The past year has provided abundant evidence that driving sales people to "sell harder" and hoping that this will boost revenues is an out-of-date and ineffective strategy in a world of increasingly well-informed and generally risk-averse B2B buyers. 

It's clear that sales people are having to sell smarter - and to ensure that they can diagnose and deal with the obstacles that might be preventing their prospects from making buying decisions.

Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions. They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.

In today's business climate, useful or important needs might help to get a vendor considered or evaluated, but only urgent needs will get them bought. So it's become critical that sales people are able to elevate the prospect’s need for their solution. This ability to identify or create urgent needs makes all the difference between successful and unsuccessful sales people, and between companies who lead their markets or follow as also-rans.

In fact, I’ve observed that the inability to distinguish between useful, important and urgent needs, or to elevate a prospect’s need for the solution from useful or important to urgent lies at the heart of many sales pipeline challenges.

Thought leading companies are able to evangelise a better future for the markets and prospects they address, and to articulate a clear and compelling vision of the role that their organisation intends to play in helping them achieve it. Companies that accomplish this rise to the top of their markets by generating a magnetic attraction that draws potential prospects towards them.

In a world where prospects prefer to conduct their own research before they decide which vendors to approach, companies who acquire a visionary status and develop a reputation for thought leadership emerge with dramatic advantages over their competition. 

Small, thoughtful, agile companies are able to “punch above their weight” because the competitive playing field has been levelled to the point where an organisation’s reputation is driven more by the quality of their thinking rather than the quantity of their marketing spend.

According to CSO Insights’ recently published annual sales performance optimisation study, the number of sales people making quota and the percentage of sales organisations achieving their revenue targets both declined faster in 2009 than at any time during the past 16 years.

Sales organisations are reporting extended sales cycles, declining win rates, and that a growing number of apparently promising opportunities are ending in “no decision”.  At the same time, they observe that their prospect’s budgets appear to be shrinking, that more players are involved in the decision making process, and that their buyers are exhibiting increasingly risk-averse behaviour.

Last week I took part - together with 30+ senior sales and marketing executives from the technology sector - in an excellent discussion hosted by Richard Eldh of Sirius Decisions on the topic of sales and marketing alignment.  

The audience included experience of everything from early stage start-ups to mature market leaders – a spectrum I’ve written about in a recent blog about "The Jungle, the Footpath and the Highway". 

Crossing the Chasm Revisited

Richard offered an idea which I’d like to develop here, because I believe it lies at the very heart of making intelligent decisions about sales and marketing strategy.  In fact, the Sirius perspective is that it provides the essential foundation for all sales and marketing efforts.

CSO Insights recently released their annual Sales Performance Optimisation study – and the results make for sobering reading. Their global survey of more than 2,800 companies revealed dramatic declines in average sale performance.

According to CSO Insights, the percentage of reps making quota fell from 58.8% to 51.8%, and overall revenue attainment vs. plan dropped from 85.9% to 77.9%.  At the same time, lead generation budgets were being frozen or reduced in more than two-thirds of the companies surveyed, training budgets fell, and investments in sales enablement technologies were curtailed. 

An experienced VC once described the stages that he saw B2B companies going through as the jungle, the dirt road, and the highway. 

Gartner have just revealed the results of their annual survey of CIO priorities.  It makes fascinating reading when compared to last year’s report.  IT spending for the coming year will increase by an average of 1.3% - but that is compared to a dramatic decline of 8.1% in 2009.  2010 IT budgets are back to the levels of 2005 – half a decade’s growth in budget has been wiped out.

From managing resources to managing results...

According to Mark McDonald, Gartner Group VP and head of research for Gartner Executive programs, the role of IT is changing from merely managing resources to taking responsibility for managing results, while the technology focus is shifting from heavy owner-operated solutions to “lighter weight” hosted services.

What was your 2010 New Year Business resolution?  The one I've been hearing most often from Chief Executives and Sales and Marketing leaders is to "get closer to their customers" - which seems like a laudable objective.

Who wouldn't want to?  However, it seems that becoming REALLY "customer-centric" or "customer-focused" or "customer aligned" (choose whichever term you prefer) is proving harder than it first appears.  The indications are becoming rather too familiar:

All the publicity surrounding the Copenhagen Climate Conference has reinforced the world-wide need for sustainable development.  It seems clear that this can’t be left to governments alone – we’ve all got a role to play, and a responsibility to avoid wasteful behaviour.

Thinking about how we can all eliminate waste isn’t just good for the environment – it’s a powerful perspective for improving the efficiency and productivity of everything we do.  And maybe we can do more with the idea than our politicians seem able to.

Where's the waste?

I’m specifically thinking about how we might establish a framework for sustainable sales and marketing.  Ever since John Wanamaker famously complained that “half of my advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half”, marketing has had a deserved reputation as a wasteful endeavour.

Of course the truth of the matter is that a great deal of conventional sales and marketing activity is far more inefficient than even John Wanamaker knew.  I’d suggest that in sales and marketing terms, sustainability involves using our resources wisely to generate the maximum customer value with minimum wasted effort.