Study Reveals Why B2B Salespeople Lose Deals

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles titled “Ten Reasons Salespeople Lose Deals.”

Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to interview several hundred business-to-business salespeople about how they win-over prospective clients and the circumstances when they lose. These interviews were conducted with salespeople across a wide variety of industries including high technology, telecommunications, financial services, consulting, industrial equipment, healthcare, and electronics to name a few. Their companies ranged from start-ups to billions of dollars in sales with the majority being between fifty and five-hundred million in annual revenues.

Why Value Trumps Selling in the Complex B2B Sales Cycle

In 2011 the Marketing Leadership Council surveyed 1900 customers to uncover insight regarding B2B purchasing behavior. It turns out, that on average (and with little variation among industries) customers will contact Sales when they independently completed about 60% of the purchasing decision process. That’s right. When you get that coveted form completion on the website “Contact Us” or a phone call to sales, chances are your prospect has weighed the alternatives and more than likely is ready to do business with you. In many cases, prospects are so educated they may even know more about your products and services (and competitive alternatives) than your own sales reps.

B2B Marketing & Sales Insights from Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research

I had the great the opportunity to interview Lori Wizdo, B2B marketing analyst at Forrester Research. Lori is a senior analyst with extensive marketing, sales, and operation experience in the information systems and software industries.

In our discussion, Lori shared key insights into the B2B buyer's journey as well as marketing and sales alignment.

There's a lot of discussion in the marketplace about articles you've written, including "The Lead-Nurturing Payoff For The Tech Industry." In that article and elsewhere, you've suggested that many buyers get as far as 70 percent through the sales cycle before they find it useful to engage the sales teams. Does that figure depend on the type of solution? Does the complexity of the solution change things?

5 Steps to Identify Qualified Leads

Not everyone on Earth is a prospect for your product or service. If you're pitching to people who truly don't need or can't buy what you have to sell, you're wasting your time. So take a few minutes to qualify your leads before launching into a full-bore sales presentation.

Are They the Decision Maker?
The very first thing you should find out is whether the person you're talking to is authorized to buy from you. In B2B sales you may need to seek out a purchasing person, the department head, the office manager, or even the company owner. In B2C your prospect may need or want to share the decision with a spouse, parent or significant other. 

When B2B Cross Selling Goes Bad

My new book, Account Planning in Salesforce, is due to be published at the end of March 2013.  I am excited about it.  As you would expect from anyone book on account planning it dives into the benefits of generating more sales from existing customers. Selling to an existing customer is easier than acquiring a new customer, and there is much research to support that.  But as I researched the cross-selling and up-selling activities of the ‘average’ B2B salesperson, I noticed some behavior that I think merits comment.

For B2Bs, Mobile Is Key to Unlocking Sales and Loyalty

As Ogilvy & Mather’s director of digital strategy, Jeff Stokvis works closely with the agency’s B2B clients and is a member of Ogilvy’s Mobile@Ogilvy cross-functional working group. Stokvis spoke with eMarketer’s Tobi Elkin for the B2B Perspectives series about the ways mobile is changing how B2B marketers communicate and the untapped business opportunities that mobile offers them.

eMarketer: Is there a low awareness among B2B marketers about the impact that mobile can have on their business? 

The Cost of Misaligned B2B Marketing

When alignment is discussed in marketing, the usual application is to sales and marketing alignment. This has been an ongoing conversation for nearly as long as I can remember. And I've been in the business environment for quite a while.

The issue that comes up for me is that there are some alignment issues before we can even get to sales and marketing alignment that could have major implications for brands, if they took stock.

What I'm talking about are two sources of fragmentation - the second driven by the first.

• marketing misalignment
• customer misalignment

But, first, let's start by defining what "alignment" really means. According to dictionary.com:

    Alignment is a state of agreement or cooperation among persons, groups, etc. with a common cause or viewpoint. 

6 Things Every Customer Wants

Contrary to popular belief, customers are less interested in price than in these six things.

All customers want the highest quality at the lowest price, right? Well, sort of. That stuff is important but, surprisingly, the quality vs. price formula is not usually on the top of the customer's list of concerns, especially when it comes to selling B2B.

According to numerous surveys, B2B customers want the following six things from the people who sell to them: 

How to Speak to a Group

Many salespeople find themselves giving sales presentations to quite large groups of people, especially in complex B2B sales. You might have to present to multiple decision makers, end users, lawyers, purchasing agents, department heads, etc. all at the same time. Speaking to a large group of people is very different from speaking to just one or two – and it's often unnerving for the speaker.

The Five Habits Affecting Your Lead Generation Campaign

It is so easy to conduct a lead generation campaign. What is so hard is actually generating B2B leads. And if you look back at the factors affecting sales leads productivity, you might be surprised to discover that most of these reasons could be traced back at you. Indeed, when it comes to getting more business coming in, most of the reasons that affects performance is all up to you. Your habits, your attitudes, as well as outlook over your business can have a negative impact on your campaign. Creating problems in your campaign is the last thing you would want to happen. Now, what are the things that can cause you to mess up?

