Revealing Hidden Flaws: Challenging Common B2B Sales Practices

Uncover the surprising truths behind widely accepted B2B sales practices that may be hindering success.

Revealing Hidden Flaws: Challenging Common B2B Sales Practices

Many tactics that salespeople consider to be best practices often turn out to be worst practices. Read the following list to uncover the surprising truths behind widely accepted B2B sales practices that may hinder your success.

• A Shallow View of Clients: B2B salespeople believe selling is challenging, without recognizing that B2B buying is even more difficult. It’s very common for B2B salespeople to believe clients are all the same. Instead of spending time researching their prospective clients to meet their specific needs and address their individual concerns, too many salespeople talk about other clients they’ve helped, reflecting their shallow view.
• Velocity and Speeding Up Deals: Even though many sales managers seek to increase sales velocity, this is a worst practice because it is self-oriented. When buyers are already afraid of getting a decision wrong and facing real consequences, salespeople need to take the time to build a client’s certainty. Trying to speed up the sales conversation creates greater stress. A better practice would be to give your client more time.
• The Legacy Approach: Our company. Our clients. Our solutions. What are your problems and pain points? You may live this Paleolithic approach to B2B sales, but your opinion no longer matters. Buyers and decision makers have decided they need a different, value-creating approach that allows them to make a good decision. Holdouts hold out, losing deals they might have won with a better sales approach.
• The Regression to Transactional Approaches: Many sales organizations are regressing to transactional approaches at the exact time they should work on being more consultative. Instead of building the salesperson the client needs, these teams struggle to create the relationships they need to generate opportunities and win new clients.
• Undervaluing Sales Effectiveness: While sales leaders are enamored by the miracles of technology, they care too little about their sales force’s effectiveness, even though it is the one thing that matters most to winning deals and attaining their quota. This is the worst of the worst practices.
• Pipeline Coverage: Twice your quota seems like a fine increase in pipeline, but that is a rare number today. Instead, you see 4X, 6X, and 8X of quota. This is a worst practice because it encourages your team to create opportunities they can’t convert. The sales leader with these sky-high quota requirements isn’t increasing the sales effectiveness that would allow their team to win deals. Most get this backward, making it a world-class worst practice.
• Automated Prospecting Sequences: Automated prospecting sequences were designed to follow up on leads by nurturing them. HubSpot popularized these marketing sequences, and not long after their introduction, sales leaders applied the technology to prospecting. What worked well for marketers was a disaster for salespeople. Using this technology makes it hard to use email in prospecting altogether because contacts have come to expect all prospecting emails to be automated, deleting sales messages with nothing more than a glance.
• Work from Home: If you have never been on a sales floor, you may not know just how important it is when learning to sell. No number of virtual meetings are capable of matching the education of being in a room of people all making calls and talking about pursuing deals. This will not change, but it still means fewer chances to learn.
• SDRs: There are sales organizations that use SDRs well, but the adoption of this sales structure is a worst practice in industries when a full-cycle salesperson would improve results. A lack of development combined with a role that is so narrow prevents SDRs from learning how to do all the things they would need to do after booking a first meeting. To succeed, young salespeople need a path to a greater role that prioritizes long-term business relationships.
• Lack of Development: Be it sales training, coaching, or some other strategy, most sales organizations fail to develop their sales force. Those who believe that training and development are expensive should worry more about not investing in the sales force responsible for achieving their goals.
• Gargantuan Tech Stacks: You need a CRM and a data source. You don’t need every new technology San Francisco puts in front of you. This is a worst practice, as it is expensive financially and the time it costs the salespeople who would be better with a decrease in the number of technologies they use.
• AI Everything: AI is a miracle and a curse. Used well, it is helpful, and it will become even more helpful. But not everything requires artificial intelligence. Some technological barbarians have connected AI to personalize emails, even though a robot is incapable of the human element necessary for personalization.

This is the state of B2B sales in the third decade of the 21st century, a difficult time for everything, including sales. The more sales leaders adopt these worst practices, the more difficult it is for them to reach their sales goals. Rejecting these techniques can give you an edge over competitors who doggedly stick to what doesn’t work. Remember that when many people do something one way, that is probably the average approach. To succeed, you need to be at least above average.

Recent data have shown that buyers would rather buy without a salesperson, and they are doing so. Win rates have plummeted, as has quota attainment. Despite this, too few sales teams will change their ways. Ultimately, those who succeed tend to do what works, even if others follow what are worst practices.

It takes courage to do what is good, right, and effective, as others follow the crowd. The lemmings stuck on these practices are jumping off the cliff. The only redeeming thing is that the bodies are now stacked up, breaking the fall of those who follow.

Leaving this post, tally the number of these worst practices you use. Do good work by reversing them and standing out as a less-common salesperson.