Yet, when asked what changes they were making to their sales hiring profiles, the vast majority of sales leaders replied; “no changes”. The study findings also suggested that sales leaders were focused on the wrong criteria when developing sales talent. Sales leaders are focusing on gut feelings over data-driven insights that can predict higher win rates and more consistent quota attainment. Wonder why only 57% of all B2B sales reps attain quota?

One of my favorite leadership quotes of all time is: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” –Sun Tzu

Now is the time to ask yourself as a B2B Sales Leader: What is your strategy? How are you going to lead your sales team through these unchartered waters caused by Covid-19? And make no mistake about it, “lead” is absolutely the operative term. I see this as a binary option. Either you step up right now and lead like you never have before. Or you will fail and fail miserably.

I talk to B2B sales leaders every day. I’ve been a B2B technology sales leader myself for many years and have spent the past 13 years as a management consultant providing strategy guidance to B2B technology sales leaders. Or as one of my favorite customer told me over the weekend, “I just figured out that you’re actually a B2B sales alchemist. As they say on the Farmers Insurance tv commercial, “I’ve seen a thing or two.”

The questions that I’ve been posing to sales leaders are: Have you thought about the impact this pandemic will have on your sales motion and customer’s buying journey long term?” Is this a short term impact or has “business as usual” been permanently altered? What if work from home (WFH) is the normal, not the exception? Only 5-10% of United States companies supported a WFH model prior to Covid -19. And that was not a permanent WFH policy, rather a periodic WFH policy.

What is the likelihood that sales cycles will take longer? What are the odds that companies stop spending money on “non-essential” technology in the short term? What if customers stop renewing their SaaS subscriptions to conserve cash on “non-essential” technology? What are the chances that the definition bar for “essential” technology is raised?

It’s easy to see why many sales leaders are stuck in a bunker mentality mode. Freeze all new sales hiring. Let’s just hunker down and muscle our way through this together. Let’s not panic…but I’m really showing panic by my actions as a sales leader.

I’m imploring those real and strategic sales leaders to recognize that this is precisely the time to retool, invest in and upgrade your sales team. I submit to you that this represents a once in a business career opportunity for sales leaders. There are some great B2B sales reps that are going to be laid off in the masses due to no fault of their own. Think about the industries that have been hit the hardest by this pandemic: Travel and Tourism, Airlines, Restaurants, Hotels, Retail, etc. Sadly, many B2B technology companies that sell into these industries will go out of business or at a minimum, be forced to lay off their sales team to preserve cash.

They may be forced to lay off their top sales reps who are excellent sales reps that would not be available or on the open market if not for this crisis. Remember the B2B sales stats that I regaled you with at the start of this blog post? Only 16% of sales leaders believe they have the talent to succeed, yet they don’t do anything to address that. Only 57% of B2B sales reps are attaining quota. Why continue to accept that?

Great B2B sales leaders will rise to this enormous challenge and prove themselves to be the type of sales leader that top performing sales reps want to work with. A Players want to work with and for A Players. That adage will never be more true than right now. I repeat that now is precisely the time to:Retool, invest in and upgrade your sales team.

Good selling!

The post What Kind of B2B Sales Leader Are You? first appeared on True Sales Results.

And there isn’t a sales magic wand that can make up for the lack of requisite sales activity being conducted by your sellers. And yes, we should expect our Marketing partners to help us as sellers in terms of building our sales pipelines through various outbound education, awareness and demand generation programs. But I always asked my sellers to take full responsibility for building their own sales pipelines. Too many sellers get stuck in the perennial finger pointing lead generation blame game with their Marketing team. And there are no winners in that game… only losers.

Smart sales managers figure out. what that consistent baseline of outbound sales activity is necessary to build a healthy sales pipeline. Good sales leaders then walk their sellers through the underlying sales math necessary including average conversion rates, sales cycle lengths and deal sizes to achieve quota. Given that only 57% of B2B sellers are attaining quota as a whole, my sense is that this sales manager with their sellers dynamic is not happening much.

