Tomprou et al.

• “Higher synchrony”?specifically refers to how successful people are in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns
• “Collective intelligence”?defined is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems.

It may surprise you to learn that the phone is more effective in terms of building trust, empathy and engagement than video, but this is truly important, as we are massively irrational decision-makers / buyers.

Cross-category decision-making ratios of about 80 % emotional, 20 % rational for 2022 - Brand Keys, a loyalty and engagement research consultancy

Conversations — real, voice-to-voice conversations — are important and entrain our hormonal system... they truly enchant us.

A 2012?article ?in Evolution and Human Behavior entitled “Instant Messages vs. Speech: Hormones and Why We Still Need to Hear Each Other” found merely hearing the voice of our loved ones versus a text conversation reduces our blood cortisol levels, which are a marker of stress, and heightens the release of oxytocin, the feel-good hormone associated with bonding.

Researchers found it’s likely the prosodic auditory cues (tone) that produce the positive feel-good hormonal effects, not the linguistic content of the exchange.

Make the call; you’ll both feel better!

Surely you know the phone is infinitely better than email?

Even assuming your email is delivered, and opened, and read... which as you'll see below are big assumptions...

You know that it fails at what really matters in communication effectiveness... tonality, trust and empathy, without which sales, let alone rapport and relationship are a pipedream.

Interactions including voice (phone, video chat, and voice chat) create stronger social bonds than interactions that do not include voice (email and text chat) -?It’s Surprisingly Nice to Hear You, Journal of Experimental Psychology

Async written comms, SMS, live chat, email... do not demand our immediate attention, and so our brains do not give them that.

There is also so much room for misinterpretation and the written word, and this only increases in non-real time.

The average email contains about 5,000 bits of information (10 bits per letter, per character. Some would say 8, but given all the emojis etc, it's 10 and maybe 500 characters in an email, or 40 if you adhere to the Lavender-endorsed SMS style of email brevity.

The human voice carries 20,000 bits per second. That's four emails per second, and every one of those bits will have an impact inside of that other person, because our response to the human voice is entirely involuntary.?

We can't decide in advance how we're going to respond to the human voice; that's something that happens inside well below the conscious level.?

In a seven-second conversation, you have just sent, had opened and had actively read the contents of 28 emails typically.

Ironically Taking a Phone-first approach actually re-activates Email as a viable sales channel

If your sales process depends on email, a channel that is steeply declining in effectiveness and one I show elsewhere is all but dead near-term as a cold outreach channel...

I'd first say switch sales strategy pretty fast and as a stop-gap adopt a talk-to-send strategy.

This is really very simple to layer onto your email-heavy workflow.

It integrates seamlessly with whatever sequence and system you use e.g. Outreach , Salesloft , HubSpot , Salesforce

Phone is The Channel for CXO Communication

According to?The State of Business Communication Report 2022 from Grammarly ...

Business leaders spend more time communicating than virtually any other knowledge worker else: over 36 hours per week.

CXOs suffer by far the most from Zoom fatigue, disengagement and even negative (even if unconscious) default disposition to video calls.

And this is the exact audience you should be targeting today in sales effectiveness terms, the economic buyers, as strong research shows that is the?best investment of a salesperson's time today ?

Number 1 sales strategy in recession according to the November b2b sales leadership roundtable?

Selling to ultimate decision makers and in line with HBR research, involving the DMU earlier in the sales process

But

Top Sales Challenge in 2023: Getting in Front of Decision-Makers - Hubspot

49% Sales Pros say getting to speak to decision-makers is the hardest part of their job today

The solution

Any of my sales reps can get on a live conversation with a named CXO, not a voicemail or chat with a PA or gatekeeper, within 4.5 minutes and they book > 0.7 meetings / hour from their outbound call time.

It is that simple...

