To deliver success in today’s climate, B2B sales organizations will need to make three seismic transformations in the way they approach customers and lead teams: they will need to become omnichannel orchestrators, adopt a value-creation mindset, and enable continuous change management.
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These changes will necessitate a considerable reskilling of sales organizations. In the most recent survey of more than 400 sales leaders in Europe and the Americas, 55% reported that just roughly half of their sales force possessed the necessary competence.
Change is never easy, especially after pandemic-related turmoil for two years. However, the research and client experience show that organizations hiring elite talent earn considerably faster revenue growth. Here’s what it takes to win the competition.
1. Train to be an omnichannel orchestrator.
As purchasing preferences change, sales excellence has increasingly come down to delivering the right experience through the right channels. However, because different stakeholders are participating in different phases of the purchasing process, sales leaders will need granular data and AI analytics capabilities to determine what content and interactions are most beneficial in reaching certain audiences.
According to analysis, B2Bs with the greatest revenue growth rates are considerably more likely to provide reps with deal-level insights and account-specific customer knowledge. One B2B sales leader, for example, identified which customers favored chat and which preferred email by correlating search data with sales data so they knew which channel to engage in. Other analytics looked at rival movements in certain parts of the country, allowing sales reps to anticipate customer questions and come up with useful solutions.
Data-driven insights can also assist leaders in better aligning and allocating coverage and resources. Instead of assessing account coverage once a year, as is common, outperforming organizations use resource modeling and planning technologies to update account priorities and realign resources as frequently as once a month. These skills require investments in analytical and math skills, account planning, negotiation, and relationship building. These investments pay off with faster growth of four to five times.
2. Cultivate a value-creation mindset.
B2Bs experiencing the strongest revenue growth are contacting customers earlier and with a more consultative perspective. They’re collaborating more with customers to create bespoke value propositions rather than the more traditional B2B sales transaction- and product-led approach. The new approach has the potential to be transformative.
One B2B packaging company pitched a fully integrated packaging product to a big manufacturing customer. Instead of merely selling the corrugated customer boxes, plastic wrap, and labels, as is customary, sales leaders collaborated with the company to develop prototypes specialized for its top product line. Running the calculations revealed that the approach would cost the company less than acquiring component packaging pieces separately. The B2B would also benefit because the solution would make the company’s packaging part of the customer’s work, making money and allowing for cross-selling in the future.
Most sales leaders think that solution selling will be an important skill in the future, and it will require a lot of knowledge of your products, how to design a good solution, and how to plan for your accounts.
To succeed, sales leaders must improve their communication skills, facilitate brainstorming with customers, and bring in technical specialists as needed, perform pilots, and set mutually agreed-upon targets and goals. In order to work together to plan a project, pipeline development, upstream engineering procedures, and the sales cycle all need to change.
The value concept that underpins the solution sales construct should also extend to price. Sales leaders can increase account aspiration with a significant impact. They may, for example, desire to implement performance-based pricing and link the fee scale to mutually agreed-upon outcomes. This approach may involve more risk upfront, but it can end in a win-win situation for both sides and increase the client’s lifetime value.
3. Make it possible to manage constant change.
Next-generation sales leaders address all aspects of change management. They move quickly through an agile process. They tell interesting “what’s in it for me” stories and keep their training, development, and incentive programs up to date.
According to a recent survey, around 65% of sales leaders believe that the rate of change has accelerated in recent years, and 85% believe that adopting agile working methods will be crucial for success in the next few years. During the depths of the pandemic, we understood things needed to be different. We began experimenting in small groups to discover what worked and what didn’t. This nimble approach was extremely beneficial to us.
For top-performing teams, for example, instead of taking on large, complex projects and implementing them over many months, rely on practices that support rapid testing and learning and break projects into smaller sprints of one to two weeks, with emphasis on a minimum viable product out to customers quickly. They focus, with a similar emphasis, on changing the sales organization’s culture, modeling desired behaviors and assisting sellers in understanding what they may gain by embracing new working methods. As a result, we invested time in clarifying the change story, empowering the frontline, linking incentives to the new behaviors, and reinforcing these through performance management tools. Nothing can be left to chance. Sales organizations need to set aside time for peer mentoring and weekly check-ins and make mentoring a requirement for all leaders.
Training must change as well. Instead of broad-brush techniques, organizations often find that making learning individualized and experiential—allowing salespeople to focus on specific skill gaps and apply what they’re learning to actual sales opportunities—produces better results. According to a recent analysis, most organizations need to reskill around half of their sales team and fill major gaps in important commercial jobs.
Leaders should look at their performance-management and reward systems and change the measurements and prizes to keep things going and make changes last.
Conclusion
Sales leaders can do more than adapt their teams to the demands of today’s B2B environment by learning from this convulsive era of change; they can lead in delivering a new level of performance. Organizations that invest in developing the skills needed to be great at next-generation sales will be able to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with their customers and make a lot more money.
Important takeaways:
Sales leaders all across the world know that generating B2B revenue growth will necessitate considerable reskilling of their teams. Only about half of the more than 400 sales leaders polled reported that their sales force possessed the necessary competencies.
It takes time and works to equip sales with next-generation capabilities, but the payback is substantial. Top-quartile teams can deliver sales four to five times faster than bottom-quartile teams.
B2Bs experiencing the strongest revenue growth are contacting customers earlier and with a more consultative perspective. Approximately 85% of sales leaders believe solution selling will be a core sales capability requiring strong product knowledge, solution design, and account-planning skills.
Last Updated on May 24, 2023
