I need Sales Tools
The Smart Selling Tools, Inc., the publisher of the above Vendor Landscape, is an analyst and consulting firm that specializes in sales productivity and sales performance improvement through the use of smart sales tools.
They support being “vendor neutral” and that is a good thing.
They also collect a sizable fee to have you published and highlighted, but that just makes good business. All vendors want to be noticed and top of mind when companies have pain and may be looking for a solution that they can deliver.
Smart Selling Tools doesn’t sell software. They just provide great information to help you find the right sales tools for your organization. The right tools can help your sales team spend more time with high-quality prospects that close and less time on everything else.
What does this mean to B2B Buyers?
On the surface, it makes the vendors happy that they are listed (Revenue Accelerators is in the “Why They Should Buy From You” category). We are glad about the listing.
On the surface, it’s an eye-chart for sophisticated executives, like CMOs and Heads of Marketing, Heads of Demand Gen, CROs and Heads of Sales, Heads of Sales Enablement, etc.
No one needs to repeat that once you contact a vendor, you end up with a sequence of emails asking for a call and meeting, reminders for a meeting, LinkedIn InMails for a meeting, and phone calls on the same.
It’s not just from a single Lead Development Reps (LDR), it can also be piggybacked from SDRs, BDRs, and Account executives. Hey, everyone needs to make a quota.
Will B2B buyers make more money?
I am confident that all the vendors on the landscape can and will do a good job of supporting a well-thought-out value proposition, know the account’s business, and use leading sales processes like the Challenger Sale or Solution Selling, etc. to present an executive-aligned client engagement process for the B2B buyer (or so I hope so).
I presume they do not get that solution out too fast and start “pitching product”. I know they don’t push for the proverbial “demo” to fast and inundate the buyers with amazing features and benefits (or so I hope so).
I presume they engage with detailed financial, operational and strategic insights into the buyer’s company and present well-aligned business value and outcomes so the conversation rests on what matters.
Here comes the big kahuna?
I am confident the vendors don’t bring in highly-professional Heads of Sales or Product Engineering even their CEO to drive the first meeting and really impress the buyer. These are very smart people on BOTH sides of the aisle, and I presume they should meet (but not when you first open the door to a business conversation).
Why do we need a 2,241?
We are all grateful to still be in a booming economy. Having the lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s is a great thing. It’s part of the reason, and due to advances in software technology, that we now have thousands of software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors entering the market.
Of course, with these thousands of vendors come tens of thousands or actually, a million sales and sales support-related folks who call into the limited and ever-fixed pool of executives they want to sell to.
The same Fortune 500 companies with their top 7-10 executives you want to sell, is now not the same Fortune 3800 because of the economy. It never will be. The vendor noise is pretty intense.
That’s why Accenture put out a fabulous paper called “Selling in the Age of Distraction”, Jason Angelos, Gregory Solomon, and Berkeley Warburton.
Where does that leave us?
We are a vendor. We are on the landscape. We should have been in actually “4” different categories. We are the only one on the entire landscape that does what we do. We are obsessed with selling to very senior executives.
We did not want to spend the thousands of dollars to produce landscape-supported case studies and collateral with Smart Selling Tools (they are a quality service) extolling how different and great we are. Maybe that was a mistake.
- The reason being is we are 100% dedicated to senior executive and C-Suite grade selling, messaging, and engagement.
- We use very smart people to understand every 10-K and the company’s strategic initiatives and financials inside and out.
- We also monetize the vendor’s solutions and align them with each 10-K so they can have deeply personalized real business outcome conversations.
We do all the work for the sales team (why would a rep do this when our CPAs will do it for them?) Does your lawyer do your plumbing?
Ok, I pitched you.
The point is if the buyers (and they are the priority) would benefit from a well-differentiated C-Suite point of view that could strategically help their business, then why would that vendor not be in its own column?
Ok, maybe a “bold” name”? Well, how about a “C-Suite Corner” for strategic vendors that can prove they have the right stuff?
I’ll leave the rest up to you. We are all in business to deliver value and make money for our shareholders, investors, and especially for our customers. If you would be so kind as to share your thoughts or comments, I would be delighted to give you some of our “stuff”.
Revenue Accelerators is the ONLY B2B account-based sales intelligence tool that quantifies vendor value and aligns it financially with each target account to enable sales reps to access and meet with coveted C-Suite. We deliver personalized, financial business cases and points of view for the front-end of any sales cycle. We transform Product to Value selling overnight for faster and greater pipelines. www.revenueaccelerators.com