Is B2B Social Media Marketing Behind B2C?

The Perception

There seems to be a general perception that social media is better suited for B2C versus B2B marketing.  This view is supported by a general lack of easily accessible social media success stories in the B2B space; on the Internet and at conferences.  But it is a misconception.

The Reality

7 Rules for Perfecting Best Practices in B2B Business Development

Musicians know it takes practice to perform at their peak. The authors of Practice Perfect stress that practice makes permanent – so you had better get it right. So, based on what we’ve been learning with our clients, here are 7 rules for perfecting best practices in B2B Business Development:

1/ Find Target Accounts Where Your Offering Will Matter Most
Firms vary in the types of pressures that they’re under. Not every firm equally faces pressures that your offering alleviates. Focus on practices that most efficiently identify firms where you’ve the greatest chance of creating value and having an impact. Focus matters.

Hot B2B Internet Marketing Tip for 2013

"According to internetworldstats.com, 2.3 billion people worldwide are online. That is a staggering one third of the entire global population! And it is a market that is growing at super nova speed. Building on a growth rate of 528% over the last 11 years, this astounding growth rate is accelerating, thanks to rapid advances in broadband and smartphone technology" explains Terrazas.

This phenomenal growth of the online market has certainly not escaped the attention of Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers, a fact that is evidenced by global e-commerce sales data from Goldman Sachs, which shows that online sales figures have grown from $572.5 billion in 2010 to $820.5 billion in 2012. And this market is expected to swell to an astounding $963 billion in 2013!
"Within this vast and rapidly growing online market there is a very distinct and lucrative sector that remains largely untapped: the large and constantly growing B2B online market" notes Terrazas.

Types of Professional Buyers

If you sell B2B, you probably deal with a lot of professional buyers. Buyers are responsible for finding materials for their companies, and they can literally lose their jobs if they make a bad deal – so they take purchasing very seriously. Experienced buyers know more about sales than many salespeople. Using sales tricks and manipulation tactics on a professional buyer is usually a bad idea, as they'll spot these tactics immediately and won't be happy. Instead, the best way to sell to a professional is to figure out what motivates them and then supply it. Different types of buyers tend to be motivated by different drives and goals, so being able to spot each type early in the sales process is crucial.

3 Ways Curation Grows Opportunities in B2B Sales

Remember the business conference or sales offsite you attended to sharpen your skills – perhaps you were a speaker. Even if you were an attendee, you can benefit from being connected to a great event through curation.
Curation is when you pull together pieces and parts of the event you attended and create one single place people can go online to see more about it. The same idea works in networking – instead of being a spoke, you become the hub.  I’ll give a few examples below, and ways that this grows business.

3 Underutilized B2B Sales Strategies in Social Media

People we know in midmarket companies tend to do what works – until it doesn’t work so well any more. Most companies are not proactive to research what is on the horizon – they simply don’t have time or resources to do so.

When it comes to integrating online and social activities into their marketing and sales strategies it seems like there are two camps – those that “get it” and those who will wait till there is more “proof” that social selling actually works. Black and white. Right or wrong.

B2B Lead Generation: Getting on the same page

A lead is a lead. Or is it?

I always recommend to my sale lead consulting clients that they create a glossary of terms related to their B2B lead generation programs. Why? To reduce misunderstandings.

Here's a first draft of a glossary I gave one of my clients to help them get started writing theirs. Perhaps it can be a starting place for yours too.

The 4 Bs of B2B Social Media

It's all about business for any company engaging in social media. Sometimes we forget that these platforms are a means to an end. That end is revenue. All the effort to win fans, followers, interactions, comments and click-thrus is part of a comprehensive effort to increase visibility, generate leads and sell products.

So, why is social media so important for companies selling products and services to other companies? It's all about the 4 Bs.

Social CRM: How Can It Make Money?

Once the consumer world shifted primarily online, the business world followed. The move to relating to the customer who absorbs and shares products and information in 140 characters or less culminated with the rise of social customer relationship management (CRM). The market for social CRM, and the applications it has produced to track customer habits, relationships and activity via social media platforms, has drastically orbited into relevance in the past year.

Social Networking Meets B2B Marketing

Ed Buchholz found venture funding for his startup on Twitter.

After releasing the first version of its forecasting and management tool for small businesses, 60mo, a 10-person startup in Cleveland, Ohio, needed to raise capital. Buchholz's first choice was Lightbank, a new fund in Chicago. Buchholz tried all the usual channels -- phone calls, emails, submitting through Lightbank's website -- but received no response.

So he Tweeted, "Hey @Lightbank, we should chat sometime. Mid-westerners gotta stick together, yo."

Someone from Lightbank responded immediately, setting up a meeting for two days later. Buchholz left that meeting with an offer.