Enabling B2B Sales & Marketing

It’s no secret that the internet and social media have changed the way people buy.

Today’s buyers can educate themselves online about their problems, and find potential solutions, without the help of a sales pitch. So, if you want to meet your customers along the new buyer journey, you need a new approach to selling.

But what should you do? An important first step is to align your sales and marketing teams.

2017 is well underway. Depressingly, it's not difficult to see what HASN'T changed when it comes to B2B sales practices.

But if we can all agree on what's wrong, at least that gives us an agenda of what to fix! The usual suspects are all here in this list of 7 deadly sins: engaging the customer too late; selling the steak and not the sizzle, and thinking that "relationship building" is the holy grail of sales, just to name a few. 

Here's a full list of what we're seeing that's wrong in B2B sales - what we're calling the "7 Deadly Sins of B2B Sales" - and how to fix them...

In our last article, we celebrated those wonderful sales prospects who are brave enough to tell us the truth and reject a sales proposal if it’s not for them.

They don’t lead us on to avoid confrontation, or waste our time by requesting a quote that they’re never going to read, let alone accept. Their honesty means we can both move on - but unfortunately, all too often in sales this is not how it goes.

I just had a prospect politely refuse to have a follow-up meeting with me.

Am I sad? Hell no! I'm rejoicing - if only some other folk I call on were this upfront and honest!

This may sound a little strange coming from a business owner whose role includes "sales" - surely rejection is never a good thing? We’ll actually, sometimes it can be. Let me explain...

As buyers continue to change how they buy, sales people need to keep evolving.

But how - and why?

In short - the salesperson of the future will be the one that adapts his/her selling processes to match the new way in which buyers buy.

There are lots of disrupting influences in the B2B marketplace at the moment - the move to the cloud, social media, globalisation, etc. These issues are disrupting commerce - but the accompanying change in how buyers buy in particular is disrupting and making irrelevant the "old ways of selling"..

You might have heard the analogy about sales (including social selling) being like a cocktail party.

The person at the party people want to talk to is NOT the guy talking about how great he is. Rather, it's the person who's doing active listening - responding to and engaging with what others have to say. 

Sales is the same. Successful salespeople are not those who yammer away at the prospect with a megaphone, talking incessantly about their products and services. Instead, it's the person who listens to the prospect's pain points and challenges, showing understanding by articulating the problem and painting a picture of a solution before ever mentioning their own product. 

2016 was a big year in sales and marketing. In order of popularity, here's a collection of our most-read posts from the last 12 months:

Why talking about your company, products and services won’t get you the sale

OK – hands up – how many of you have proudly invested in your “company presentation”, insisting your sales team includes it at the start of every customer meeting?

Typically, it will go something like, “Here’s how we started – here’s our staff – here’s our locations – here’s our products and services…” and so on. What a great way to bore a customer to death!

In Part 1 of this series on improving your personal brand via social media, we looked at how to know when it's appropriate to share content, and what the right content is.

In Part 2 we're looking at how best to maximise your time to send out the RIGHT content at the RIGHT time.

There's nothing worse for your personal brand than to send irrelevant stuff to people - or even relevant stuff, but at the wrong stage of the buyer journey. 

What exactly is "personal brand"?

I could give you the (very) long consultant version of the definition of "brand", but the best - and most succinct I've ever heard - is that brand is "promise".