Just as the world is constantly changing, so too is the way that B2B Buyers buy.

The biggest shift has been and will continue to be related to the vast amount of quality data that is now available on the internet. This vast resource of valuable information has made it much easier for buyers to gather the information that they think they need in order to make intelligent purchasing decisions and this in turn has led to fewer opportunities for sales people to get in front of their customers and to influence those buying decisions.

According to Gartner, when we look at the whole time that a B2B buyer spends considering which purchase to make, only 17% of that time is actually spent with potential suppliers…..if they are comparing multiple suppliers, then the time with each individual supplier might be as little as 4 or 5%. That’s not a lot of time for a sales person to make an impact, especially when we consider the amount of classic sales activities they need to get through; rapport building, educating the customer, finding out about their needs, aligning and communicating the value of their solution, negotiating etc.

Many businesses think that this lack of access is down to the individual sales person’s ability to get in front of the customer and to communicate value quickly and effectively enough when in reality, numerous studies show that problem is far less to do with the sales person’s struggles to sell and far more to do with the customer’s struggles to buy.

The B2B’s customer’s buying journey

Research tells us that in complex B2B sales, the customer’s business has, on average, 6 – 10 decision makers armed with 4 or 5 pieces of information about possible suppliers and potential solutions. In order to make an effective decision, these buyers need to work together to assess and quantify the information and opinions that they’ve already gathered between them, at the same time as including the constant stream of new information readily available from other suppliers, the internet, technology etc. This is no easy task and never before has the term ‘complex sale’ been more apt.

In order to be able to navigate a complex sale, it’s important that sales people really understand the journey that B2B buyers need to go through in order to make a decision and the steps they typically take. Sales people also need to recognise, that this journey isn’t linear – B2B buyers may return to previous steps time and time again and they value suppliers that are able to facilitate this journey smoothly.

To make an impact with a B2B buyer there are some key things that sales people need to remember:

1. The process of buying is hard and complicated for the buyer – they have lots of information to work through and the sheer volume can mean that they inadvertently exclude the sales person from the process
2. Research shows that buyers really do need help from sales person at all stages of the buying process, in fact customers who perceived the information that they received from suppliers to be useful were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease and three time more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret
3. To compete effectively, sales people should focus on providing customers with information that is specifically designed to help them to complete their buying activities at the right times during the buying process and beyond the sale

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having an influence in your life whether you’re aware of it or not. AI powered algorithms decide which music or shows to recommend on your favourite streaming platforms. When you order something on Amazon, AI decides which other products to recommend based on your purchase. Those online ads that seem to magically promote products or services you’ve been thinking about? That’s AI choosing which ads to show you based on your browsing activity.

Yet when it comes to our working lives, we’re often presented with headlines that tell us AI is something to fear. It’s often framed as a technology that will eventually take our jobs away from us, but the truth is, AI is here to help us become better at our jobs.

There are various applications in sales where AI can add real value:

1.  Taking over menial tasks

Monotonous tasks prevent us from getting on with the more important aspects of our jobs and can sap the enjoyment from our working lives. In sales, the monotony can range from trawling through long lists of leads to gathering data on your prospects and creating weekly reports. These repetitive and time consuming tasks can be removed from salespeople’s workloads with AI, allowing them to get on with doing what they do best – selling.

2.  Feeling out deals worth chasing

All too easily you can waste too much of your time working towards a deal you believe will deliver, only to find yourself at a dead end with nothing to show for your efforts. AI can eliminate this frustrating process, effectively feeling out the deals worth chasing. Salespeople can train the AI to recognise a good deal and can even predict the products or services the prospect will be interested in based on previous sales data.

3.  Improving forecast accuracy

Predicting your team’s sales numbers for each quarter is one of the most daunting challenges of your job. Getting it wrong can result in your team falling short of the expectations you’ve set, so forecasting accurately is key. AI algorithms are now supporting sales managers by accurately predicting where your team’s sales will fall, making it achievable for your team to successfully meet the forecast you’ve presented.

4.  Recommending upselling and cross-selling opportunities

Selling isn’t all about sizing up prospects and getting a foot in the door. There are always upselling and cross-selling opportunities within your existing client base, but these can be easy to miss. AI can quickly identify clients that are likely to be open to upgrading the current product or service you’re supplying. Not only does this create more revenue opportunities – it also means a reduction in marketing costs.

5.  Calculating the right rates

It can be difficult to work out how much discount you need to offer to win a deal. Offer too much discount and you’re losing money the client would’ve been willing to spend. But if you don’t offer enough, the deal might fall through. AI can analyse specifics of past deals such as the size of the deal, how many competitors you’re up against, the clients’ revenues and more, to recommend the most suitable discount that you should apply to each deal.

It can be difficult to adjust to working with new technologies in the workplace. Sometimes skillsets and behaviours need to be developed to ensure people are getting the best value from working with the technology implemented. A blended training strategy that incorporates elements of both online based self-study and face to face training sessions will support the development of any new skills or behaviours required. With the right training strategy and the right technology investment, AI can be a transformative force for your sales team.

Successful selling requires a certain set of behaviours, but those behaviours are constantly evolving. As new sales challenges and new developments emerge, salespeople must adapt or face losing out to competitors that have understood and reacted to changing behavioural requirements to support their sales strategies.

It’s important that companies communicate the latest behaviours that sales people should be demonstrating and encourage and support them to understand and successfully integrate those behaviours into their daily sales activities when dealing with prospects and customers.

