Over the last 16 years, we have always stayed a step ahead of trends affecting enterprise sales teams. We do that by taking the whole sales engagement into account of what we do, not just "calling them" and engaging. When companies understand the need to have the same level of peer level fluency at all stages, then they see results.
Another reason is because the foundational behavior of people hasn't changed. Social Selling is applying the same principles great sales teams have always used, understanding their prospects...it's just doing it virtually now instead of in their office.
Being able to factor in buyer behavior, sales management modeling, technology shifts, current roadmaps for organizations and the resulting changes to how decisions are made to acquire enterprise platforms is what is needed for real sales development effectiveness.
You can't look at sales processes in silos of "marketing does this" and "SDR's do that" and the "direct reps do this.." What can result from not having someone that understands the big picture is a lot of disjointed activity that causes attrition as prospects move to each stage. Each stage sees less and less prospects, and some of ones that were lost those were closable deals.
What's happened? It isn't just one thing, it is many things that create breaks in the prospect relationship along the way.
Just a few of those are:
- Now engaging when the prospect want to engage and is making choices--this is often where you see BANT and out dated qualification methods in play.
- Reps making decisions about how to handle prospects without understanding the big picture--today's buyers require precision with engagement, not just a "follow up" but a correct follow up for the situation.
- Neglect--one of the biggest problems I still see is sales teams don't do what it takes holding onto old-school tactics of 2 emails 2 calls and assuming prospects aren't interested. Sirius Decisions, Forrester, DGR, and many other respected industry sources, including the 1M+ engagements we have done ourselves, prove that to be wrong.
We have worked with organizational psychologists and many professionals to arrive at the design of our solution, this is why it gets results. Are you stepping up your team to align with real-world requirements?
Doing so much work to help companies succeed with sales development is why cold calling works for their programs. I have said many times that people do take calls, they just don't take bad calls.
Are you stepping up to the 3.0 world?
