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3 min read

The End of the Beginning of SAAS Sales

By Mark Gibson on Feb 14, 2023 5:05:47 PM

Topics: Saas
trash mountain

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”

trash mountain
More of the same is not the answer and neither is ChatGPT.

Everyone is drowning in information, but who has time to find the metaphoric diamond in a mountain of trash?

Enabled by technology and driven by skilled and unskilled operators, we have rendered both inbound and outbound as only marginally effective.

Welcome to the end of the beginning of B2B SaaS sales.

As  Jacco van der Kooij aptly describes in The Sweet Spot in the Eye of the Storm, perhaps this moment we are in right now in the aftermath of the burst SaaS bubble is an opportunity to rationalize and rethink how we do things when our sales teams have fewer conversations, but of higher value, with fewer customers.

Part of the problem is succinctly identified by Anthony Iannarino in Elite Sales Strategies, and that cause is the legacy approach to selling, where a vast majority of under-skilled salespeople push products, interrogate buyers, and create zero value for potential customers in their conversations.

Is there any wonder buyers increasingly avoid having meetings with salespeople?

The bright light in all this gloom is that customers still have struggling moments.

As Bob Moesta would say, they still have jobs they need to get done to grow, become more competitive, reduce costs, and improve their customer’s experience and outcomes.

Yes, they already have systems in place that are supposed to help them do that. 

If you are selling technology designed to replace a legacy system, then business acumen and an understanding of the job they are trying to get done and the outcomes customers are trying to achieve are more relevant to buyers than your moribund product features and benefits that no one gives a darn about, or your ridiculous competitive feature comparison table.
 
I like Dave Brock’s blog summary, “We have to change. We have to rethink what we do. We have to find a way to stand out, to engage customers in new and different ways. Right now, I’m putting my money on a new form of thought leadership combined with a reinvented form of inbound."

”The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." —Alvin Toffler

If you need help to rethink how you create value for your customers and to upskill your sales team to be truly consultative, then you know what to do.

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