The second fundamental thing that smart sales coaches focus on is quality. By quality, I mean the quality of the sales activities that the seller is responsible for consistently conducting. Are your sellers personalizing every outbound email? Are your sellers doing research on the key issues and challenges that your customers are facing at an industry, company and personal job function level?

Have your sellers thoughtfully prepared discovery questions in advance of a customer conversation? Do the discovery questions that your sellers ask make sense to the different customer stakeholders? Are your sellers spell/grammar checking every email prior to sending? Based on the cold emails and voice mails that I receive daily, this is not happening often enough.

There is an optimal intersection between sales activity (aka quantity) and quality necessary to achieve sales success. For example, if you ask your sellers to send out 100+ emails or make 150+ outbound sales calls per day, do so knowing full well that they will be low quality emails/calls (e.g., generic and not personalized) with a corresponding very low response rate. By the same token, if you ask your sellers to conduct hours of research to personalize every new outbound email or call, you will see a corresponding higher response rate due to the higher activity quality quotient… but it may actually be negatively offset by the much lower quantity of emails/calls resulting in an inadequate sales pipeline.

The final factor to consider as a sales coach is that every seller is unique. They all bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table. Your fundamental job as a sales coach is to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are. Help them by providing clear guidance as to how they can best leverage their strengths in their selling activities. And help coach them up and develop the sales skills that they are weak in.

At the end of the day, great sales leaders don’t just present a sales compensation plan and quota to their sellers. Bad sales leaders do this. Strong sales leaders sit down with their sellers and collaboratively build out a sales success plan. Both for the company and the seller. The key is that the seller has to understand the underlying sales math and be bought into the sales success plan based on their own strengths and weaknesses.

Cautionary note: You can actually have sellers that do too much outbound sales activity. I once had a great sales rep that worked for me that was a prospecting machine. He was using headphones before it was even a thing for sellers to use. He would literally block out on his calendar hours of time every day to prospect. He had a funny Do Not Disturb sign on his cubicle when he was prospecting. And if he had a week where he was on the road doing customer sales calls, he would make up for those lost prospecting hours the next week.

The problem that arose was that while he had the healthiest sales pipeline in the company by far… he was working too many deals at once and his forecast deals slipped often. We devised a model where he would prospect like crazy the first month of every quarter. Then he would schedule advanced stage customer sales calls the second month of every quarter. Then we created a weighted sales forecast formula whereby we’d multiply the likelihood that the deal would close in that quarter by the deal size. That math informed us of which opportunities we’d invest our time in closing for the third month of every quarter.

We solved the forecast deal slippage problem and he went on to become the #1 seller in the whole company for many years in a row. He’s now a very successful CRO who still obsesses over prospecting and the underlying sales math model. There is this notion of a seller band width issue. If you have sellers trying to work too many sales opportunities at the same time, you’ll lose opportunities that you should have won because the seller does not have enough time to properly work the opportunity. And you’ll see lots of forecast opportunity slippages due to the same reason. Finally, you’ll experience too many opportunities ending up in the dreaded “No Decision” state because the seller did not convince the customer of your value proposition.

Good selling!

The post B2B Sales Coaching 101 first appeared on True Sales Results.

Radically change how sales quotas are derived. According to CSO Insights 2019 World Class Sales Practices Study, only 57% of B2B sales reps are attaining their quota. Yet the same study showed that overall B2B company plan attainment is at 101%. Sound like a rigged system? Sure does to me and as a long time B2B VP of Sales, I have lots of first-hand knowledge of how compensation plans and quotas are created.

The dirty little secret is that comp plans and quotas are driven by the investors. All of the Venture Capitalists (VCs) have their proverbial revenue scale spreadsheet that magically arrives at how you are going to grow the business to $100M in ARR in 4-5 years. The “strings” that are attached when you accept a large VC investment of millions or tens of millions of dollars in a round, should really be viewed as impenetrable steel cables. You sign up and commit to a revenue growth plan that is predicated on getting to $100M in ARR.

