Attached to this post is a free link to my Reading List for Salespeople. This post was originally published on Linkedin and it went viral, so I thought I would repost it here.
This post is relevant for any person in a professional selling or sales management role or wanting to get into selling as a career, regardless of experience.
Salespeople are Struggling to hit their Numbers
The single biggest problem I’m hearing from sales leaders since returning to the UK in late 2021 is that salespeople are not hitting their numbers. The main underlying causes of the problem are all fixable and can be summarized as follows;
- Poor inbound lead flow and salespeople are having to do the heavy lifting themselves to get initial meetings with buyers - and most are struggling
- Trying to use product selling tactics (transactional) when buyers need industry and solution insight (consultative) from salespeople
- Salespeople contribute no value in a conversation with buyers – the job of the B2B salesperson today is to create value by helping buyers to realize that they must change to grow, cut costs, or reduce risk.
- The underlying cause of this is that companies have not done the work to identify the cause-level of customer challenges, what Matt Dixon in the Challenger Customer calls (Commercial Insight) and salespeople do not know how to have conversations that get the customer to think differently
- Poor qualification – chasing deals that will not close and wasting valuable presales resources and time
- More than 50% of forecast deals end in no decision
Since returning to the UK I have found that a majority of B2B salespeople are poorly equipped for the job in front of them and have not yet taken responsibility for their own personal and professional development.
I have attached my compulsory reading list for salespeople at any level of experience which will help salespeople to understand and overcome the problems summarized above.