B2B Sales: What's going on and what to do

B2B Sales is dealing with an existential crisis. The world has pivoted from a growth mandate to a margin focus, and many feel unprepared. 

The ‘Grow fast or die slow’ narrative (McKinsey article in 2014) has been amended to ‘Grow fast or die slow: the role of profitability in sustainable growth' (McKinsey article ~4 years later)

In the last two years, the cost of growth capital has increased, and an influx of digital automation tools has broken the top of funnel activity math. Everybody's inbox is wrecked and B2B buying has moved to a consensus based decision-making process. Buying centres which used to be refined to a small, dedicated group of senior executives, are being replaced by a web of stakeholders across multiple levels, roles and functions (source). Your contact can say 'Yes', but the 4-10 others involved can say 'No, not now'.

The once Predictable B2B Sales Playbook is showing cracks:

• Response rates have halved

• Scrutiny on budget has increased 

• More people are involved the buying process

• Sales cycles are longer 

• "No decision" losses are on the rise

The elephant in the room

The elephant in the room is that many B2B sales organisations have made hiring, salary and workforce planning decisions on the back of old math.

Typically, a go-to-market team’s largest expense, is the salaries they pay their client facing people. Due to growing markets and the Covid war for in seat talent, this expense line accelerated .... and many are now stuck.

Let’s imagine you have 100 client facing people and are paying an average of $150K per person / per year. In total, you’re paying $15M a year on salaries, or ~$67K a day for people to be in seat.

Trouble starts when, the people you're paying:

• Find it harder to cut through (response rates are down 30% - source),

• Are dealing with expanding buying centres (on average 11.4 people are now involved in a B2B purchase decision - source),

• The window of opportunity to influence buyers has narrowed (just 5% of a buying journey is spent with the sales rep - source), and

• Your sellers find themselves spending less than 30% of their time actually selling (source)

Of the $15M you're paying in annual salaries, $10M is being lost to reduced productivity. It's equivalent to a sales rep starting work on Monday morning and not speaking to any customers until Thursday afternoon, and it's costing your company $234.6K a week.

As one sales leader said to me this week, it is soul crushing for reps and business leaders alike.

So, how is this working out for everyone?

• In 2022, 68% of Sales Organisations reported missing target (source)

• Business leaders are trying a variety of strategies to right the ship, at faster and faster increments - sales training, followed by a focus on performance management, followed by a restructure, followed by manager coaching, followed by more sales training, followed by an overhaul of their incentives and rewards program, followed by another restructure ... and on it goes.

So what can you do?

A few months ago, LinkedIn's COO Dan Shapero wrote an insightful post outlining LinkedIn's strategies for driving profitable growth in this market.

As a LinkedIn sales leader, I took this post to heart and have been looking for simple ways to execute these strategies with my team.

Here are some of things we've done and will continue to try.

Idea 1: Embrace Customers Who Already Love You

The first thing we did was ask our customer success managers who their favourite customers were and why. This exercise not only helped us focus on the right accounts it also helped us identify potential referral paths across businesses.

Asking who their favourite customers were was also helpful in understanding what great change makers looked like. In our situation, they were all .....

• big believers in the importance of Digital Transformation and Data 

• open to advice, eager to learn, and collaborative

• willing to share company-related insights (i.e. priorities markets, GTM challenges)

• well-connected across their business and able to open doors 

Key questions for you to ask: Who are our best customers? What makes the champions great to work with? How can we elevate those champions and find more people like them?

Idea 2: Use data to help reps identify customers "likely to succeed" dynamically

We identified a number of Growth Indicators and shared them with the sellers. This helped sellers become more agile and responsive to customer value opportunities. Identifying when companies were hiring more people, or when companies had small increases in organic add-ons, were powerful signals to help reps focus on the right accounts, at the right time. It also gave many sellers a better sense of control in a fast moving world.

Key questions for you to ask: What data do we have access to? What do our strongest customers have in common? How can we bring those insights to the front line sellers and sales managers faster?

Idea 3: Verbally shared our commitment to save sellers time.

Last July, each member of my team spent around 50 hours on territory and account planning exercises. Most of this time was spent understanding base level information. For instance, how does the company make money, what are typical challenges faced by similar organisations, are they growing or declining headcount, etc.

This datapoint brings mixed emotions. On one side, I'm happy for the deep customer focus; on the other side, I think their should be a more efficient way to get base level information.

