As salespeople, customer success and pre-sales engineers return to face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers, it presents an opportunity for your business. How can you equip your direct and channel teams to thrive in these in-person conversations while fostering growth and learning?
The appetite for mergers in the SaaS business is hot, with dealmaking volumes predicted to grow at 13% in 2024. Yet between 70% and 90% of M&A transactions fail to meet their objectives.
If you Google culture fit, you will find scant references to B2B selling and hundreds of references to the suitability of candidates in an organisation, but the concepts are related.
This article, first published on Linkedin has been substantially enhanced and will interest founders and sales and marketing leaders in early-stage SaaS companies.
Today, AI-powered buyers have equal or greater access to information than sales professionals. It's time for your company to shift away from discussing product features and solutions and instead focus on understanding the needs, struggling moments and desired outcomes of your customers. No one cares about them... except your product team.
My first article on this topic, buried features and benefits back in 2011. Yet, they are like a zombie apocalypse (a dreadful movie from the same year) and refuse to die, haunting the Website pages and .pdfs of B2B technology companies along with another artefact from the past, solutions, which my friend and colleague Bob Apollo wrote about recently.
Another 20th-century relic that I cringe upon hearing is "sales pitch".
Today, we are laying sales-pitch to rest. The term "sales pitch" should be barred from the sales lexicon as it carries a connotation of manipulation and insincerity, reminiscent of sideshow spruikers or pitch-men of the 19th century, whose aim was to sell without regard for the customer's needs. Using the term "pitch" demeans the integrity of the sales profession, reducing it to a mere performance rather than a meaningful exchange of information and understanding. Today's buyers seek intelligent conversations with well-informed sales professionals who can provide valuable insights about the industry and share compelling stories of how they've helped others.
This shift in buyer expectations means we must ditch the outdated PowerPoint pitch and move towards authentic, value-driven interactions that prioritise customer needs and interests.
The BANT framework, long ingrained in sales culture, is outdated and inappropriate for prospect qualification. I shudder to think of SDRs using BANT on a first call with a prospect trying to get a commitment for an initial meeting, yet it still happens. This article from Dave Kurlan, "Improper use of BANT will cause you to kill opportunities", clearly explains the problem with BANT and why it is neither an effective qualification tool nor a valuable sales methodology and deserves to be laid to rest along with the other villains.
In the technology business, the approach to creating case studies is straightforward; it's product-centric and thus uninteresting. These narratives typically place the company and its product as the hero, solving the customer's problems while pulling a couple of quotes from the customer for social proof. While these stories do their part in showcasing product capabilities, they are often impenetrable and miss a crucial aspect of storytelling: emotional engagement and relatability.
The video below runs for 3 minutes and explores essential activities to accelerate revenue. The place to start sales performance is with your existing customers. All of the methods discussed build on a fundamental understanding of the jobs your customers are trying to get done and are based on proven concepts. It is read by my wife Robin.
This post was first published on Linkedin on 15 January 2024
Part 1. of this article, Activating Direct and Channel salespeople,lays the foundation for a transformative approach to sale and channel activation—a proven technique that captures your compelling “why change” story in a whiteboard visual story. Combining multiple stories in a compelling hero's journey narrative that resonates with partners and customers effectively engages your direct and channel partner sales team and elevates their skills for more successful engagements.
Are you a revenue leader in a B2B SaaS company charged with recruiting, activating a channel, and achieving significant sell-through in 2024?
