Over the last several years, there has been a quiet explosion of numerous new technology companies being born, from SF downstream to NYC. Especially with the advent of SaaS technologies, many of these firms are quickly funding, and entering their respective markets, at an alarming rate. Added to that, many traditional software companies have moved their platforms over to SaaS, and now run at the same elevated velocity as their counterparts or competitors.
The new found choices in SaaS, with brilliant leadership, is very exciting. There is a heightened sense of energy in this space, which eclipses traditional software technology plays from the previous ten years. As these new firms move off of the early adopter phase, they now require steady streams of Enterprise revenues. To get there, they look for a well proven, sales methodology to help fuel their growth. It has to help ensure competent hires, realistic ramp times, even pipeline builds and conversions, and all at reasonable hiring and training costs. It has to service Inside Reps, Account manager and of course Enterprise Account Executives. It was Consultative Selling.
“Consultative Selling” has been around since the 70’s. In the 80’s, it came to be known as an arduous sales process, which converted the traditional product-focused Sales Rep, into a needs-based, customer-centric expert. It made the Sales Reps more a student of their customer, where they used artful questioning (among many other tactics), to help guide the deal forward to a close (simply put).All things equal, this is still a fantastic way to sell(free “gifts of Knowledge”). But alas, with all forms and sizes of “customers”, who have access to massive amounts of information, in real-time, and with the spigot always on; the sales process or game has radically changed.
There are leading business research firms and industry experts today, stating that with this information flow, the B2B buyers do NOT require the help of a Sales Rep for approximately 60-70% of the sales cycle. This gives the Sales Rep only 30% of the time for initial engagement, discovery, presentation, negotiation, and most likely, a RFP.
With dramatically shorter selling times, and highly-educated and sophisticated buyers, I see the need for upgrading our selling skills once again.This brings me to that “upgraded” approach, or now called “The “Challenger Sale”. More to come in our next post…stay tuned!
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.