And if you miss out on hitting the revenue numbers, they will fire you and bring in someone else that will commit to hitting those growth numbers. Comp plans and sales quotas are reverse engineered off this basis. The CRO/VP of Sales adds a sales quota “buffer margin” so the company achieves their overall revenue plan. What that means is it is common practice to add a 15%-20% buffer in assigning individual sales contributor quotas. That means if you added up all of the individual sales contributor quotas, it would be at 115%-120% of what the actual company overall revenue plan.

Then if you factor in the Pareto principle (aka the 80/20 rule), where you model that 80% of your revenue will come from your top 20% of sales performers…you have created a framework designed so that only 57% of your sales reps will attain their quota. What’s the problem with this model? It creates an abnormally high sales rep attrition rate. The aforementioned CSO Insights study revealed that seller attrition last year was at 18%, which is up 5% over the 2017 seller attrition rate. This means sales leaders are spending too much of their time recruiting and on boarding new sales reps to back fill open sales positions.

Sales reps are hard wired to compete and win. No sales rep that I know wants to come in at less than 100% of quota. Rather, they all want to blow out their quota and earn the maximum accelerators in their commission plan. This is the root cause of the high seller attrition rate.

Radically change how B2B Company valuations are derived. We have formally become a subscription economy. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Disney are concrete evidence of this. Yet we are still using anachronistic models to value a company that have no subscription economy basis. Companies should obsessively focus on customer acquisition, customer retention, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the lifetime value of a customer (LTV).

In the subscription economy, there are new metrics and KPIs that would reveal the true health and value of a company. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one example of such a metric. Shouldn’t we reward companies that treat their employees well and have high employee engagement scores and retention rates? Wouldn’t that inherently be a more valuable company than one that treats their employees like crap and has a huge attrition problem as a result? CAC and cost of sales tends to be really high, particularly in the B2B technology sales world. Why are we not measuring and rewarding companies that retain their sellers for longer average tenures? All of the empirical data proves that when you have B2B sales reps that are tenured for at least 3-4 years with the same company, they have their highest performing sales years. Most B2B companies hide key performance metrics like employee engagement, NPS, retention rates, average seller tenure rates, etc. because they are receiving failing grades.

I’d submit that these are paramount KPIs that measure the true health and quality of the company. You could make the argument they are at least equal in importance to revenue growth, profitability, etc. Why? Because these are new and intrinsic things that must be measured and reported on in our subscription economy to truly understand how healthy the business is.

Do away with sales quarterly reporting and the dreaded sales quarter end. It’s all a silly game that we continue to play with our customers. Customers hate it. Smart customers exploit our silly quarter end game and use it against us to get ridiculous discounts. This only serves to cheapen the value of our product/service/solution to our customers.

Coming back to the subscription economy, customers buy when we’ve done a good job of proving the value of our solution to them as sellers. Until we’ve proven the value of our solution to the customer’s satisfaction, they are not ready to buy and no quarter end discount is going to motivate them to meet our arbitrary deadline.

There is a natural and organic average sales cycle length for every B2B product that is sold. There are always outliers, but B2B sellers should know how long on average it takes to prove their value proposition to the customer and inspire them to action. There are variables such as the complexity of what you are selling and the price point, etc. that means it will simply require more time on average to win a new customer deal.

Trust me when I say that customers will find it incredibly refreshing when B2B sellers stop trying the quarter end or fiscal year end approach to get a deal to close. Old habits die hard. But this one needs to die fast.

Do away with sales quotas altogether. We started off by calling out that our B2B sales quota system is failing and only getting worse. Why not blow it up and try something new? Commission plans are all about incentivizing the right sales behaviors we want execute in the field with customers. Revenue is a byproduct of sound sales behavior and execution. Why not reward and incentivize based on the right sales behaviors and the resulting business outcomes we want to achieve?

