Why Change Selling Blog

The prognosis for B2B salespeople not invested in their own personal and professional development is not good.  The era of artificial intelligence (AI) and the accelerating pace of change is transforming the way we live and work... it's a great time to be alive.  Have you tried to figure out how to use Chat GPT as your digital assistant yet?

How to Fly a Horse, The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery by Kevin Ashton, was published in 2016 and is still fresh today.

I just finished reading #theendofaverage by Todd Rose and recommend it highly to parents with children in high school for its insights into our 19th-century education and industrial models which we and our children are subject to on a daily basis.

This book resonated deeply with me, as someone who did not fit the mid-20th century education mold due to an attention deficit disorder and slight dyslexia. I hated school but loved certain subjects and was really good at them and really bad at others. I also dreaded performance reviews at work, another artefact of the average and Taylorism.

We owe our current education systems, based on standardised testing to the ideology of Frederick Winslow Taylor, in the late 19th-century. Taylor theorised that the way to increase efficiency and productivity in a workplace is to scientifically analyze and optimize the work process. Taylorism gave rise to the "average" as a yardstick for measuring productivity, intelligence, height, body-mass, you name it. The current education system was optimised to produce workers for 19th-century Taylorised industrial environments and it still is, with a few notable exceptions.

Rose illustrates how the use of the average has created a one-size-fits-all model in education, where students are subject to standardised tests and sorted to fit into predetermined academic streams rather than being allowed to explore and develop their individual strengths and talents.

He provides examples in the business world, using the same approach, where employees are often evaluated and rewarded based on how well they conform to the average rather than on their unique contributions and potential.

Rose uses a simple comparison between #Costco and #Walmart to contrast the impact of the Taylorist model in retail, Walmart vs. an operating model at Costco that recognizes and nurtures individual differences and where employees at all levels participate in profit sharing. Annual staff turnover at Walmart is 40%, it's 6% at Costco and Costco is extremely profitable in a sector where profits are measured in pennies.

I believe that quiet quitting thrives in organizations like Walmart and education institutions where Taylorist operating models treat and mould people as replaceable cogs in machines.

Highly recommended and thanks for the recommendation Bob Moesta

This week I managed to get through to a buyer who had been ghosting me for a month.  Even though we had a great first meeting, I knew there was no opportunity.  We all hate losing, either to no decision or to the competition and that is why the meeting summary is such an important part of the modern sales process. Without a buyer's confirmation of agreement to your summary of the first meeting, there is no deal.

Losing to No Decision

The Jolt Effect, by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna is garnering a lot of attention and rightly so as it documents the analysis of 2.5 million sales calls, the largest B2B sales data study since Neil Rackham’s research of 40,000+ sales calls documented in Spin Selling in1988.

The Jolt Effect (read my review), is all about judging and helping buyers to overcome their indecision around purchasing new technology.

I hadn’t heard of Bob Moesta’s work until Mark Littlewood, CEO of The Business of Software recommended I watch a couple of videos from their UK conference last year.

David Brock is a senior sales and marketing performance consultant whom I know and trust and whose blog I read.  David correctly identified our B2B SaaS zeitgeist - and the end of the way we used to do things in outbound and inbound sales and marketing. 
 
David contends in his blog, Outbound is Dying, “Outbound is dying because it is drowning in the volume of messages, mostly bad, but some good, that we are inflicting on everyone through every channel. However, good the quality of the message, it no longer matters because it is lost in the volume of garbage that fills our inboxes”

This post will be of interest to CXO’s and revenue leaders in B2B SaaS companies because 25% of revenue is leaking from your funnel due to buyer indecision.

Storytelling, Visual Storytelling, and asking insightful questions are three of the most important skills for all customer-facing professionals for learning, retaining, and engaging buyers in conversation around their issues. They are equally important for conveying your story to prospects and customers in a way that makes an impact on them and that they are likely to remember.

A Messaging Architecture helps amplify your Value

Clarity in communicating how you create value for your ideal customers is vital in attracting the right visitors to your Website and in sales conversations with buyers.  Today buyers are close to 80% of the way through a buying process before contacting a salesperson and probably know as much as you do about your competitive product segment and have little time for product salespeople.