67% of CXOs prefer to be prospected via the telephone - Crunchbase

The Phone is the Channel for Sensemaking and Discussing Complex Topics

The modern Salesperson is Sense-Maker in all this uncertainty and multi-channel information overload.

We teach decision-makers how to solve their problems.

So it is important to realise that people have learning modality preferences and that certain topics are better suited to different communication channels.

There are 4 primary learning modes: visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic (VARK)

Research shows that auditory learners are the largest unimodal category making up around 25% of the population -?Engage Education

So 25% of the population learn almost exclusively by hearing and listening.

So it makes sense to pick up the phone on this alone... but auditory bias is also potent in multi-model learners.

Even more interestingly... CXOs and effective champions are heavily characterised by an auditory bias.

Auditory learners are who you want to be selling to

A phone-first GTM motion enables you to identify and engage this ideal persona...

• Have strong speaking comms bias. They are natural conversationalists and typically very good at explaining things verbally, taking on new perspectives, and solving complex challenges by speaking aloud and with other people
• Have strong listening abilities, and are natural story listeners, while typically attention poor / mentally unavailable on other channels, and easily remember spoken information
• Learn through conversations and actually love having a good chat (I believe the goal of all sales comms is to have a meaningful conversation, so it makes sense to seek out those who are predisposed to having such conversations?)
• Work well in groups (most business decisions are made by groups of economic buyers and associated influencers and stakeholders, so it makes sense to identify and engage with people who can champion you effectively in this context of groupthink / consensus seeking group dynamic)

Conversations really matter so start talking and get to work.

An organisation’s results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations. We share a common heritage as fundamentally social beings who, together in conversation, organize for action and create a common future - Fernando Flores

This view of conversation as a way of organising action contradicts a basic tenet in many organizational cultures — one based on the edict, “stop talking and get to work!”

The underlying belief is that conversation takes time away from the more “important” work of the organisation.

Paradoxically, what we are discovering is that the talking — the network of conversations — actually catalyses action.

Through conversation we discover who cares about what, and who will take accountability for next steps.

It is the means through which requests are initiated and commitments made. From this perspective, a more useful operating principle for organisational life might be “start talking and get to work!"

Alan Webber, in his pioneering Harvard Business Review article “What’s So New About the New Economy,” goes one step further and asserts that conversation is the lifeblood of the knowledge economy.

The most important work in the knowledge economy is conversation - Alan Webber

Where information is the raw material and ideas are the currency of exchange, he explains, good conversations become the crucible in which knowledge workers share and refine their thinking in order to create value-added products and services.

So what's stopping your sales team from using the phone?

Calling manually or with click-to-dial from your CRM is hard work.

And I can see why sales reps shy away from it.

Even if they have direct dials available, they are overpaid and overqualified to be spending on average 115 minutes to get a named CXO on a live call.

BUT Today It's Easy to Fix These Issues & Weaponise the Phone as a Sales Channel

To cultivate an adaptable and high-performing sales organization, focus on two key areas: customer engagement, customer understanding - Gartner

You know that expensive stack of sales tools that no one uses...

Cut that, and invest in a conversation weapon that your team will actually use, and that will pay for itself in a few days.

A plug-and-play conversation weapon that 100% removes all the blockers to using the phone that the above survey identified that enables you to have the conversations that matter on-demand at scale without sacrificing quality of engagement.

Next week, your sales team can be speaking to 10x the so-called hard-to-reach decision makers that they do today....

You'll get revenue insurance across your pipeline from prospecting to forecasting.

Such an easy and powerful quick win.

Your reps, your target list, your message...

I bet they'll have 10 times more conversations in a day than you've managed by any other channel in the last month.

Telephone Sales Effectiveness Breakthrough

Here's what my inside sales team (also known as SDRs) does in a typical day using this conversation weapon.

Each of my team generates > 10 times the outcomes of the average SDR according the The Bridge Group's 2023 SDR Report... where on average an SDr has only 3 qualified conversations per day!

