Navigating the seismic shift in B2B sales to the non-linear buying journey: Part 3

There are many challenges facing business today for CEO’s in leading their organizations, especially with B2B sales and marketing having seismic change from the pandemic. I have worked closely with multiple CEO’s during my 15+ years with P/L expertise growing $100+M in annual quota or during the 8+ years as an entrepreneurial executing on our created go-to-market strategies leveraging dynamic market conditions. We used my “Inquisitor Learning Methodology” (ILM) to diagnose business challenges that define the critical underlying difficulties facing our organization.

In the original blog Discovering the 10 most difficult business problems all CEO's must immediately interpret and solve to unlock consistent growth in ongoing pandemic economy, I briefly described the leading challenges and here will take a deeper look at one of the problems. This is part three in the series how to address the customer journey and with the sales pipeline.

No longer is the customer sales journey a linear process. B2B prospects have changed their process and buying methodology several years ago and that has significantly increased since the start of the pandemic. My experience is organizations are moving from the initial needs assessments to proposal and back to needs assessment multiple times to come to a decision then back to needs assessments all in the typical prospect sales journey. Before covering the recommendations, first a brief overview of why this is taking place in organizations.

• Product Research: Organizations no longer rely on the sales professional to provide the facts and information needed to make a decision. Limited in-person sales calls move the buyer into self-reliance for discovery. They want to self-serve to learn about vendors on website, industry publications and competitors website.

• Culture: Organizations are digging deep to create and integrate working relationships across the various departments to improve collaboration and organizational buy-in. This means more than one business owner and typically more than one leader’s budget.

• Team Cohesion: One of the 10 problems we identified in the initial CEO blog: the need to have remote team members have a sense belonging and participation. More influencers in the room, more stakeholders need to buy-in. More back and forth in the sales journey and pipeline tracking.

• Integrations: Enterprise business applications, with more departments and people using the application are being impacted by making any change. This increases integration, increases the sales complexity and time to come to a decision. The proper scoping of the project completely is difficult and time consuming.

• Decision processes: Because the above, the decision process is more complex with more stakeholders, influencers, decision makers and budget approvals means less of a linear process and more back and forth movement in the pipeline stages.

There are many contributing factors in making the sales journey non-linear and therefore breaking the sales pipeline stages. Gartner’s research documents sales organizations should focus on tracking customer completing tasks versus the traditional pipeline stages. Gartner recommends completed tasks are a better predictor of pipeline status and the real close dates. This is my exact experience the better indicator of prospect decision timeline is completed tasks. Here is a summary of the contributing elements to sync the sales journey with the pipeline.

• Buyer Discovery: Self-service functionality and content on your website is a minimum requirement especially for enterprise decisions. Tracking these discovery actions or tasks by user and incorporating the tasks into your CRM is critical. This requires integration of marketing tools, sales forces automation and CRM. This is a digital roadmap coupled with your physical sales teams.

• Verification: Do you know the critical tasks for buyer to make a purchase? Do you understand the end-to-end journey? Does your pipeline track and document each task? This requires rich and dynamic customer engagement and digital models from multiple sources. It must include the prospect’s problems being solved and what organizational initiative does the decision address.

• Buyer Decisions: Does your pipeline process including the buyer purchasing processes after getting to the decision? Who will sign and how will the contract be done? These tasks have to be capture, documented and tracked as part of your sales journey.

No longer is customer sales journey a linear process as it has changed to be a combination of digital, physical and a more complex process . Prospect organizations consistently seek to improve their organizational performance typically large initiatives and internal digital transformations. These have fundamentally changed their buying process and methodology. In response, sales organizations need to invest in modifying their sales journey, integrating marketing sales tools (analytics and tracking) and update sales pipeline using a new methodology.

If you would like to discuss the specifics of your organization please reach out and I look forward to learning about your particulars.

Note:

These elements that are incorporated into the post:

· Real World Experiences: Lessons learned from my experiences are always bolded and blue.

· Critical Competencies: These are tangible proven skills sets that I have developed over my career. These should give insight into my competency and are highlighted in yellow.