Customer retention is paramount in the subscription economy. Let’s reward sellers that have the highest customer retention rates. Let’s reward sales managers that have the highest seller retention and performance rates. Let’s reward sellers that have the highest customer LTV rates. Let’s reward sellers and sales managers that have the lowest CAC. Let’s reward sellers and sales managers that have the shortest average sales cycle lengths and use less of the companies resources on average to win a new customer deal compared to their peers (i.e., sales efficacy metrics)? Let’s reward sellers and managers that win huge competitive displacement deals? Aren’t those types of deals inherently more valuable? Shouldn’t we model out what the ideal set of sales behaviors and business outcomes looks like and incentivize our sellers and sales managers against that?

Do away with complex pricing. Often, B2B technology companies create pricing models that are incredibly complex and confuse the customer. This only adds to the length of the sales cycle. Customers love simple pricing models. It removes a ton of friction in the customer buying journey. If it requires a PHD from MIT to explain your pricing model…then you’ve failed.

Simple pricing models should be based the customer’s actual value levers. What is most important and valuable about your product/service/solution to the customer? You should absolutely know the answer to this question and that is your fundamental value proposition. All pricing should be based solely on the value levers that are quantifiable. Don’t ever try to create an ROI model with a customer that is not based on any elements that are not easily quantifiable by the customer themselves.

This may too radical for most B2B technology companies, but don’t be surprised if someday soon a truly disruptive B2B technology company lets the customer decide how much to pay for the value they are receiving from their product/service/solution. Obviously this would require an ROI model that quantifiably can measure the value provided that the customer agrees with. Wouldn’t that be powerful and cool if your B2B technology company was the first to offer this to customers?

My admonition to all B2B sales leaders as we enter 2020, is think outside the box and disrupt. Try new things that have never been tried before. Aspire to build lifelong relationships and partnerships with your customers. Offer a “frictionless” buying journey to your customers. Dream big and insist on being the B2B technology company that your customers refers to as the model example of who they want to work with and how they want to work with you. Just be simple and drop dead easy to work with in all of your customer interactions. It will pay huge dividends, I guarantee you.

Good Selling!

The post 2020 Vision: B2B Sales Predictions first appeared on True Sales Results.

We all know what it’s like to deal with buggy technology that acts up right when we need it. Often, salespeople experience this same frustration with buyer engagement. Many struggle to find the right tactic to interest buyers and wish they had a secret code to keep them interested throughout the buying journey. By implementing a few key approaches, creating and retaining buyer engagement can become much less stressful. To break it down, here are three simple steps that sales reps can take to inspire more powerful interactions with buyers through the sales process.

1.) Prepare Your Sellers to Communicate Value First

What happens when sales reps use the wrong value proposition from the start? Buyers zone out, become frustrated, and are less likely to commit even if a practical solution is offered in the end. That’s why top-performing sellers meticulously plan early-stage interactions to create solid foundations for their relationships with buyers. First impressions can make or break a sale, so it’s important to capture buyers’ attention from the start to retain their interest in the future. With the right tools and training, sellers have the ability to quickly address any situation, uncover what buyers are looking for, and inspire engagement in the sales process by providing direct, worthwhile information.

It’s important for sellers to be ready to provide insight and value right off the bat. They should know their buyer, carefully listen to their needs, and quickly deliver the right information. More often than not, buyers have done their research and already have an understanding of an organization’s solution. They expect the sales rep to promptly provide them with the specific insights they need to make a purchasing decision. Preparing your sellers with the appropriate resources with a sales enablement solution is critical to ensure that your reps successfully engage their buyer. Engaging content that can be easily accessed and personalized will equip your sales reps for a successful first interaction. A Salesforce study found that more than 80% of sales reps in high-performing teams say their companies are aligned on giving them the tools and content they need to engage with prospects. Whether it’s slide decks, email templates, or other sales collateral, each item should have the ability to be personalized at a moment’s notice so that the right information, tailored to the buyer’s needs and scenario, is ready exactly when it is needed. It is up to the sellers to stay one step ahead of the customer and meet them with the most valuable information upfront. Modern business is chaotic and fast-paced, so sellers must get to the point and get it right!

