New buying behaviour from an online society, informed and all-powerful customers, globalization leading to greater competition…… now commercial business finds itself at the centre of a digital revolution.

With the growth of Big Data, social selling has become a powerful strategy that can help sell ideas, establish credibility and win customers.

Making the numbers work

Traditional sales functions are easily recognised for their conventional structures and adherence to the basic principle of performance metrics.

Mechanical, easy to monitor and report; but risks activities being driven by ‘quantity over quality’.

Experienced sales people know their metrics of course, while the new breed of Social Sellers may regard metrics as being one-dimensional unless intelligence is applied.

If you were not conforming to this framework during the Monday morning sales meeting, you were discredited.

These rules became the structure around which many sales activities were built.

Change is upon us

Yet in recent years, surveys have revealed significant trends indicating these metrics are becoming less and less effective with Gleanster Research also revealing that only 25% of leads are legitimate and likely to advance to sales.

Putting a value on this, according to The B2B Lead, lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year.

So how did this change happen ?

Getting past the gatekeeper and then meeting the boss is not enough anymore; decisions are based on multiple influence points that need to be met to win the deal.

Other factors can be external company influence (advisors, consultants and networks) all of whom can play a part in any decision making.

  • In a typical firm with 100-500 employees, at least 7 people are involved in buying decisions.5
  • Average sales cycles have increased 22% over the past 5 years due to more decision makers becoming involved in the buying process.6
  • If we look closer at the buying behaviour from an increasingly online society, 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer talks to sales.

In addition, according to Mike Derezin, LinkedIn VP of Sales, “In today’s digital and data driven age, online is how perceptions are shaped, so for anyone working in sales today, it’s a real miss to not make it core to their strategy”. 4

From small limited companies to large international groups, there are fewer individual decision makers!

We have moved away from the logic that the “customer is king” to the “customer is all powerful!”

With the internet, buyers instantly have access to information so they can:

  • Compare offers across the market in just a few clicks
  • Benefit from unbiased user feedback

Test products before even acquiring them

We are no longer talking about a sales cycle, but a procurement driven cycle, whereby the buyer can reject all forms of business communication, they perceive to be marketing manipulation.

The importance of information

If being informed was an asset in business, today it has become an essential component.

An effective sales person has to know and understand their customer’s needs, their market and possible challenges and this is best achieved through a consultative/trusted advisor approach. They need to develop a greater awareness of the customers’ expectations and possible influences that might affect the decision making process.

Closing deals is an ever growing challenge. Many deals have become projects with long decision cycles and complex procurement processes.

Having become less influential throughout the decision making process, the proactive sales person needs to make themselves more valuable. To manage this issue, the sales person can turn to data to help close the deal.

Finding relevant information that helps influence and reassure contacts, turning negative aspects into positive effects.

  • But to achieve this, the effective sales person has to become a data scientist… and then the problems start, because undoubtedly there is too much data out there!
  • Internal data: colleagues, CRM, company’s intranet…
  • External data: blogs, social networks, press…

The purpose being?

Finding an area of interest which enables them to develop their relationship with the customer that will help them do their job more successfully.

They can impose their own timescales and assessment processes and this can mean that speaking to someone in sales has often become their last resort and one of the final actions in their buying cycle.

Finding the time

This wealth of information now available on the internet and social networks is undeniable. However monitoring this data is not just time-consuming, but also hugely challenging for any business and their sales people to manage.

Yet having lots of data is only the start, understanding how to turn it into meaningful insights that can be actioned is really what is needed.

This inefficient use of time and lack of insight into the available data is neither sustainable nor desirable for any company that is striving to grow their business.

Limited time v Unlimited data: the unsolvable equation

Sales people often have little option than to make arbitrary choices and skip specific sources of information that might affect potential targets or contacts. Running the risk that strategic information is missed….a contact’s job role changes, new relationships with a competitor are forged or influential market related news is released…..

These risks can become key factors that may result in the loss of both new and existing business opportunities.

Every thorough sales person strives to understand when and why their prospect has reached a decision.

They look back at the sales process, study the history and review their proposals and the competition, in an effort to find the missing piece of information; the factor that made all the difference, that justified the loss of the opportunity or even showed that there had been little chance of success from the very beginning.

Had this information been identified earlier and acted upon, a change in sales strategy could well have proved more successful. Frustrating for the sales person as the information is all out there, it’s just a question of finding it!

The next step

In 2015, the Forrester Cabinet went as far as to predict the loss of 1 million US B2B sales people, in favour of self-service e-commerce by 2020.

Whether or not you choose to believe this statistic, there is little doubt that data intelligence directly affects every sales person.

Whilst the fundamentals of selling and the questions being asked have not changed, the ability to adapt the approach to sales will undoubtedly play a significant role in determining success rates of the future.

As an ever evolving profession, the role of the sales person has become one that can be defined as a key consultant within the purchasing cycle!

 COLD CALLS BELONG IN THE PAST, WARM CALLS BELONG TO TODAY