Bob Apollo

According to some of the latest reports from Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights and other leading B2B research organisations, the best-in-class sales and marketing organisations are as much as 5 times more effective than the average in converting inquiries into sales - as well as maintaining significantly faster average annual revenue growth.

How do they achieve this? A large part of the answer lies in how they choose to measure their performance - and how they apply what they learn to achieve continuous improvement. I’m going to be sharing the key principles in a free BrightTALK webinar on “Applying Smarter Metrics to your Sales and Marketing Funnel” on 22^nd May at 2pm UK. You can register for the webinar here - but I’d like...

Faced with increasing competition, commoditisation and margin erosion most B2B vendors have chosen to embrace “solution selling” in one form or another. But, as many have learned to their cost, simply slapping solution lipstick on a product pig tends to be a cost-added, rather than a value-added strategy.

Applying solution selling in today’s increasingly well-educated and often justifiably cynical buying environment requires a profound change in mindset and selling (and marketing) behaviour that many companies never manage to properly master - but the ones that do usually reap substantial rewards.

Having observed some of the best exponents of the art, I’d like to suggest that there are six critical foundations of the new solution selling. They involve more than the sales person - in fact they reflect and require a co-ordinated approach between the sales and marketing organisations. Successful solution selling is a team effort.

1: Educate before you Sell

CSO Insights have just published their 2012 Sales Management Optimisation study.  As always, the conclusions from their latest research make compelling reading - and provide B2B sales leaders with much to think about.

I’ll be offering a series of recommendations from their research over the coming weeks, but I wanted to start by focusing on a new metric that CSO Insights introduced to the study this year: how effectively B2B sales organisations are tracking the real progress of their prospect’s buying decision process.

Fewer than 20% of sales organisations continually track buying behaviour

I found the answer very disturbing, and I think you will too: Fewer than 20% of the 600+ companies surveyed had the discipline to continually track specific buying behaviours in order to assess the true state of their sales pipelines. More than half never...

I had a truly bizarre experience the other day. A senior (and very experienced, by the look of him) sales person actually started a conversation with me by asking me “what kept me awake at night?” I just managed to resist giving him a biological explanation.

Now, it may have come straight out of a second-rate consultative selling manual from a decade or two back, but his question struck me as being completely irrelevant and utterly out of place in world where any sophisticated buyer is likely to laugh out loud at the glorious incongruity of such a silly and uninformed question.

Are your sales people provoking silent laughter?

Which is, of course, exactly what I did. Which unsettled my friend to start with, but he at least knew by then that he’d started off on the wrong foot. It’s the silent laughter that will really get to you, mind - prospects that may appear to listen politely to the rest of the conversation but have already ruled you out for being so...