Today's post is by Ken Valla, President and Co-Founder of The Valla Group, a modern sales training organization. Follow The Valla Group’s LinkedIn page for sales effectiveness insights.
You’ve seen the research: Companies engage with B2B salespeople later and later, and involve more stakeholders than ever. Add in the challenges of remote sellers and tightening budgets, and it’s easy to see why enterprise selling is tougher these days. To succeed, companies need customized sales effectiveness approaches that directly improve sales performance.
Yet most traditional sales effectiveness solutions and sales methodologies are one-size-fits-all affairs that ignore the fact that every company has different values, needs, and problems. This often results in an expensive consulting project that never gets integrated into the client’s sales strategy.
To get the best results from your enterprise selling efforts, look for a modern sales effectiveness solution with the following three attributes.
Treat clients like partners
There’s no cookie-cutter fix for each company’s sales effectiveness challenges. Most sales methodologies and sales training companies lack the customization necessary to identify and correct what’s driving a company’s poor sales performance.
For example, one team may have pipeline management issues, while another struggles to drive early demand. Traditional sales methodologies don’t dive into organizations’ unique challenges and deliver bespoke solutions.
In contrast, modern sales effectiveness solutions go deep into a client’s unique needs, focusing on understanding how sellers think, work, and sell, and then delivering customized sales training approaches that pinpoint improvement opportunities with the most potential for impact. The end result is a partnership that’s built to work best for each client—and vastly improve sales performance.
Create demand via early-stage selling
B2B buyers engage with vendors later in sales cycles, but what do salespeople do in the meantime? It’s tough to find a B2B salesperson who’s made quota on leads alone, yet many salespeople still over-rely on their BDRs. As a result, pipelines shrink and salespeople grasp at unwinnable deals to keep their activity metrics high. These efforts typically increase sales activity at the expense of sales performance.
In contrast, a modern sales effectiveness provider will empower salespeople to drive top-of-funnel demand themselves, working with leaders to:
- Identify why and how salespeople can establish credibility with buyers early
- Create custom messaging for key stakeholders
- Box out the competition early
- Increase pipeline and deal velocity
Shape better conversations during mid-stage opportunities
Banking on the efforts of one or two internal champions isn’t enough for B2B salespeople to succeed. Almost every enterprise sale is a complex process that involves many stakeholders, all of whom need focused attention in order to maximize value, increase deal velocity, and eliminate surprises. When salespeople cut corners and go for the close without involving all the key stakeholders, they end up with undersized or stalled deals.
Modern sales effectiveness solutions look at how to shape successful outcomes through conversational sales interactions with all the key stakeholders in an account. Each of these conversations must be personal, situational, and collaborative—focused on the unique needs of each stakeholder. In contrast to scattershot sales efforts, conversational sales approaches ensure that deals aren’t upended by surprise roadblocks, and that value for each stakeholder is maximized—resulting in more and bigger deals.
Implementing a modern sales effectiveness solution over traditional sales methodologies ensures that your sales training will meet the unique needs of your sales organization, align more closely with your sales strategy, and lead to improved short- and long-term sales performance.
To learn more about the value of a modern approach over typical sales methodologies, click here.