Here are five behaviours that are becoming increasingly relevant in sales:  

1.    Understanding generational differences

Younger generations often get a bad rap from their elders. Take the millennial generation now representing a large percentage of the workforce. Millennials are often criticised for being reliant on technology, constantly glued to their phones and users of dumbed down language and writing. But instead of criticising, salespeople need to embrace and partake in the way younger generations communicate. They need to understand their expectations and see things from their perspective. Different portions of your target market will be represented by different generations. Use social selling to engage with different generations in the way they’re used to engaging with others, demonstrate an understanding of their world view and talk about things from their perspective and you’ll build better business relationships.

2.    Building personal brands

In a world where people concentrate on their online personas almost as much as their real selves, everyone has a personal brand. Businesses need to embrace this as an opportunity and make the most of the tools available, such as social media and thought leadership opportunities, to help build the brands of their salespeople, positioning them as industry experts. In doing so, they can amass an online following where your business can be freely promoted, while your salespeople build reputations of trust and expertise. This also increases the opportunity for engagement with prospects digesting the content that your salespeople are putting out there. Your salespeople don’t need to be skilled writers – the content itself can be created with your marketing team, an agency or a freelancer.

3.    Embracing ‘scary’ tech

Scaremongering headlines often deride technologies that have been developed to make our lives easier. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such technology that improves efficiency and intuition in the sales process. AI can take over the management of many of the basic, time-consuming tasks that slow down your salespeople, from creating contact lists, logging communications with prospects and generating sales proposals. The market for smart sales tools has exploded and continues to grow. Businesses embracing and implementing these solutions are removing the menial tasks from their sales people’s workloads, enabling them to place a stronger focus on what they’re best at – selling.

4.    Becoming customer centric

When it comes to selling, businesses are becoming increasingly customer-centric. This approach, sometimes referred to as Account Based Selling (ABS) means building a sales strategy around each individual prospect. Each prospect will have its own requirements and its goals that differ from every other prospect. By placing those requirements and goals at the centre of your sales approach and tailoring your offering around them, you will set your business apart from your competitors. Today, prospects have unbridled access to information about the products and services available to them, so a solution that can be carefully tailored to their needs will make your business stand head and shoulders above the one-size-fits-all solutions that are also being offered to them.

5.    Maintaining the human touch

Instilling any new behaviour in your salespeople, your leadership or across the wider business requires a careful blend of self-led study and group-based learning activities. While digital training solutions have become popular for allowing people to fit training around their busy schedules by enabling access to online content and activities where and when it suits them, the human touch is still an important aspect of behavioural training. Blending online self-study with face to face and group learning activities will provide both flexibility but also builds a support system by maintaining the traditional collective element of workplace training.

Embracing these 5 behaviours will enhance your businesses sales activity, but embedding the behaviours successfully will come down to how well you tailor behavioural training to your sales people’s needs. By adopting a blended approach across a sustained learning programme broken down into bitesize learning activities, you can ensure your people thrive in the ever-changing world of sales.

Transitioning from a successful salesperson to a successful sales manager can be something of a challenge. Beyond being great at selling, you also need be great at managing people. Balancing the two competencies can be struggle, especially when people management hasn’t necessarily been a requirement in your skillset before that managerial opportunity materialised.

Here are the five attributes that are key to becoming a successful sales manager:

1.     Strategic planner

Make no bones about it, sales management is a strategic affair. Yes, there are lots of operational responsibilities, but overriding this is the importance of sales managers being able to direct the activity of their sales teams through a carefully considered strategic plan.

2.     Master of change

Sales is constantly evolving. Products change, customers change and the approaches and tactics that used to work in the past won’t always work in the future. As we continue to feel the impact of globalisation and megatrends such as digitalisation, one thing is for certain and that’s that nothing is certain. The way that sales people work will have to change too.

One of the most difficult tasks a sales manager has is to support their teams in a constantly changing marketplace. Sales managers must be ready to consciously and proactively abandon everything they know and adapt to a new normal. They must be able to lead their sales team into a successful future by navigating and adapting to uncontrollable and unpredictable changes in economics, technology, and finances.

3.     Outstanding coach

The sales team is the number one tool that sales managers have at their fingertips to achieve their sales objectives. Without a high performing team, failure is inevitable. Coaching as a concept is easy to subscribe to but in reality, few organisations invest enough time or money into ensuring that sales managers have the practical skills that they need to coach their people.

4.     Constant communicator

An effective sales team is a responsive sales team where support from the manager and communication between team members is imperative to ensuring that approach and tactics take into account the knowledge and experience of the whole team. Successful sales managers know that they need to be available to offer guidance and advice at the same time as making sure that they are communicating exactly what is required. They ensure that communication happens on both a formal and informal basis and they create a platform where honest feedback and expertise is shared.

5.     Inspirational leader

Research continually shows that people perform best when they have an inspirational leader; someone who puts the needs of the team before their own and is focused on motivating and inspiring their people to achieve outstanding results. Sales leadership is both an art and a science and the best sales managers recognise that they need to be equally competent at leading in the hard business sense (targets, sales tools, finances, prices) as they do in the people management side (motivating, providing feedback, developing skills, providing support).

A leadership training programme that blends online learning activities with face to face and group learning activities will be essential to instilling these attributes into your existing and future sales leaders and enabling them to leverage the collective capabilities of their teams to achieve exceptional results as a collective.

The right programme should be tailored to your business, with content built around realistic interactions with existing customers to reflect the way your business operates. Often businesses invest in tick-box training exercises but an effective development programme should take place over a sustained period, giving your sales managers a realistic opportunity to cultivate these essential attributes on the job.