“Many of you have likely heard the analysis by Corporate Executive Board that B2B customers have completed nearly 60% of their purchasing decisions before ever speaking with a supplier. This has forced marketers and their organisations to change how they participate in the digital buying process. Unless organisations understand what this digital buying process is, along with the buying patterns and behaviours of prospects, they run the risk of being excluded from prospects’ considerations.”
InsideSales covers the seven data-backed sales best practices, which include:
- Responding immediately
- Being persistent
- Establish a local presence
- Create a cadence
- Motivate your staff
- Hire smart with data
- Analyze your pipeline
Get the details on each one, and read the full article here.
“It’s important to note that a majority of B2B sales reps miss a huge opportunity every day. This is usually not based on a lack of intelligence, but on a flaw within many solution selling approaches. In the CEB study, almost two-thirds of vendors revealed that their sales reps use customer interactions to extract data and information as opposed to providing insights. Again, it all comes back to the idea of question-based selling. Questions are not the evil here and there is such a thing as good questions. However, asking questions to gather more information on how decisions are made and priorities assigned is synthesizing what already exists in the customers’ mind.”
If you’re in the B2B sales arena, chances are good that you’ve either read, or heard of, CEB’s The Challenger Customer. This post focuses on the first installment, from The Challenger Sale. As CEB’s study found, prospects aren’t interested in what you sell, but rather how you sell it – are you providing customer insights? Showing them what problems you solve for their specific issues? Bringing value to the table in not only your product or service, but in the relationships you’re developing with each member of the buying group? It’s a lot easier said than done.