2.) The Omnichannel Approach Is A Must

As technology becomes more and more integrated into buyers’ everyday routines, sellers must take advantage of every opportunity to reach prospects and boost awareness. Sales reps have to make the extra effort to communicate with buyers everywhere and in every way or they risk losing them to the competition.

Using various channels of communication is an easy-to-implement way to keep selling practices dynamic and to leave a memorable impression with buyers. It is also a necessary action to keep buyers tuned in to what sellers have to say. Decision-makers today are bombarded through traditional communication channels such as email and phone, and your sellers must participate in other forms of communication to ensure they stand out.

Meeting buyers across communication channels means:

• Producing intriguing social posts via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
• Sending personalized direct mails
• Utilizing text messaging appropriately to send personalized reminders
• Capitalizing on every opportunity for face-to-face interaction

Each of these communication approaches should be applied throughout every stage of the selling process so that your organization stays at the front of your buyers’ minds.

3.) Measure Engagement, Good and Bad

Once sellers are applying techniques aimed at producing higher engagement, how do you know if it’s working? Ensuring you can measure both the good and the bad engagements is key to understanding best practices and fine-tuning your reps’ approach.

Reps need to see in real-time when buyers engage with content and what communications perform best in order to strategically plan for the most effective follow-up. With the right sales enablement technology, sellers can engage buyers in a way they know will work. What does this look like? As an example, let’s say a rep using a sales enablement platform sends a buyer a whitepaper. The rep then receives insight that the buyer spent a significant amount of time reading through a certain section. The rep then follows up with additional information on that specific topic. Using engagement analytics, this rep gained insights that enabled them to send personalized outreach to their buyer and make a good impression before their next meeting.

With analytics, sellers can over time identify the combinations of content and channels that work well for them and drive higher quality engagements. Organizations that develop data-driven strategies and turn analytics into insight will gain a competitive advantage in buyer engagement by personalizing every prospect’s experience.

Conclusion

The truth is that selling is becoming more and more difficult in our modern landscape, and people are yearning for new practices to sell more successfully. Buyers expect sales reps to provide valuable information that guides them through evaluation and purchasing processes. Pressure is on for sellers to earn customer trust, loyalty, and reference ability in order to win a sale, so every engagement counts. Help your organization crack the code to customer engagement and outperform your competitors by integrating sales enablement to empower your sellers with valuable content that can be consistently communicated across various channels and quantitatively measured for engagement success. Utilizing a sales enablement tool not only hits all of those points, but also empowers sellers to feel confident in building more personal, lasting relationships. Take your organization to the next level by mastering the art of engagement and driving overall sales success.

Author Bio

Talia Vestal writes for Highspot, the industry’s most advanced sales enablement solution. You can follow Highspot on Twitter @Highspot.

The post Cracking the Code to Buyer Engagement first appeared on True Sales Results.

The post 2019 B2B Sales Predictions first appeared on True Sales Results.

Rather here is some practical advice…double down on the basics. It starts with a sound discovery and discernment framework. Have you armed your sales team with a deep understanding of all the stakeholders that they need to engage, influence and sell to in order to win new business? What do they need to learn through their discovery process from each stakeholder? What are some smart discovery questions they should ask? What are the real business drivers that your solution aligns well to?

Does your sales team know how to identify and cultivate a Champion(s) in an opportunity? You might be surprised how many sales reps (even experienced ones) struggle with this key sales capability. Are your sales reps mistaking the first person who engaged with them as always being the Champion? because more often than not, the first person who engaged with them tends to be a lower level project manager type person that was tasked with doing some preliminary research on technology solutions.

