According to an upcoming report commissioned by InsideView, sellers and marketers see significant shifts in how B2B solutions will be marketed and sold in the coming year. When asked which of the following they believe are most likely to happen in the next year, more than 500 sellers and marketers agreed on the top three responses. “Sellers become more consultative and less transactional” topped the list, followed closely by “Companies become laser focused on their ideal customers versus ‘anyone with a pulse’.” The predictions are a sneak peek from an upcoming sales and marketing alignment report that will be released early this quarter.

The top five predictions from both sales and marketing pros for 2018 are:

1. Sellers become more consultative and less transactional.
2. Companies become laser focused on their ideal customers versus “anyone with a pulse.” 
3. Artificial intelligence and machine learning fuel decisions on best market targets. 
4. Millennials have a major impact in both buying and selling. 
5. Marketing and sales operations merge into one revenue operations team. 

Lindsey Armstrong, President of InsideSales.com, said, “Sales teams have a serious challenge with time management. When 63 percent of salespeople’s time is focused on activities other than selling—whether by necessity due to policies and tools or to lack of process and organization—revenue suffers. We can see that most organizations, and the sales industry at large, have a significant requirement (and opportunity) to get these issues resolved.”

- 28 percent of sales reps follow a structured time management system.
- 37 percent of sales reps’ time is spent on revenue-generating activities.
- 18 percent of sales reps’ time is spent using their customer relationship management system (CRM).

Perhaps the study’s most surprising result is the declining dependence on—and use of—CRM. 18 percent of a sales rep’s time is spent on CRM, while 61.7 percent of their time is spent using sales technology. Worse still, close to 10 percent of a sales rep’s time is spent in spreadsheets to help them accomplish what they wish they could do in CRM.

1. Mirroring: Mirroring involves the repetition of three to five keywords from your counterpart’s previous statement, in the form of a question. 

2. Emotional Labeling: Labeling is, in a sense, mirroring on steroids. Rather than merely repeating words, labeling involves proactively labeling your counterpart’s emotions – especially fears. It entails careful and proactive listening skills.

3. Getting to “No”: Getting the other side to say “no” makes them feel safe and secure. When you empower the other side to say “no,” they feel more comfortable that they aren’t being pushed into a commitment and more willing to entertain your ideas. 

4. Triggering “That’s right.”: Voss contends that the single biggest breakthrough moment of a negotiation is getting the other side to say “that’s right.” To achieve this breakthrough, negotiators must actively listen to the other side and effectively summarize how they feel and what they hope to achieve.

5. Asking Calibrated Questions: The best negotiators will transform negotiations into cooperative joint problem-solving sessions. Rather than focusing on negotiation, they’ll focus on discovery – on truly understanding a counterpart’s wants and desired outcomes. To do this, Voss recommends the use of calibrated questions. These are open-ended questions that generally start with “what” or “how.”

Created by Process Street in partnership with PersistIQ, this study uses an archive of over 1,000 sales emails and voicemail transcripts from some of the world…

B2B sales leaders say they could win more deals if their marketing teams delivered better messaging and more qualified leads. See what else the research has to say.

B2B sales is governed by the following methodologies.

DIY Self Service: A complete end-to-end web experience where clients educate themselves and complete the purchase online.

Transactional selling: Helping customers buy the solution they picked themselves, often through online research. These customers often are in a hurry and ready to buy.

Solution selling: Customers already understand their problem and want sales to address specific issues with products and services. Customers buy in days to weeks.

Consultative selling: The customer does not fully understand the problem. Sales has to diagnose the customer’s situation to determine the right solution. Sales can take 6-18 months.

Provocative selling (ref: HBR Provocative Selling): Sales experts can identify clients who will face a problem before the client himself knows. They provoke an executive client into action. Often applied to innovative solutions, this B2B sales methodology takes anywhere between 3 to 9 months.

"So how can your organization begin the process of sales acceleration?

• The first step is to break down the departmental and data silos present in your organization by having all teams work from one set of data, one set of goals and one set of measurements.
• Another shift from traditional prospecting is the need to make sense of all interactions, both online and offline, that influence the buyer journey. This disconnect between offline and online worlds is what is frustrating customers . 
• In addition to knowing your data and establishing a connected identity, companies must use the right tools to generate that holistic and consistent customer view. 
• Finally, companies must develop the right analytics to find truth and meaning from the data and surface those insights into the systems and the workflow of the people or sites that should take the next best action."

1) Practice Asking Questions

2) Understand Your Buyer

3) Add Variety To Your Sales Process

4) Training – Zero In On The Qualifiers

SlideShare has been an important tool for marketers and salespeople for several years now, but some business leaders are still unsure how to get the most value out of this powerful platform.

"Sales leaders must change compensation plans to look more like management bonus plans, designed to encourage people to work together to make the company and its customers more competitive and prosperous in the long run. Changes include:

• Changing the metrics for determining incentive pay. 
• Shifting the pay mix more toward salary. 

