How do your customers experience your sales department on their buying journey?
2 weeks ago we published 10 typical mistakes in complex B2B sales. As promised, we will now go into each error in detail.
Mistake 1 deals with the lack of ambition to make working with us as a sales force a unique, clearly differentiating experience.
Whether it’s the Buying Journey or the Unique Buying Experience, while the mindset behind these terms has already arrived and is actively lived in day-to-day business in some industries, many companies are still selling as they did 20 years ago. For example, tenders are still answered without first communicating with the customer.
From our experience, two factors are dominantly responsible for this.
First, the belief that the technical solution or price is more important than how we sell.
Second, the lack of cross-fertilization from modern practices such as design thinking and agile approaches.
If you want to change this scenario in your own company, we recommend the following steps:
1. Talk to someone who specializes in #sales productivity and #sales methodology and elicit if you have great untapped potential.
Example: Most machine builders have a Win Rate between 15 and 23%. With a good sales methodology, 1-3% increases are typically feasible here with consistent implementation. Or more clearly: 3-10% increase in sales within 18 months.
2. treat yourself to a workshop with the best people in your company to identify and prioritize the most important areas for action in sales and define measuresthat can then be applied to the entire team.
3. analyze the typical buying journey of your customers and define measures how you can create added value for your customer in every contact / touchpoint.
4. Create a culture that allows time and focus for reviews of your most important projects. Especially when day-to-day pressures are high, these reviews and internal coaching sessions are invaluable and often provide the necessary impetus for action to successfully drive the project forward.
Or to put it another way, just imagine for a moment that your #sales process is the next generation of machines or the next software release. And now treat it with the same passion and consistency.
Contribution by Pierre Martin,
Managing Director CEVEYCONSULTING GmbH
