We all know that the B2B sales process is becoming increasingly complex. Over the past several years, we have seen a shift in how B2B buyers make decisions. They are much more informed, have too many options, and are digitally well connected to validate their choices.
Sellers struggle and often fail to provide their buyers with the right answers. This alignment gap between the buyer’s expectations and seller’s skills continues to grow, and the new normal with COVID-19 isn’t helping. But, is the gap because the sellers are less capable, or is there something else that is fundamentally misaligned? We’re questioning everything – from old school sales practices to how we communicate with the buyer who knows it all.
Spencer Wixom is the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Challenger Inc, an organization with many top-selling books on overcoming sales challenges, such as The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, and The Effortless Experience. With over 15 years of experience at CEB, Gartner, and Challenger, Spencer has helped transform sales and marketing teams in some of the biggest and best companies in the world.
SUMMARY
- In these times of COVID, where you have a different economic situation, suddenly, all the established demand and activities among complex buying groups came to a halt. As sellers, we should realize that we need to go in and create demand.
- The early and late majority are not particularly interested in nor familiar with your innovations and technology but are looking for ways to make progress or solve problems.
- According to our survey, the sales experience represents over 50% of the loyalty equation with a customer.
- Sellers need to handle the real objections and concerns that they encounter in their buying journies. There’s a lot more inertia in a buying organization to get things done.
- Sellers need to keep the following three things in mind: get the right message, make sure you have the right skills to deliver that message effectively, then make sure you’ve got a strategy in place.
- Sales leaders and sales managers need to capture feedback and spend a good portion of their time analyzing it, reviewing it, and coaching sellers around it.
CAN YOU GIVE WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN IN THE RECENT CHANGES IN SALES ENABLEMENT, AND WHY UNDERSTANDING IT IS IMPORTANT IN SALES ORGANIZATIONS?
It has created a bit of a full circle over the last 12 years or so. When you had the global financial crisis of 2007-08, what made the difference between high performing sellers and core performing sellers was a difference in hearts and minds. Your high performers were just geared differently in thinking about the customer, in their focus on the customer, in their desire to bring insight to the customer. That ultimately led to this original Challenger study, which came out in 2008-09, where we identified various performance profiles and found that the Challenger profile was four and a half times more likely to be a high performer in a complex B2B sales environment. That environment – the global financial crisis, a reduction in spending, a lot more complexity, and growing buying groups – all of that was a perfect ground for us to originally validate in study Challenger.
We had the recovery, and we had several years where the economy was moving along at a really good clip. You had many complex buying groups in B2B organizations who were actively making decisions, actively purchasing things because their organizations had budgets to spend, and their organizations were growing. During that time, many people forgot the fundamentals that make complex B2B sales difficult because there was established demand in the market. You have COVID, and you have the economic situation that we find ourselves in right now. All of a sudden, all the established demand and activities that were happening among complex buying groups came to a halt, and sellers, similar to the way they felt back in 2007-08, realize we need to go in and actually create demand. We need to assemble these buying groups and help them come to a consensus and make decisions.
All of a sudden, a lot of these fundamental skills that were so critical and that identified high performers in 2007 & 2008 are now again at the fore, and buyers are telling us, these skills are critically important for the sellers that call on me. I’m just not seeing sellers meet the bar that I would expect, or that I want to motivate me to action, to motivate me to consensus among a buying group that I would like to see.
DO YOU THINK THAT DURING THE MATURITY CURVE WHERE THE TECHNOLOGIES ARE MATURE, THE MINDSET OF THE SALES PEOPLE HAS TO CHANGE FROM ‘EVEN THOUGH THE TECHNOLOGY IS MATURE, YOU STILL HAVE TO CREATE THE DEMAND’?
This goes to Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm. When you’re talking about innovators and first movers, those are the ones who are going to appreciate your technology and your products, services, features, and benefits. They’re going to intuitively “get it.” A lot of sales organizations have this false sense of security because they found it simple or easy to sell to innovators and first movers. All of a sudden, as the organization grows and they scale the number of salespeople, they’re trying to professionalize their sales function and connect with the early and late majority. But they find that the value proposition they need to present to the early and late majority is very different than the value proposition they needed to present to innovators and first movers.