Each of my SDRs daily has on average

30+ live conversations with named CXOs on their target list

> 0.7 meetings / hour / rep booked, so 3.5 meetings booked in under 5 hours

My SDRs are daily booking more meetings than most SDRs are having conversations

Interestingly > 50% of positive disposition follow-up requests from initial cold calls are for a further phone call, not straight to zoom, because CXOs generally speaking prefer the phone to other channels and suffer from so much zoom fatigue.

Oh and my reps get smarter from every call.

We are constantly refining targeting and messaging to convert better through actionable conversation analytics.

FYI my AEs invest far less time in outbound prospecting, most of their conversations are more mid and bottom-of-funnel MOFU / BOFU and so worth more and closer to revenue banked...

But they sure as hell still use the phone every day to accelerate win rates and compress sales cycles

Conversational sales are so powerful today

Conversations manifest The Holy Grail of Allbound Sales and Marketing Integration and Alignment

This is what I have discovered, the secret I am excited to share, as I've been banging away about the importance of aligning revenue teams for almost 20 years.

Humble outbound sales development, empowered by a solid conversation-first approach, leads to a 164% increase in influence on your pipeline where the cold conversation didn't have an immediate outcome to a meeting...

This phone-first strategy enables a talk-to-send email motion that increases email open rates by 4-5 times and replies by 80-150 times...

That great whitepaper you created actually gets seen by the people that matter, and you actually close the loop and get the feedback from the horse's mouth from the named decision maker at your dream target account, and arrange to meet up at a forthcoming event.

Sales reps actually follow-up in a timely manner on every marketing lead generated, and every lead generated is truly a good fit.

You routinely generate fresh referrals from 70% of your clients and 5% of the people that you speak to in your TAM that do not buy anything from you

This is not some pipedream... this is what we are doing, and you can too.

Conversations-First Sales has Profound Company-Wide Benefits

This makes ROI calculations very tricky, so it is lucky that the S&M impact is so massive and easily attributable!

Easy Way to Operationalise Conversation-first Selling - Free POC Trial for your Team

I appreciate there is a lot to take on board, and it all sounds very complex... the truth is you can be live and experiencing the difference in a few days!

Let's have a chat! I can walk you through it.

I guarantee you'll have > conversations in your 1 day trial than you’ve had in 3-5 weeks by any other channel

Conversations matter: "Top sales performers make 82% more cold calls & send 26% fewer unsolicited emails" - McKinsey

?? https://cal.mixmax.com/alexhobbs/meeting-request

?? [email protected]

I appreciate change can be hard, but outbound calling using the same conversation weapon and service wraparound I use is painless and rapidly provides true revenue insurance.

It is worth the small disruption to business as usual, that after is failing... over 75% of sales leaders missed their targets in 2022 after all.

I appreciate most companies and reps have lost the muscle memory to do calling with confidence.

50% of sales pros are afraid to make calls - Harvard Business Review

Well the breakthrough I am sharing is not just another bit of sales tech... it is managed solution, designed to deliver outcomes and fast.

That will take your existing reps, contact data, target lists and messaging and rapidly refine them in parallel with building pipeline.

Your team can become among the top 1% of outbound sellers on the planet in a matter of days, and rapidly dominate your niche by optimising the most successful, but crazily most under and misused route to market... the telephone.

You don't need to believe me.

I can get you set up with a Free Proof of Concept Trial in days.

Your data will preach the truth to you.

A bulletproof internal business.

DM me to get the ball rolling

Too many sales pros are far too reliant on / hiding behind email sequences, jumping on video calls as default, busy building their side hustle / personal brand on LinkedIn...

All this omnichannel busy-ness dilutes outcomes and burns people out.

Sales leaders must intentionally fix this self-defeating go-to-market channel misallocation.

Time is money and it is being terribly mismanaged.

Moneyball your 2023 sales strategy to do more with less...

The smart GTM money is all about Channel-Market-Fit