It’s time.
Imagine driving a car today you purchased in the last century. Or living in a house you designed and built 40 years ago and only made cosmetic changes to. Feels comfortable but it’s time for a new car or home. You need to keep your family safe and to function properly in the world we live in today.
That’s the state of B2B Sales today. The basic design, structures and processes you see today in business sales were developed in the last century. Many in the 1980s. Sure, there has been tremendous change. But if you took an Enterprise sales professional from the 1980s and dropped them into the world of sales today, they would recognize it immediately and perform just fine. If they were a high-performing sales professional then, they would be now.
Ok, you go from a file in a drawer to a CRM but they would recognize the same mess …. bad data, missing records, and so on. Both are data consumption devices….a lot goes in but little in the way of insight comes out.
So much would be familiar to them. Same management structure. Same comp plans. Same sales process. Same auditing of activity. Same pressure to make the number each month, quarter and year. Same discounting at the end of the quarter. Same president's club trips for the top performers. And customers feel the same pressure to make buying decisions.
It’s time.
You can see the aging of the system.
Performance is declining. There are approximately 1.4M B2B sales professionals in the US today. An estimated 24.5% of them made quota in 2023. That means about 1.0M salespeople did not make quota last year. That is a lot of unhappy people. And think beyond the impact of that on the Seller’s company in terms of cost of sale and the impact that has on the morale of the salespeople. What about the impact on Buyers’? The pressure they get from salespeople desperate to make a sale. No wonder Buyers don’t respond to outbound calls.
It's time.
Look at all the duct tape and fresh paint being applied over the rotted wood.
The average sales rep manages at least 12 different tech tools today. And few are designed to work with each other. We just are just throwing them against the wall hoping something sticks. And more AI bots are on the way.
Despite this decline in productivity, there are more sales ‘experts’ than ever. Go to Linkedin and do a search on sales trainers and coaches / consultants. I got 144,000 hits. That is how many sales ‘experts’ there are trying to fix this mess.
It's time.
Sales today is a business drug. Instead of building great products or services that Buyers can’t wait to use, that are easy to adapt and creating a world class customer experience, companies overbuild their sales function. They are on drugs counting on the sales team to magically make business appear. You put the pressure of super-high quotas on them and churn through the sales team firing and hiring when they disappoint. You take the sales drug to hide the fact that maybe you haven't built the best product nor best customer experience in the world. And training? Don’t even ask. It’s typical these days for new-hire sales reps to be put in the field with under 30 days of training.
It's time.
Take out a blank sheet of paper. It’s time to re-think and re-architect the Buyer / Seller relationship.
What is our sales strategy in this age of intelligence? There is a strategy gap in sales today. Too much focus on sales tactics or how you sell. But, as they say in the Art of War, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.
There is not enough thought leadership on sales strategy. Who, what, when, where & why you sell. Strategy and tactics are 2 sides of the same coin. You need to be good at both.
We need sales strategies & tactics that are appropriate for our age. The Age of Intelligence.
Enterprise sales is not going away but it does need to get a clean sheet. It needs a completely new design.
You do need sales professionals because you need people skilled at navigating the Enterprise buying process as well as the Seller’s internal sales process. Both Buyer and Seller need someone to project manage the process because both environments change constantly. There are just too many variables to manage by an unskilled person. And buying is something that still has a strong emotional element to it. Hence the need for humans and not just machines to guide the process.
It’s time.
Take out a clean sheet of paper and a pencil with an eraser. Or a white board with erasable markers. Or Figma. Or Canva. Or ChatGTP. The tool doesn’t matter.
Intelligent, strategic design does.
It’s time.
Compass Navigation:
Music: I wrote this listening to El Rio by the Rose City Band.
Quote: “A cavalryman’s horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be allowed to know this”
- Steven Pressfield, ‘Virtues of War’.
“A person’s AI Bot should be smarter than they are. But the Bot must never be allowed to know this. Grip the reins with conviction and hang on to your virtuous true north no matter how reckless the Bot becomes!”