Can all of your sales reps find a path to the money? Are they capable of jointly building a successful business case that your Champion(s) can present to the power to get budget approval for your solution? Are your sales reps proficient at “coaching” up your Champion(s) on how to best pitch the business case for approval? You are being very naive if you think that your sales reps will always get the opportunity to present the business case to the ultimate decision maker. Experienced sales leaders know that when selling to large enterprise companies, your sales team will rarely get that direct in person opportunity to pitch the business case with the decision maker. You have to rely on your Champion(s) and that can be scary.

Does your sales team understand how to effectively navigate the IT Procurement approval labyrinth? For startups selling to large enterprise companies, this should almost be considered an entirely separate sales process with plenty of twists, curves and pitfalls that you can fall into and fail. Fortune 1000 IT Procurement agents are well seasoned expert negotiators that will chew up and spit out the uninitiated sales rep.

Can your entire sales team lead an effective Teaching Conversation tailored for each stakeholder? Does your sales team tell a consistent and compelling story? Do all of your sales reps know your customer case stories and all of the intimate details associated with your most successful customers even if they did not work the deals themselves.

I’m just scratching the surface with these questions. But the point is that smart and successful sales leaders don’t look for the non-existent sales silver bullet to improve sales performance. They focus on modeling best practices in the basic sales blocking and tackling. They practice and role play with their sales teams to hone their key sales capabilities and develop their sales skills. They are committed sales coaches that know how to motivate and inspire their team to levels of performance.

Good selling!

The post Stop Looking for the Sales Silver Bullet! first appeared on True Sales Results.

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Another clear signal of how well the economy is doing is the real estate market. Not only have home prices soared in appreciation, many folks are buying second homes. Lakefront homes, mountain ski condos, ocean cottages are all the rage. People and companies are spending lots of money on lots of different things. All is well in the sales commission world.

But what happens when the next recession or market correction happens? As a sales leader, are you prepared to weather the storm? Now is a really good time to carefully review your sales team roster and assess what you have or don’t have in terms of experience and make up. How many of your sales reps have sold through a recession before? Does your sales team as currently constructed have the necessary sales grit to make it through a severe market downturn where the lavish spending spree dries up? Because it takes a whole different level of sales determination to sell through a recession.

I’ve always preferred hiring “street smart” sales reps. They have a blue-collar edge about them. They tend to have that Tom Brady chip on their shoulder determined to prove every year that they should have been drafted in the first round rather than the sixth round (yup, he was the 199th draft pick with six other QBs being chosen before him). The street-smart sales reps have an innate ability to smell out the money. They hate wasting their time and ruthlessly qualify out of deals that smell bad.

These types of sales reps are not afraid of asking the tough questions. This sales rep archetype absolutely holds the customer accountable and insists on mutual respect and incremental commitments throughout the sales cycle. They tend to build long lasting, successful relationships with their customers as they earn real trust through their business integrity. I’ve found that the higher you go into the customer’s executive ranks, the more important that no bullshit sales approach resonates to the customer. They appreciate honesty. They value business integrity. They need to trust you as a sales person to buy from you.

This was the foundational sales model that I used to sell with when I was an individual contributor. I would tell the customer “no” when it needed to be said. I would honestly let the customer know what our software could and could not do. I never got defensive when the competition came up. In fact, I embraced a competitive differentiation conversation with the customer because I truly believed that we had the best overall solution. I prided myself on rarely discounting on price. My job was to build and prove out the value of our solution compared to alternative ways of solving the customer’s business problem. If the customer insisted on a discount, then my sales mission had failed.

Are you ready as a sales leader for the next recession? Do you have the right sales team composition to make it through? If you have any question marks or concerns, now is the time to start upgrading your sales team roster or helping the current team develop new sales skills that are essential for successfully selling through a recession. It’s like they say in Game of Thrones (GoT), “Winter is coming!”…are you ready?

Good selling!

The post How Do You Sell Through a Recession? first appeared on True Sales Results.

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