The early and late majority are not particularly interested in nor familiar with your innovations and technology. They are interested in making progress or solving problems that they’re either uncovering in their business on their own or that you’re uncovering for them. That’s a very different conversation. Let’s take tech for an example. If you’re a salesperson who is well-steeped and passionate in your technology, and you go out and pitch that technology to customers, that will work for some 15-20% of your customers. But will that message necessarily work for that early and late majority? My argument would be, ‘no!’ You need to position it in a different way to, first of all, you need to have them recognize an issue or a struggle that they have in making progress, and then connect to or lead them to your solution or your technology as a support for that struggle.
WHERE DO THE SELLERS OR THE BUYERS SEE THE GAPS DURING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OR THE CRISIS LIKE COVID? HOW DO SALESPEOPLE CAN READJUST THEIR STRATEGIES OR SKILLS TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE COMING TIMES?
We are constantly evaluating both sellers and buyers. We like to look at both sides of the situation. We’re sampling both the community of sellers and sales leaders and our community of buyers to understand both sides of it.
We first were studying buyers back in 2007-08. This is where we came up with the concept central to our Challenger philosophy: the insight-led sales experience. The sales experience represents over 50% of the loyalty equation with a customer. If I’m a seller and I want to develop loyalty, then I need to bring an insight-led sales experience, or at least that’s what buyers told us that made up more than half of the equation in their mind. This has continued to be a very popular finding ever since. In late 2018-19, we restudied that postulate to find out if the findings are still valid. It turns out that the insight-led sales experience still is 50% of that equation. We deepened the validation in 2018-19 by retaining existing customers and creating initial sales with a new customer. It turns out that the sales experience is dominant in both of those areas. If you want new customers or deepen an existing relationship with a current customer, the insight-led sales experience is a critical part of the equation.
We also wanted to understand from the buyer’s perspective, what skills sellers bring are the (A) most important to you and (B) do you see more frequently performed at a high level versus see less frequently performed at a high level?
Here are a few items that buyers told us are most important when sellers call on them. Number one: demonstrating unique insight, bringing a unique perspective to that customer. Another is helping the customer make decisions by having an understanding of the various stakeholders’ interests in the buying group. Tailoring a message to their needs and being able to configure that message to appeal to the interests of the multiple stakeholders helps that buyer build support or consensus in their organization, and overall making it easy for that buyer to complete the transaction. These were the skills that buyers told us were most important to them.
We also asked how frequently or to what degree of expertise are sellers bringing these skills to the table. We measured that in 2018-19, and then COVID hit. We decided to take another look at the buyer’s perspective or opinion of the skills that the sellers bring. We re-studied that exact same thing this summer. There was a fascinating finding that when we looked at those same skills between 2018-19 and then 2020 post COVID, we found a consistent drop among each of them in the opinion of buyers.
For example, the buyer’s opinion of sellers’ capability to demonstrate unique insight fell 52% in the year and a half timeframe. Helping buyers make decisions fell 34%. Seller’s understanding of stakeholder interest fell 41%. If you take the average across, say, these top five most important skills, it’s down on average 40% in the eyes of buyers. We can’t just assume that seller capability has fallen 40% post-COVID and that sellers have just erased their memories or their skill sets in some way. What you must look at is, the buyer’s bar or their expectation for these needs has gone up significantly. The big sin that sellers are committing is not adapting, not noticing that buyers are looking for something different, looking for something better, and not rising to meet the occasion. Sellers are continuing to do or perform in the same way they always have and expecting buyers to react in the same way buyers always have, but buyers are very clearly telling us is not the case.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE BELIEF OF SALESPEOPLE WHO HAVE ADOPTED THE MODE OF DIGITAL PRESENCE HAVE PROBABLY BEEN LESS HIT THAN THE ONES WHO FOLLOW TRADITIONAL WAY OF SELLING USING WARM HANDSHAKES?
This whole idea of shifting entirely to a virtual sales environment, particularly in complex B2B or particularly in complex account management, is changing. It could be your presence was actually in the customer’s organization; say you were a key account manager, and you almost had a desk at the customer’s facility and knew people and could navigate your way around that facility. It becomes a lot more difficult when you are selling entirely virtually, just engaging with people, and maintaining those relationships. Secondly, the idea that if sellers have not shifted to having a digital footprint to engage, inform, and teach customers across multiple channels, then the customers are going to notice you far less. There are many sellers who have not fully engaged digital and social channels to reinforce their sales messages and build their personal brand.
