What modern sales organizations must do to survive and thrive in the coming years

An interview with sales thought leader Bob Apollo:

There’s no question that the B2B selling environment has changed dramatically in the past twenty years, and continues to do so at an accelerating rate. The question that sales leaders wrestle with is how to help their sales organizations adapt and thrive in this new environment.

My team recently spoke with Bob Apollo for his insight. A well-known thought leader in the sales arena, Bob has worked with and for many of the world’s top B2B technology companies in senior marketing and operations roles. Through his own company, Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, he now helps promising B2B organizations emerge as future market leaders, by systematically improving the performance of their sales and marketing organizations.

In our interview, Bob told us that the key challenge for modern sales leaders is getting their salespeople to communicate value in a market that’s crowded with information and filled with salespeople using outdated sales approaches. It’s a problem that goes deeper than sales people simply not understanding their company’s value. The solution, he contends, is complex, and must engage the entire organization—incorporating sales, marketing, technology, and senior leadership.

The rest of that interview, which is packed with valuable insight, is below. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Q: In a recent post, you mentioned that the average salesperson’s inability to communicate value is one of the most frustrating challenges faced by today’s CEOs & Heads of Sales. Why is that, and how do we solve it at the organizational level?

Bob: One of the challenges with trying to articulate value is in helping the customer to acknowledge the costs, implications and consequences of their current situation. When significant change is required, any large investment decision is non-trivial. If there are no significant costs or consequences associated with sticking to the status quo, then it’s most likely the prospect will do just that.

Most research suggests that people, even when it comes to business decisions, buy emotionally, and justify rationally. So simply coming up with a sterile ROI calculation isn’t going to be enough. You’ve also got to help the client develop a visceral sense of the cost and negative consequences of their current situation.

Q: Would you say you’ve got to make them feel pain?

Bob: Pain, yes, but there is more than one way to help the customer to acknowledge the need for change. The obvious, pain-based approach is to make them believe that their current situation has become untenable—that’s the sort of pain most people think of. But an alternative catalyst for change lies in the recognition that they have a future opportunity that they cannot afford to miss. Either way, they need to believe that sticking with the status quo isn’t a viable option.

Q: How does the organization support the salesperson in accomplishing this?

Bob: Sales leaders have to understand that this is not just a sales responsibility. It’s also a key marketing responsibility. Marketing has a critical role to play in crafting the appropriate insights, materials, and equipping sales to use them to unsettle the prospect and to help them come to terms with the idea that what they’re doing today is not what they need to be doing in the future.

Q: When you talk about “unsettling” the prospect, it sounds a lot like concepts from The Challenger Sale methodology.

Bob: I buy into many of the concepts behind The Challenger Sale - but implementation requires a high level of sales skill. Challenger sales people need to have curiosity, empathy and emotional intelligence and demonstrate high levels of cognitive thinking. We need to acknowledge the fact that some of the salespeople who have been successful in the past using traditional sales techniques are going to find it increasingly hard to be effective in a world where the buyer has higher expectations of what they need and expect from a sales conversation.

Putting Challenger into practice is a non-trivial exercise. It’s an idea that resonates in particular with chief executives, but it requires a determined cross-organizational cooperation to make it work. But many organizations lack the commitment, the determination, and the right people to put it into practice. For those who do, The Challenger Sale is one of the approaches that are helping them to embrace the future of B2B selling.

Q: How do you get that determined cross-organizational cooperation?

Bob: It needs to happen in a number of places, and it starts by changing the way we think about marketing. There’s a natural tension between sales and marketing, and I don’t suggest that you should eliminate that. But I do believe that many of the tools that are needed have to come from marketing, and the metrics that are used have to change from those that are more relevant in a B2C environment such as number of leads generated, to those that are based on the value that marketing has actually added to the pipeline.

Q: How do you do that?

Bob: The compensation plan is part of it. Marketing should be compensated based on the pipeline value they have helped to generate. Sales and marketing have to come up with a common plan to systematically identify, target, engage, qualify, and persuade more of the right sort of prospects. Marketing has to see their mission as not just restricted to the top of funnel and to branding, but as helping to facilitate the sales process from start to finish, providing materials and tools that help sales people move an opportunity to the next stage in the process.

That recognition is really important. If B2B marketers fail to see see their primary role as enabling the sales process, and if their performance isn’t measured by the value they add to the pipeline, you’ll inevitably have a disconnect. I advise clients that they should not produce a single additional piece of marketing content unless they’ve agreed with sales where it fits into the sales process and - this is critically important - what sort of sales conversation they want that new piece of material to stimulate. Marketers should be working together with sales leadership to coach, equip, enable and encourage the salespeople to have profound, insight-related conversations that will make the prospect want to learn more.

