Has Your Sales-Org Adapted to the Non-Linear Buying Process?

Buyers will buy whether sellers sell or not. The question is, have you built enough influence with your target audience and are YOU the person they will come to for the information they need to inform their decision?

If so, you've increased your chances of having a conversation exponentially.

And when you have a conversation with a buyer you've also increased you chance of informing their decision exponentially.

So why do sales leaders still manage reps to a linear sales process?

It's possible to help a buyer identify a problem they didn't know they had through questioning, but that opportunity will never present itself until you've built trust.

Buyers and sellers want different things. Yet organisations force sales reps to follow a semi-linear sales process.  Saying you have a non-linear sales process does not mean you actually follow a non-linear approach. 

Especially while marketing is tasked with building awareness and nurturing and expects to hand off to sales mid-way through the sales funnel or towards the end of the sales funnel in many cases.   This model is outdated as today buyers believe vendor content less and less and turn to other sources to inform their thinking.  And whilst SDR’s look like sales development reps buyers won’t engage with them at the risk of being sold to, rather than informing.  Information is what buyers want.  

Still, Sales & Marketing Alignment Remains the Unsolved Challenge

Buyer alignment is impossible when sellers and marketers are misaligned and work in a linear fashion, again, whilst 'trying' to be buyer centric.  When all is said and done buyers don’t trust vendors, so any action of ‘selling’ is met with resistance unless the buyer feels a sense of trust towards the company or individual. If the company, it’s usually because the buyer used the vendor before and the experience was good, because of the people they dealt with or someone they trust has recommended them. 

People Buy from People

For the individual, the traditional operating model of SDR, Sales, Services and Customer Success means the buyer is handed from one person to another just as they build rapport with them.   This previously successful model no longer provides the level of engagement and depth of trust the buyer wants when often putting their career in the hands of people with the vendor they choose. 

Tackling the Real Problem

Tackling the business growth problem in 2023 must start with speaking to your target audience.  The more conversations you have the easier it is to optimise your approach and be the buyer centric organisation you aspire to be.  Every organisation is different, every value proposition is different therefore your approach to winning and growing new business should be different, unique to your organisation. 

With this in mind there are only two problems business must solve for as a matter of urgency. 

• Problem 1: not engaging with enough people to have meaningful conversations across your target audience and converting them into commercial ones.
• Problem 2: not scaling those conversations across your target audience enough to create predictable pipeline flow and revenue growth. 

If all you did was increase the number of commercial conversations your organisation was having, based on your current value proposition and performance metrics, your revenue will grow exponentially. 

We Throughly Test the Approach to Solving Problem's 1 & 2

At Supero we have been running an A/B test for three years, comparing a traditional cold outbound approach where we focused on searching and qualifying the 5% of ones territory in-market for a solution v’s a modern approach based on developing one’s personal brand and focusing on the 100% of ones target audience that is open to building a relationship.  

The findings are ongoing and before I share some of the facts we've uncovered, I want to share why Supero exists. 

There's a Mental Health Endemic in Sales today!

We exist because we want to eliminate poor mental health in sales.  Salespeople are suffering because businesses force them to perform outdated sales techniques that no longer deliver the desired results and then those salespeople are managed based on outdated sales behaviours that cause very high levels of stress in 4 out of 5 salespeople, resulting in 3 in 5 salespeople now suffering with poor mental health. According to the 2022 Sales Health Alliance report.

THIS MUST STOP!

There is a better way. Sales should be fun, about building meaningful relationships with your target audience that result in a commercial outcome that helps both buyer and seller. Supero are proving that developing pipeline and revenue can be fun and be done without causing poor mental health in salespeople.

The Data To Back This Up

Here are five of the findings from our analysis from our clients adopting our modern approach to developing new business-relationships.

1. For a rep focusing on a volume account territory, they went from 3 meetings per week to 15-20 each week, consistently. 
2. Reps with a focused account (territory less than 75 accounts) territory penetration went from 1.6% and single threaded opportunities to 25% territory penetration and on average 6.4 stakeholders per opportunity. 
3. Conversation rate across focused and volume territory reps went from 2.5% to 9.9% (the percentage of people a call was completed with).
4. Call progression rate = 33.6% (the percentage of meaningful conversations that progressed with a next step agreed). We are currently monitoring, of the 66.4% of conversations that didn’t progress at that time, what percentage will progress in the future because they were not ‘sold to’.

This ongoing test is supported with 10 months of data tracking behaviours across the Supero client base.  

Let’s do some math comparing approach A and B, assuming each approach was targeting a territory of 10,000 companies.  Bear in mind that traditional marketing has very little influence, assuming you believe Chris Walkers analysis that MQL’s are converting at a rate of 0.01% in 2023. 

So these numbers must assume a standing start on a territory and zero dollars spent on marketing with all effort as a result of up-skilling and coaching your existing teams on the ‘modern approach’.  Any existing effort gone into a territory can only support the uplift. 

The Facts

Fact 1 - Focused account approach only.  

A. Traditional Approach

• Meet 1.6% of your 10,000 companies = 160 conversations.
• 33.6% qualify = 53.76 opportunities
• 17% convert (industry average conversation rate from SMB to Enterprise - *WbD) = 9.1 deals
• With an average order value of £100k = £910,000 

B. Modern Approach

• Meet 25% of your territory = 2,500 conversations
• 33.6% qualify = 840 opportunities
• 17% convert (industry average conversation rate from SMB to Enterprise - *WbD) = 142.8 deals
• With an average order value of £100k = £14,280,000 

Fact 2 - Combined volume and focused account approach.

A. The Traditional Approach

• 2.5% conversation rate = 250 conversations
• 33.6% qualify = 84 opportunities
• 17% convert (industry average conversation rate from SMB to Enterprise - *WbD) = 14.28 deals
• With an average order value of £100k = £1,428,000 

B. The Modern Approach

• 9.9% conversation rate = 990 conversations
• 33.6% qualify = 332.6 opportunities
• 17% convert (industry average conversation rate from SMB to Enterprise - *WbD) = 56.5 deals
• With an average order value of £100k = £5,650,000

The Conclusion

Our modern approach outperformed the traditional approach in all cases, whether a business selling to B2B2B or B2B2C in a focused account approach or volume based approach.

In B. The Modern Approach, for both fact 1 & 2 the SDR role is expected to evolve in the future to support the rep with deal management activities, combining prospecting with deal support in partnership with the the sales rep.  And together with the Sales Consultant or any other pre-sales support they combine effort as part of the territory and account plan.

To learn more about this approach and how our Conversation Creation operating System can support your business in the future, drop me a DM or follow me on socials.

I look forward to speaking with you!