There are some elements at play on the buyer’s side as well. The idea that procurement has taken a much more active role in spending, and they have reduced budgets and have put much more scrutiny into every deal. When you have a reduction in budget where they say only essential spend and where they say each deal will require all of these additional layers of scrutiny, you put those two elements together, and you have real objections.
What’s interesting in the boom years of 2015 to 2019, there were objections. Many of those objections were essentially to pressure test the various sellers against one another and lightly test sellers. Companies were going to buy; they were going to do something. They had the budget, they had the initiative, they had the autonomy to do things, so they were going to buy. It was just a matter of time from whom we buy and under what circumstances we buy. Now, those objections are real, and sellers need to be capable of handling real objections, real concerns in those buying journeys. There’s a lot more inertia in a buying organization to get things done.
WHAT ACCORDING TO YOU ARE THE THREE THINGS THAT THE SELLERS SHOULD KNOW TO SUSTAIN IN THESE TRYING TIMES?
Sales leaders believe that they have got to rebuild pipelines. They’ve got to have sellers who can go out there and target effectively because not all organizations are equally capable or interested in buying right now. Do really good territory targeting, find the right prospects, and then engage those prospects effectively around a new idea and convert that new idea into a commercial opportunity. They need to be able to do that well because the primary sales metric concern of sales leaders right now is that front end pipeline building enough opportunities in the funnel to hit quotas.
Of equal concern is increasing value capture among existing customers. Many long-time existing customers have gone to sleep in the current environment, and that is concerning to sales leaders as well. That requires a very similar skillset on the part of sellers that building an initial pipeline is. When you’re trying to wake up that existing customer base, you’ve got to bring them insight. You have got to bring them ideas for customer improvement.
The third thing they say is improving the effectiveness of sellers. They see the third one as the input to achieve the first two. If we’re more effective, if we’re meeting that bar more effectively with our existing customers in our new prospects, we’ll see more front-end pipeline and wake up those current client accounts.
We believe this needs a focus, and that focus should be pretty straightforward, which should start with, “do we have the right message?” Do we have a message that’s powerful; that teach customers something they’re not considering. Is it a message that builds that motivation for action? You really need to test the quality of the message you’re giving your salespeople to deliver. Secondly, do they have the skills to deliver that message effectively? Are you monitoring and measuring the delivery of that message? This is a great time to engage with conversational intelligence tools. You need to incorporate one of those tools when the vast majority of your interactions with customers are over video conferencing, like Zoom, so that you can record all of it, you can measure it, and you can analyze it.
Because it’s so important to find the right advocates inside the customer’s organization to build consensus and manage the buying group – a seller can’t do that from the outside – you’ve also got to ask, “are we identifying the right stakeholders?” At Challenger, we call them mobilizers. Our second book in the Challenger series talks a lot about that. Are we identifying those mobilizers? Do our sellers know how to work with them, partner with them, coach them effectively so that the internal mobilizer is the one actually building the consensus among the buying group, and moving the deal forward? It’s challenging, particularly in a virtual environment, to move those deals forward from the outside. You need that internal partner.
These are the three things: to get the right message, make sure your sellers have the right skills to deliver that message effectively and confirm that they do, then make sure you’ve got a strategy in place to identify the right mobilizer stakeholders to partner with to move the deals forward.
TELL US ABOUT HOW CONVERSATIONAL AI TOOLS HELP EMPOWER AND IMPROVE THE SELLING AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT EXPERIENCES?
What I love about it is it provides multiple benefits simultaneously. You can measure the efficacy of the seller’s delivery, their use of skill, their capability. At the same time, you can evaluate customer reaction to the message you’re delivering. You can see it, you can see exactly what’s happening, and you’re not taking the seller’s word for it. That lens can be biased in some way by what the seller perceived or what the seller wanted to believe. You can see those reactions in real-time. It’s essential for sales leaders and sales managers to capture that feedback and spend a good portion of their time analyzing it, reviewing it, and coaching sellers around it.
This is a perfect area for sales and marketing to get aligned. Marketing has to play a much bigger role now in all of this. It will take at least a decade’s worth of generation to come to a point where the new sellers have learned these tools right at the get-go when they’re doing their education. For the next ten years, the marketing and sales have to work collaboratively to implement these tools, analyze the conversations, improve the message in an agile way, and identify what works and what doesn’t to improve.
Digital transformation in the context of sales and marketing is something that CMOs and CSOs need to start exploring. It’s not just about implementing processes within the organization, but it’s about how you transform sales and marketing to become more digital.