There’s a dangerous disconnect right now. Too many content marketers think that the job is done when the material is produced, but the truth is that the job’s only just begun. If that material does not serve the purpose of advancing a buying decision, you’ve got to wonder why it was ever created in the first place.

Q: Does technology have a role to play in this cross-organizational cooperation?

Bob: Yes. There are a couple of things that are important here. First, you’ve got to make sure that the quality of information that you’re collecting about each opportunity is as complete, and comprehensive, and accurate as possible. You’ve got to be able to work out where you’ve got gaps in your knowledge. Quality and quantity of information is a key foundation.

Another key element involves guiding the salespeople through what they need to know and do at each stage of the sales process. What marketing and sales tools are available, what they can share, what might help a prospect feel motivated and confident to move to the next stage.

Most CRM solutions are regarded by their users—the salespeople—as sales accounting systems that they’re required and expected to put information into. They see very little value in it.

All three of these issues are solved by a new generation of technology solutions, which Membrain exemplifies. CRM adoption, data quality, and salesperson performance are all dramatically improved if we create a tool that salespeople want to use rather than feel obliged to use—a product like Membrain, of which I have a very high regard.

Q: Is there anything that’s still missing in technology, from a sales perspective?

Bob: There’s good progress being made in a number of areas. If you think about Membrain’s focus, for instance, it’s about developing a winning sales process that reflects the behavior of top salespeople. It’s got to reflect what the best salespeople really do in practice, not in theory. Membrain does a great job of encouraging the collection of data points and coaching salespeople in what they need to do, but there’s a parallel process that Membrain also plays a role in, of creating better sales analytics. Intelligent technology has the potential to help drive sales performance in a truly profound way, so that leaders can see what’s really going on in the pipeline, and model best sales process practices based on what’s really working.

Q: Are there any big mistakes organizations are making when it comes to building those processes?

Bob: An analogy I like to use is that process needs to be more of a skeleton than a cage. People hear “sales process” and they think of it as restrictive: You have to do this, you can’t move forward unless you do that. In the complex world my clients work in, you’ve got to recruit salespeople who can apply their curiosity, initiative, interest, and creativity, and you’ve got to support them rather than restricting them. When process feels like a cage, it stifles rather than supports.

That’s why I prefer to think about embracing winning habits. Process has got to offer a way to help salespeople to make intelligent choices that improve their chances of winning. Highly rigid sales processes are ineffective in complex sales environments. They have to be flexible and adaptable to reflect the accumulated wisdom of the smartest sales people in the organization.

Sales process can’t be a substitute for hiring salespeople with critical thinking abilities. In fact, one of the benefits of a well-defined sales process is that it deals with the obvious, the predictable, and it helps them avoid otherwise common errors. In doing so it gives them more freedom to devote their energies to creative, inquisitive aspects of the job.

Consider how highly seasoned professionals—airline pilots, surgeons, for instance—use checklists to ensure the basics of their work, so they can focus their attention on the creative aspects of the job. The surgeon’s skill is best applied to reacting to what he or she discovers during the course of the operation, rather than on remedying errors in simple, basic procedures that are easy to forget.

Q: Good point. Is there anything else you think our readers would want to know about sales process or technology?

Bob: I’m intrigued that you brought up The Challenger Sale. It’s an interesting concept and not well-implemented in many places, but it can make a dramatic difference where it has been. I can see how Membrain would support a Challenger Sale environment well.

I think we all need to recognize that the sales performance bar is being progressively raised, in terms of our expectations of salespeople. Buyers expect more of the salespeople who engage with them. They are increasingly intolerant of salespeople who ask twenty questions and give nothing back in return.

As a result, some salespeople whose CVs would lead you to believe they’ve been highly successful in the past, and probably have been, find themselves struggling. And it’s not just a generational thing. There are experienced salespeople on a continuous learning process who are doing well in the new environment, and young people who struggle to embrace this type of thinking. I think there needs to be a much higher emphasis on the salesperson’s ability to listen and adapt, to see patterns, to synthesize, and to bring fresh insights that make prospects sit back and think, “I’ve actually learned something.” Prospects are keen to continue a conversation with a salesperson that has brought them value.

So it’s a challenge for salespeople, and it’s a challenge for sales leadership as well. The entire sales community has got to get smarter, be more adaptable, more curious. That’s where modern selling is heading.