Bob Apollo

I’ve been called in by a number of clients who believe that they have a bottom-of-funnel sales problem. Their sales opportunities just seem to be piling up and getting stuck in the later stages of the sales pipeline. They imagine that their sales people need help with their closing techniques. But when you dig into it, the problem is almost always somewhere else...

They have been looking in the wrong place. The real problem typically turns out to be not closing techniques, but opening techniques. A careful examination of the evidence often shows that their sales people have been starting off on the wrong foot, and rushing the all-important early stages of the sales engagement.

An opportunity to explore

If a sales opportunity isn’t set up in the right way from the start, it becomes progressively...

It’s not a question that comes naturally to many CEOs or, let’s be honest, to most investors. Here’s the problem: for growth phase companies, all other things being equal, the probability of your success is inversely proportional to the size of the market you have chosen to target. At any given point in time, as far as sales and marketing effectiveness is concerned, small target markets are better than large ones.

The only appropriate answer to the often-heard question “how hard can it be to win just a 1% share of that huge market?” is that it is inevitably far, far harder that you might ever imagine, and likely to be a horrid waste of time and money to boot. Better to chose a market you could dominate, and expand from there once you’ve succeeded.

Populations are not markets

Most growth phase companies would describe their goal as becoming a (or even better, the) market leader. But first you have to decide which market you are aiming...

It’s not a very edifying sight, but it happens way, way too often. A prospect gives the faintest acknowledgement of a potential issue, and the impatient (not to say desperate) sales person simply can’t wait to respond by presenting the features, advantages and benefits of their proposed solution in glorious detail. They may even offer to follow up with a costed proposal. All this before the poor bewildered prospect has even come to terms with whether they need to do anything at all. The sales person has pitched their product way too early. This uncomfortable condition is called "premature elaboration" and, trust me, your organisation doesn't want to be seen to be suffering from it.

I referred to the underlying problem in a recent article “3 critical questions for B2B...

…or at least, that’s the conclusion from a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. In it, the authors of the Challenger Sale reveal some fresh conclusions from the Corporate Executive Board’s ground-breaking research programme into B2B buying and selling behaviours.

In “The End of Solution Sales”, they conclude that most traditional sales people are spending far too much time with the wrong people - because they tend to seek out friendly informants. Perhaps it’s human nature for most of us to want to avoid disagreement - but as the authors point out, comfortable conversations rarely cause people to change their perspective.

They go on to suggest that traditional sales training approaches - by stressing the need to find an advocate or coach - may actually be reinforcing the problem, and encouraging sales people to waste their time in what...