Why Change Selling Blog

In June this year, Gartner held their mid-year Chief Sales Officer Conference, featuring a keynote from Distinguished VP Advisory, Brent Adamson, which I summarized in Brent Adamson Gartner CSO Conference Insights.

In May this year, Gartner’s Customer Service and Support team published a paper entitled, Why Service Reps Disengage and What You Can Do About It.

 4 must haves For pipeline growth in a virtual world

The essential ingredients for salespeople to rapidly build a pipeline in addition to selling competence are virtual presence, video competence, brand mojo, and visual conversation frameworks for synchronous and asynchronous selling. Each element in the pipeline growth equation is important but they are accretive and help salespeople to capitalize every moment on camera in front of buyers.

Last week I joined Dave Kurlan, CEO of Objective Management Group for a conversation on Virtual Presence for salespeople. From this interview we concluded that the majority of salespeople worldwide have a long way to go before they reach an acceptable level of virtual presence where they are creating Mojo for themselves and their brand in meetings with buyers.

CEOs, marketing, and sales leaders are likely unaware of the opportunities their sales and customer success teams are missing to contribute to their brand Mojo.  In fact, if they knew how badly some of their team members' online presence looked, they would be alarmed and call for immediate action.

Every new year there are myriad articles published by analysts, pundits, and pseudo-experts looking back on the prior year and expounding on the future.  I have captured key points from a number of articles on what happened in 2020 and what to expect in 2021 and beyond.

This 2.5-minute video explains how you can transform your team's virtual selling results, boost win-rate, and build pipeline this quarter.

Mergers and acquisitions hold promise for owners and investors of combinatorial synergies to reduce costs, increase profit, extend market and product coverage, as well as accelerate innovation.

2020 has been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions, with 5500 deals so far. This record volume may be partially due to the Covid-19 outbreak forcing the liquidation or disposal of underperforming non-core or struggling investments. However, mergers come with a great deal of risk as reflected in failure rates that are reported to be between 40% and 70%.

Despite best-laid plans and executive oversight, human factors present the greatest risk and sales-force integration is the toughest merger issue to overcome. 

This article will be of interest to salespeople, sales managers, sales enablement pro's, SE's and anyone interested in improving the outcomes of remote B2B sales meetings. The ideas in this article aren't new, but are largely unknown.  I learned the Sales Prologue for opening meetings from Enableocity partner, Jim Burns of Avitage and he learned them from Rob Scanlon.  We have adapted some of Rob's ideas to match our Remote Selling 4-Box Qualification Model.

How Salespeople Learn

Learning is the most important skill for salespeople to master in the second decade of the 21st Century. Unlike medicine or law, selling is a profession that is learned by doing. The more calls you make, the faster you learn, and the more you learn about what works and what needs to change. Already in this decade, we are seeing the effect of combinations of exponential technologies that are profoundly and permanently disrupting the marketplace. Salespeople must learn how to learn and apply new knowledge quickly to contribute value to buyer-seller interactions.

I have been working in complex B2B sales enablement consulting and as a sales enablement practitioner for the past 16-years. Right from the first engagement where I rode-along on sales calls, to the conversation I had last week with a sales leader, a consistent problem persists: salespeople do not know how to effectively communicate value with buyers.

If your sales team is not using content like this to engage buyers they are missing a trick. Even if you are not in Cybersecurity, this article is instructive and comes with a proforma spark-email

The Mandiant M-Trends 2020 Report published last week is compulsory reading for cybersecurity professionals and salespeople selling into the cybersecurity market.

B2B Selling process is the subject of countless books, yet basic qualification of opportunities is still problematic. As a result, precious marketing, technical and sales resources are wasted on weeks and months-long evaluations for prospects who will never buy. What if your sales team was 90% accurate in qualifying prospects, what would that do for your win-rate and forecasting accuracy?