The change in the B2B sales process was apparent several years back and HBR has been in the forefront of reflecting the shift. Not necessarily in these exact terms. Take for example the article “The New Sales Imperative” written by Nicholas Toman, Brent Adamson and Cristina Gomez of CEB. The shift is from ‘the customer purchase from us’ journey to a ‘proactive, prescriptive approach that guides customers through decision making’ journey
In my post on sales on 14th Feb I wrote about the Buyer study conducted by Steve W Martin. Steve teaches at the Marshall Business School, author of the Heavy Hitter series, advised companies like Google, IBM and PayPal and an expert in *Sales Linguistics.
CSO insights report that in 2016 only 45.8% of forecasted deals closed as predicted. The recent survey of over 270,912 closed won opportunities (making up over $18.1 B in closed revenue ) by InsideSales shows the story continues quite, well, predictably.
Larry Susskind, MIT professor and co founder of the Program on Negotiation and Consensus Building Institute, made an appearance in the ‘Negotiations Ninja’ podcast hosted by Mark Raffan to talk about his book – Good for you, Great for Me.
In the Microsoft paper on ‘The Open Secrets of Buyer Seller Alignment’ the chapter on buyers journey opens with the above comparison :
In the Smarter with Gartner series, Jordan Bryan recently summarized shifted realities vis a vis B2B Buyers. Although popular discourse amongst the leaders in the sales/sales training industry would like to believe otherwise, the Buyer has actually changed. Here are the headlines :
Andy Raskin recently wrote on his experience of a CEO he was working with, negotiating with a senior colleague on the strategic story for the company. The colleague was not aligned with what was being proposed and Andy’s sessions with him did not help at all. He didn’t budge. Next, the CEO has a chat at the end of which this employee turns around completely. It was attributed to a negotiation technique espoused by Chris Voss in his book ’Never Split the Difference’.
Many of you would have come across this post by Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director of Redpoint Ventures. His frequent posts are primarily data driven and are pointed and succinct. In this post and one after that (where he does the math) he points out to the maturity of the SAAS companies where a “…a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business.”