As James Dixon shares below, in recent months we've leaned into leveraging our new GenAI features to save time and help sellers have higher quality conversations with their clients.

Key questions for you to ask: If we break the week into 40 hours, how is the team spending their time? Here is a list of activities to get you started: Admin, Research, Compliance, Sales Training, Internal Meetings, Internal Reporting, Prospecting, Preparing Presentations, Updating Internal Systems, Meeting Clients, Client Follow-up. In a perfect world, how do we want our team spending their time? Where can we reduce slack and give time back?

Idea 4: Focus attention on the only metric that matters - our speed to high quality meetings with the people that matter

A review of my team's forecasted deals over two quarters, uncovered a fascinating insight. The deals which we won had an average of 10.4 new connections within the client account during the sales cycle. The deals we lost had an average of 1.4 new connections with the client during the sales cycle. In other words, the speed by which we went broad and deep within an account was the game.

As an interesting side note, I recently learned through a leaked email that Mark Zuckerberg focused his whole business on "Development Speed" in 2008. In Mark's words, "The reason our development speed is so important is because it is effectively how well we are executing. We can have a great strategy but if we're slow at implementing it then we still won't succeed." I think the exact same principle applies in B2B sales, the speed in which you develop relationships is the game. You can have a great account strategy, but if you're slow having high-quality meetings with the people that matter, you won't succeed.

Key questions for you to ask: What metrics actually matter? How can we accelerate our speed-to-meeting with the people that matter?

Idea 5: Run a warm referral sprint to increase speed to high quality meetings

This is something my colleague Alana Brittain created. She got everyone in her team (~20 people) in a room and they spent 25mins looking for warm introductions into one reps book of business. The 25 minute warm referral sprint, resulted in 58 new warm paths, one day later that rep had 11 new meetings in her calendar. She repeated exercise for each team member.

Key questions for you to ask: Why wouldn't we do this? How can we streamline the warm referral process? Can we reduce slack in the system by batching internal referral requests?

Idea 6: Help customer go from good-to-great by building simpler business cases, faster

As Nate Nasralla shared last week (post), building the customer business case is the sales process. The fastest way to do this is to start all customer meetings with an overview that summarises what you've learned about the customers goals, challenges and environment.

The deeper you go with an engagement the more this overview becomes an Exec Summary of the value the customer is currently getting, or the opportunity the customer has to create more value through specific actions.

A great exec summary acts like a trailer to a blockbuster movie, it gives you the overarching view and excites you to invest more time and attention in the conversation. It also helps you navigate what is important to the customer and accelerate speed to customer value.

Key questions for you to ask: Can we create a central repository of our best client business cases? What do these business cases have in common? How can we bring common elements to the start of all client meetings?

Idea 7: Help more customers go from good-to-great by having senior leaders amplify valuable content

Senior sales leaders have amazing networks, generally they are connected to more senior decision makers across your customer base than any individual sales rep or team. Their reach provides a fantastic opportunity to amplify and scale content that helps others be successful.

Using the example above, Alana Brittain did a great job getting the warm referral post out, then Alyssa Merwin Henderson added rocket fuel by resharing it. This action generated 909 more likes for the content and 103 more comments, extending this insight into more sales orgs around the world.

Key questions for you to ask: What types of insights will help our customers go from good-to-great? How can we encourage our team to share more authentic content that will help our customers? How can we help amplify and scale great content? (hint: linking, commenting and re-sharing is a great start)

Idea 8: Start all internal Deal Reviews with LinkedIn Account Maps open

LinkedIn Sales Navigator recently launched a new feature called Account Maps. In my 10 years at LinkedIn it is the single most valuable tool I've used to collaborate with team members on deals. Essentially, it creates a shared organisational view of the client and dynamically highlights warm paths, the people we've worked with before, and the people we need to know.

One of the hardest parts of any deal review is getting everyone on the same page. Account Maps reduce this process by an order of magnitude and creates more time for a robust and meaningful dialogue about the deal.

Key questions for you to ask: Which client personas do we engage with? For the deals we lost, who did we miss and how did we miss them? Do we have any hidden allies within the buying group?

Thank you to James Dixon, Roger Lu, Alana Brittain, Fiona Pettigrew, Charith Moonesinghe and Ashley Tait for helping craft this post. I truely believe that change creates opportunity. The world of B2B sales is going through a step change and those people who move fast will capture the upside.

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