My prediction is that sales organisations will increasingly look for sales reps with outstanding people and communication skills, and that they will then equip them with technology and expert support to help them convince the multitude of buyers that their offer is the only one to buy.Now, here is the rub: all this effort in time and resources comes at a cost, which means that opportunities will now need to be qualified out at a much earlier stage, and that we can thus only afford to go after the opportunities that are identified as high value. Marketers will need to work hard to collaborate with reps to help them to understand and deal with the different Buyers' personas and their unique requirements. This means that your intrepid sales reps now must be very aware of the multitude of view points from which your offer can be looked at, and they must be able to articulate value in each of the stakeholder's language. This, of course, makes the sales process more complicated, as there are now not only more decision makers and influencers involved but, to further complicate matters, they each have different requirements and perspectives on your offer, and they all need to be convinced that your solution suits their needs best. According to CEB, we now have to convince a variety of executives in order to make a sale, such as the financial buyer, the technology buyer, the operational buyer, the strategic buyer, etc. However, gone are the days when getting the CEO interested was enough to secure a sale. Firstly, even CEOs of large companies now have limited personal budget spending approval power, and secondly, they now need (and want) to include the senior executive team in the decision-making process. “An average of 5.4 People are now are involved in the buying decision” (CEB)ī2B Sales reps used to look for THE mystical "decision maker" within a prospect's organisation to make their pitch to. There is now more than just one Buyer Decision Maker A shameless plug here: Look out for my interview with Rob Garsden at LinkedIn in which he describes how LinkedIn's own sales and marketing teams collaborate to generate sales leads. Importantly, they will need to offer Buyers value right from their first cold call. My prediction is that this "numbers game" breed of B2B selling will diminish over time and that even high call rate outbound call centres will need to pre-qualify their suspects and prospects to a certain, higher, degree. On the flip side, it may also indicate that there are still sales reps out there who believe that "selling is just a numbers game" and that the more cold calls they make, the more sales they will close. I mean, which executives do you know who have either the time or the inclination to take an unsolicited call ? In the cold light of day, though, the fact that the statistic is not 100% must mean either that there still are very effective cold calling techniques out there, or that there are still executives out there who have enough time on their hands to explore spurious opportunities, just in case they turn out to be worthwhile. If that is the case, then, frankly, I am surprised that this figure is not 100%. I think HBR is talking about an unsolicited call from an unknown person here. “90% of Decision Makers won’t respond to cold calls” (HBR)
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