Executing your sales strategy - the importance of how-to

In the B2B sales space, there is a wealth of information on emerging trends and the strategies required to adapt. Readers of this blog have likely heard about the ongoing polarization of sales, where the transactional becomes increasingly commoditized and automated while B2B sales gets even more complex. How will you survive and thrive in an era of global competition and informed buyers?

Luckily, there is a laundry list of best practices - sell on value, implement a sales process, spend more time coaching and, of course, align with the buyer’s journey.

This is all incredibly valuable advice, backed up by research on what top performing sales organizations do differently. We can all access great information and quickly understand what we should be doing – so why are we still struggling to make our numbers? It’s all about execution and too often, the tactical perspective is absent. The details. Steps needed to convert theory into practice. In order to execute, we need to move beyond knowing what to do and figure out how to do it.

With B2B win rates hovering around 50%, it’s easy to suggest that we should qualify our prospects much more rigorously. It means little if we do not establish how to convert this strategy into practice and do the sometimes tedious work required for implementation. 

The devil is always in the details

Who are our ideal customer profiles? How many touches do we need to complete for different types of leads? What should our sales people communicate and ask at each contact attempt to build value and initiate the process? Which qualification criteria must be met in order to convert a lead into an opportunity? Do we need to define each criteria to minimize ambiguity and room for interpretation?

Asking the right questions to uncover exactly how you will move from theory to practice holds true for every change you are looking to apply. Implementing a sales process to ensure everyone is following best practice is one of the best things you can do – teams that follow a structured sales process in the field achieve 48% higher win rates. However, first you need to document and refine what works for you.

Which phases and steps do you have? What information will a sales person need at every milestone to have the best chance of moving the deal forward or qualify out? How should all of these activities best be sequenced in order to make sense and become something that can easily be repeated? How will you integrate this process into the tools your sales people use every day, to avoid it being yet another paper product that ends up on the shelf?

I know. It doesn’t sound very exciting. Arguing about whether your sales process has a good mix of buyer-focused steps, value-building activities and qualifying outcomes may not cause everyone to jump in front of the white board and get involved. 

However, if you have a vision about where your company is going and a thought out strategy to help you get there, it all comes down to execution.