The Future of B2B Selling
(at least…as far as we can tell today)
For me, an unwaveringly tell-tale sign that I’ve stumbled across an insight or perspective that will help me CHANGE THE WORLD (or at least my tiny sliver of it), is when I experience a weird blend of aha! & no-duh moments…but struggle to distinguish between the two.
The 2022 Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference a few weeks ago provided exactly that.
“From virtual selling to inflation, the pace of unrelenting change has had a massive impact on B2B commerce,” said Scott Collins — managing vice president in the Gartner for Sales Leaders Practice — in the conference keynote. (arguably a no-duh)
But then, Collins (and the rest of the Gartner team) shared research that sheds light (and ahas!) on the why and how this disruption makes B2B selling more complex, more highly variable and way more unpredictable than it’s ever been before. And, how NOT adapting to this changing dynamic can significantly damage your ability to sell.
Got it…B2B selling is even harder now. But what’s a sales team to do?
The Answer: Make it easier.
But here’s the thing…that’s not easy to do.
According to Gartner, the key to taking complexity out of an overly complex B2B selling dynamic is to better equip your sales team with more guidance, more playbooks and more support -BUT- (and it’s a big but) make 100% sure those things empower your team to be agile, flexible and highly pivotal.
In other words, you need to create a sales organization that adapts to quickly changing customer needs by creating highly-tailored and situational engagement strategies that are relevant for specific customers given where they are in the purchase process.
Sales leaders looking to do this need to rethink their sales efforts across three critical dimensions:
There is LOTS of specificity in the conference materials around strategies and tactics within those dimensions as well as great “from > to” guidelines that you can access below.
However, if you’re an “executive” and prefer a summary of the most interesting takeaways, you’re in luck…mine are below (and they’re really good).
1) We’re woefully uninformed about our customers’ buying behaviors
I’d love to tell you that after mapping out your customer’s buying process and the activities they undertake to make a purchase decision, you can call it a day. Turns out…those journeys are multi-faceted and there are additional dimensions that are mission critical for us to understand.
- Informational journey — where, how and when customers get the information they need during the purchase process (from you and everywhere else on the planet).
- Emotional journey — from curiosity to frustration, hope to doubt, customers will experience a wide range of emotions as they weave in and out of their buying and informational journeys.
- Interpersonal journey — individual stakeholder roles, needs and desires and how their internal team dynamic can impact the purchase process.
Mapping out a more robust customer journey provides the contextual understanding of the buyer dynamic to ensure you have the tools to guide customers step-by-step through their own complex buying process (buyer enablement) and make it easier for the customer to make sense of all the information they’ll encounter on their journey so they feel confident with their decision.
2) Compliance creates busy work and busy work KILLS revenue
I’m consistently shocked by the volume of busy work we inadvertently create for our teams and it seems the bigger the organization, the greater the burden. Even though that work is often driven by our efforts to simplify the sales process and the intent is good — the results are not.
According to Gartner’s most recent research, 71% of sellers say their sales leaders dictate how they should meet their objectives. This sets up a compliance environment PERFECTLY — we prescribe the path, train the steps and monitor compliance. Unfortunately, 60% of reps also describe those leaders as disconnected from day-to-day selling reality. Yikes.
If we don’t fully understand the multi-dimensional buying journey we talked about above, we’re driving compliance around an insufficient understanding of buying behavior and any advice we provide sellers is not only inaccurate, but potentially out of touch.
And it gets worse…in compliance-driven organizations, 68% of reps report they merely “go through the motions” simply to meet activity requirements without much confidence those activities will drive results. That lack of confidence could stem from the fact that in those organizations, reps suffer from 20% lower quota attainment as compared to their counterparts in organizations that empower reps to make their own decisions and create tailored, relevant approaches to customer engagement.
And make no mistake…buyers feel this. 72% of B2B buyers in Gartner’s most recent research prefer not engaging with a sales rep AT ALL. Why? They think sellers just don’t get it. They don’t find the engagement relevant or useful as it’s not tailored to help them achieve their specific objectives. Ouch.
We’ve GOT to move away from prescribing & policing and set our sales teams up to leverage their knowledge and creativity to find new and better ways to meet customer needs and deliver on organizational goals through customer engagement.
And…we need to reward them for doing so — not spank them for coloring outside the lines.
3) It’s time to get rid of sales & marketing (finally)
Let’s just do this. Legacy organizational structures where sales and marketing are two distinct functions were created for a buyer journey that no longer exists.
Today, B2B buyers leverage countless channels to get the information they need to make a purchase decision and their journey isn’t linear — they weave back and forth between rep-led engagement and digital interaction. As a result, simply “improving the hand-offs” and “increasing collaboration” between sales and marketing is an insufficient attempt at creating a seamless interaction internally — and a frictionless experience for the customer. We need operating model innovation to create a truly adaptive selling organization.
At the end of the day, Sales and Marketing have the same goal — to drive growth (revenue and/or margin). As the research has found, to drive growth in a highly disrupted marketplace, it’s imperative that we create customized engagement strategies aligned to a specific customer’s need at a specific point in their journey.
Managing those journeys effectively will require fierce (and constant) synchronization of all resources that touch the customer, so it’s critical that Sales & Marketing present one face to the customer and operate as one team — a revenue generating team. With one tech stack, one operating model, one playbook and one objective — growth.
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I’m not gonna lie — none of these things will be easy to do. There’s a huge change management component, likely culture pivots and investment in new technology.
But technology isn’t the only critical enabler. Building the right team and fostering the right culture (with the right leadership) will determine whether you win or lose in today’s highly uncertain world.
If you’re interested in digging in…I recommend the conference keynote to start. If you want more, there are 3 additional presentations that drill down into the execution across customer understanding, customer engagement and operating models that you can access here.
