Mastering B2B Sales and The Revenue Growth Blueprint

B2B sales has never been easy, but it seems to be getting more difficult as a confluence of forces change B2B sales growth. We built the Revenue Growth Blueprint to suggest a path for training, developing, and enabling salespeople to succeed in our current environment.

Enabling B2B Sales

There are a few enablement initiatives that can give salespeople an edge. Some of them come from experience, others can be trained, and most of them require a combination of coaching and practice to perfect.

Value Creation Strategies

What is missing from most sales training and development is the lack of value-creation strategies. Without the ability to create value in the sales conversation, salespeople have a difficult time getting a second meeting or winning the clients’ business. These strategies lead a prospective client to prefer to buy from your salespeople.

Information Disparity

Most of the legacy approaches to B2B selling have the salesperson and the client having information parity, meaning they have the same information. Effective salespeople using a modern approach are likely to have information disparity—specifically, they know more than their client. When a salesperson shares information that the client can easily find on the sales organization’s website, it’s a sign that they don’t have information their clients lack. To reach information disparity, a sales force needs business acumen, information, and insights that are unavailable to the client. When salespeople cannot offer this, buyers will look elsewhere for help.

Building Insights

Both enablement initiatives above require a set of insights that ensure information disparity and the ability to create value for clients. They also require salespeople to be able to communicate how this information relates to the client’s challenges. These insights provide the sales force with the ability to provide a better sales experience for their contacts.

Executive Briefing

Using an executive briefing can create value for the client in the first minute of a sales call. It also positions the salesperson as an expert and authority. An executive briefing provides a view of the headwinds and tailwinds that the client is facing and the changes they will need to make to improve their results. This is part of the communication that is so important to building insights.

Training and Development

Once you have provided your sales team with necessary enablement initiatives, you must develop their competencies and skills.

Consultative Prospecting

We have been writing about the coming apocalypse of cold outreach for some time here. Between the spray-and-pray approaches and automation, buyers are ignoring sales emails and the meetings they ask for when they make a cold call. Consultative prospecting relies on enablement to cut through the noise by ensuring salespeople have something to say about what is important to their prospective clients. This is how you differentiate and win a first meeting.

Gaining Commitments

Selling is a series of conversations and commitments. The linear sales process died and was replaced by a nonlinear, dynamic conversation that is difficult to manage. The critical skill for success is gaining commitments. The salesperson is now responsible for facilitating the buyer’s journey and leading the client toward the better results they need. Outside of asking for a meeting, salespeople are generally unequipped to manage the sales process.

See: The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales.

Addressing Objections and Concerns

Some contacts will make objections, but this is typically a sign that they have real concerns about significantly changing their business. Treating these real concerns as if they were superficial objections causes longer sales cycles, disengagement, and lost deals. Your contacts need a salesperson who can provide them with the certainty that they need to change and the confidence to buy from your organization.

Advanced Discovery

Asking the client about their problem and their pain points leads to poor discovery. Once salespeople hear the client mention a problem, they generally want to propose their solution. Over time, the discovery call has been completely commoditized. Each salesperson sounds like the next. There are four areas of discovery that are critical to understanding the root cause of the client’s problem and how to improve their outcomes.

Professional Differentiation

Your company and your solution are good. So are your competitors. Most sales forces have been taught to believe that their company is different and better, usually because a solution has certain features or options. This isn’t true differentiation. Salespeople differentiate themselves and their company by teaching the client how to make strategic business decisions. We call this triangulation strategy, and you can learn more about it in Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.

Building Consensus

Buyers need consensus to move forward. A consultative salesperson will have an easier time helping the client through a messy and often political process than a salesperson that cannot guide the process. Consensus isn’t going away anytime soon, and without taking care of the stakeholders, you risk losing. You need to train this competency.

Presentations and Proposals

Your contacts have seen slide decks that answer the question “Why us?” There are better ways to open a presentation and starting with the question “Why change?” is one of them. Most sales organizations present their sales presentations in the wrong order. You create greater value by reversing the order.

Negotiation Mastery

A lot of what we do in B2B sales is negotiating. We negotiate meetings, access to stakeholders, pricing, and terms. Most salespeople who lack training will disengage from the negotiation with a client and negotiate a concession with their sales manager. Your salespeople should be trained to negotiate instead of providing concessions.

Buyers have changed. You might not have done so yet. But it is time.