In addition to changing sales compensation, sales leaders and managers must take a more active role in managing salespeople. This involves changes such as:

• Deploying new sales team structures. 
• Hiring salespeople with new capabilities. 
• Using performance management, coaching, training, and sales data and tools. 
• Establishing a new sales culture. "

• The Brain: Sales Director
• Spine: Customer Support
• Arms/Hands: Outbound & Inbound 
• Legs: Marketers
• Smartphone: Tech & Data
• Mouth: Sales Development
• Digestive System: Closers

The core cause of the B2B sales prospecting epidemic is an inability to create opportunities when buyers aren’t looking to buy. The reality is 90+% of potential buyers in your market aren’t actively looking.

A second reality exacerbates this situation. Professional purchasing agents have given way to teams of buyers. The 6 to 8 people on these teams typically represent multiple functional groups. Often they have never conducted a similar procurement process before.

A third reality complicates this situation. The digital trend to ubiquitous online information has produced self-educating buyers.

B2B is high stakes team buying. It’s a very different buying dynamic. If your marketing team isn’t clear and honest about these differences, and have a compelling strategy to address them, you’re probably in even deeper trouble than you think.

This is not a sales rep problem, per se. It is a business and sales leadership problem. B2B sellers must create value for customers through the way you sell. This starts with the way you create opportunities with prospective buyers who aren’t actively looking to buy what you are selling.

"Download the report today to discover how SPM leaders like CallidusCloud have had to:

• Continue to evolve as commissions evolve. Yesterday’s solutions put sales operations leaders at a disadvantage. Today, they are growing to provide flexibility—making a direct impact on sales results.
• Make territory management easy, fast, and intuitive. Managing territories off a spreadsheet no longer works. Leading territory management tools allow managers to change territories with speed and precision.
• Provide sales ops with new ways to drive behaviors. Gamification gives managers additional ways to drive behaviors and improve the customer experience."

Whether you're a sales leader in SMB or Enterprise, follow our sales metrics cheat sheet to guide your organization to success.

When marketers and salespeople are tasked with tightening the sales funnel and increasing conversions together, they have no choice but to cooperate. Reorient your teams toward pipeline growth in four steps:

1. Don’t point fingers.

2. Hold sales and marketing mutually accountable.

3. Implement account-based marketing.

4. Make product a part of the picture.

• Avoid hiring sales stars. 
• Don’t slash prices. 
• Ditch the extra incentives. 
• Provide top-notch customer support. 

To maximize the power of consultative selling, we have to move beyond a simplistic view of solution selling. It’s not about grilling the buyer but rather engaging in a give-and-take as the seller and buyer explore the client’s priorities, examine what is in the business’s best interests, and evaluate the seller’s solutions. Asking questions is part of this engagement process, but there’s a right way to do it. Here are some important pitfalls to avoid:

Avoid checklist-style questioning. 

Avoid asking leading questions. 

Avoid negative conversational behaviors. 

Having more information doesn’t always make it easier to decide. Consider what’s happened with travel: With the explosion of internet travel sites in the 2000s, consumers took charge of their own travel, and travel agencies hemorrhaged business. Fast forward to today. According to the travel and leisure marketing firm MMGY, the use of travel agents increased by 50% from 2014 to 2015. Why? Because consumers, overwhelmed by information and inundated with choices, are again turning to travel agents to take the work out of travel planning.

A similar sequence has happened with B2B buying. Just as with travel, a wealth of easily available information has made it possible for buyers to do much of the work themselves. By 2012, our research shows, nearly 60% of a typical B2B purchasing decision — researching solutions, ranking options, benchmarking pricing, and so on — was happening before the buyer even had a conversation with a supplier. But just because customers can research their purchase doesn’t necessarily mean the process is going smoothly. The torrents of information, expanding array of options, and growing size and diversity of purchasing groups are leading to a kind of purchase paralysis: Customers are taking longer than ever to make purchases, and abandoning them more often. At the same time, second guessing and post-purchase regret are on the rise, while loyalty is falling. As purchasing becomes ever more complex, it’s becoming harder and harder — and buyers are now looking for sellers who can make the process easy once again.

So the question remains…how prepared is your go-to-market organization to meet the needs of today’s B2B buyers? And what are you going to do if they are not? Start by allowing the lines between marketing and sales to blur to better serve your customers. Identify a couple of buyer-centric initiatives like social selling or account-based marketing and align marketing and sales compensation in more meaningful ways. Be open to new profiles and constructs.  Place the buyer at the center of your universe and seed more cohesion between teams.

Insight #1: The “Talk-to-Listen Ratio”

The average B2B sales rep spends between 65–75% of a call talking, leaving only 25–35% of the call for listening. 43/57 seems to be the golden ratio.

Insight #2: When, and How Often, Should You Discuss Pricing?

The data tells us pricing should come up roughly 3–4 times during a call(preferably after value has been established). When pricing is discussed too early in a call, less than 3 times, or more than 5 times, the odds of closing the deal tend to shrink.

Insight #3: Prospect Timing Signals

There is a positive correlation between winning the deal within your forecast, and the customer responding to the timing question with the word “probably.” When a prospect responds to your timing question with some variation of “We need to figure out X”, there is a negative correlation of getting that deal closed within your estimated forecast.

Insight #4: Use Risk-Reversal Language

When sales reps remove the risk of purchase by touting customer-protecting terms, the probability of closing the deal skyrockets by 32%.

Insight #5: Coach Salespeople with Real Calls