sales management
Reaching the Real Decision-Makers in Complex B2B Sales
Salespeople are told to “get to the decision-maker.” This is, of course, sensible and obvious advice - but reality is often more complicated. In complex B2B environments, where multiple stakeholders shape the buying decision, identifying and engaging the real decision-makers is rarely straightforward.
Why a Shared Mental Model is the Missing Piece in Complex Sales
In the world of complex sales, we spend a lot of time talking about prospecting, pipeline, win/loss analysis, and how to reach the right stakeholders. We invest in more training and coaching, better strategy, and processes. We hire more effectively, purchase enablement technology, and still… sales effectiveness rarely improves by more than a margin.
4 Things Tokyo Taught Me About Sales Discipline
I was in Tokyo for the first time recently. My son and I went there for a little vacation, and I was struck by how clean and orderly everything is. In a region of 38 million people, I expected a lot more noise, chaos, and pollution. We found none of that.
“We Are Competing To Lose 80-85% Of Our Deals!”
Imagine a CRO presenting to the exec or investor team. This CRO is presenting their GTM strategy, and a key statement in that strategy is, “We are competing and hoping to lose 80-85% of the deals we invest in!”
We Just Updated and Expanded Our Most-Referenced Article: Here’s What Changed
In 2017, I wrote a piece about complex sales that soon became one of our most-referenced resources on the Membrain website. The piece, titled “What is a complex sale?” strove to provide a clean, compact, useful definition to help us, as a profession, understand the difference between complex and transactional sales.
Zoom In: Micro Behaviors. Zoom Out: Big Impacts
“The micro makes the macro.” That’s from Derek Cabrera, of the Cabrera Lab at Cornell, talking about systems behavior. Cabrera is a leading authority in the systems thinking world, who is working to apply the rules of systems logic to world problems large and small.
