There’s no doubt that the world of B2B buying and selling has changed and continues to evolve. The critical question is, are we evolving our sales organizations quickly enough to adapt and thrive in the current (and future) buying and selling environment?
Ongoing shifts in buying and selling
I wrote about this recently in a blog post called Buyers are Buying Differently – What Are You DOING About It? Here are some of the things mentioned, plus a few more:
- content marketing
- marketing automation
- sales and marketing alignment (with a great "hand-off")
- social selling (although I prefer the terms "selling through digital channels" or “digital selling”)
- trigger event sourcing and using alert services
- other online research (such as search engines, analyst companies, sec filings, annual reports, 10‑Ks, and more )
- referrals and introductions (part of social, but also offline)
- the impact of big data (such as territory optimization, predictive lead scoring, buyer/purchasing analytics, behavioral economics, and more)
- leveraging other tools to find prospects and clients who need you
- smart use of CRM (go figure)
- insight selling, provocative selling, thoughtful selling, and similar approaches.
To make it more complex, the degree to which these things apply, can vary by industry, vertical, channel, and other factors.
Had enough yet?
Shift in selling skills
I wish I were done, but the above requires dramatic shifts in what sales professionals need to know and do. Sales knowledge, skills, competencies, and behaviors need to evolve. You can achieve significant sales growth naturally through an unwavering focus on your customers, but in many cases, our sales organizations will simply need to be reskilled. (I’m not saying the sky is falling. Although I think there is plenty of room for improvement right now, so I wouldn’t mind seeing a revolution. But I also believe there is time for evolution, if we get started now).
Much of this change is necessitated based on the shifts documented above, and that can be figured out relatively easily with normal tools like process work, needs analysis, and task analysis. This will sound odd, perhaps, but I’d also contend that selling skills have needed to evolve for a long time.
Why do I say that?
Because, after
- more than 20 years doing sales performance work
- conducting a dozen sales performance lever analyses
- studying over 17,000 sales people to document the differentiating practices of top producers
- delivering over $1B in top-line lift (level 4 results) in a variety of industries…
…I’ve seen some top-producer patterns emerge that I’m finally ready to talk about. I usually contend that we have more to learn from the 16 percent of producers just below the top 4 percent, because those top-producers do, is not always replicable.
Here’s a graphic representation of what I normally do:
But leadership skills aren’t always easily transferred or replicable, yet we do it. This time, that’s why I’m talking about the top 4 percent (the top 20 percent of the top 20 percent), or the true top-producers. So, here is a graphic representation of what I’m doing now:
By way of full disclosure, I also want to be clear that this is not:
- the result of a scientifically controlled, 20-year longitudinal study
- a formal research project
- a published paper or peer-reviewed article
- data that has been statistically crunched in SAS, SPSS, or Minitab using multivariate regression analysis, Pearson correlation coefficient, ANOVA, or other such fun statistical tests (or at least not across companies, over the years, in a combined analysis).
(By the way, I could say the same about many of the industry reports that I see offered as “research.”)
But it is:
- a series of observations I’ve collected over time, while comparing the top 4 to 7 percent of top-producers to the rest of the top 20 percent and mid-producers
- seemingly consistent for B2B & B2C sales, across a variety of sales nuances
- a part of how I have helped employers and clients hire for sales roles more effectively
- something I have incorporated in effective learning systems and sales curricula, very successfully, in a few companies.
Enter 22nd century selling skills
While some of these skills address the aforementioned challenges that are exacerbated by the recent evolutions in buying and selling, the 22nd Century Selling Skills are those that I’ve seen differentiate the top producers from the rest of the pack, for quite some time. I also believe these skills are largely replicable across sales organizations (keeping in mind that possible or simple doesn’t always mean easy).
Join me for more discussion
I’ll be sharing more about this topic at my presentation at the ASTD 2014 International Conference & Exposition on Sunday, May 4. If you are attending and interested in the Sales Enablement Experience, I invite you to join me. You can see details about the session here, and you can see some slides that will help you decide if the session is right for you here.
In fairness to those who may be interested but can’t attend, I will be doing a Business RadioX broadcast at ASTD ICE on Monday May 5 at 11:20 a.m. EDT, and will have a recording I can share later. I will also return here to our Sales Enablement Community to share more details, post-conference.
I hope you find this intriguing and valuable, and give some thought to how you need to respond to the changes in the buying and selling marketplace, what new knowledge and skills your sales organization needs, and how the 22nd Century Selling Skills might be worth exploring in an ongoing sales development curricula in your company.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments, to hopefully seeing you at ASTD ICE (even if you don’t attend my session, if you see me, please say hi and introduce yourself), and seeing you back here after ICE.
In the meantime, thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means, let's continue to elevate our sales profession.
