The big picture and elephant-in-the-room; There’s a reason you or your sales team didn’t hit your sales quota and a reason why marketing keeps hitting their KPIs and implying sales can’t sell or close.  This perennial sales dilemma is rooted in an blatant misalignment of strategies, which has perplexing every CEO for the past twenty years!

B2B sales teams today face unprecedented challenges, from longer sales cycles to unresponsive prospects. These issues can leave you questioning whether your sales process needs a revamp. For insights into aligning sales and marketing strategies, explore "How to Bridge the Gap Between B2B Sales and Marketing". Learn how real-world marketing strategies can inform your decisions in "Proven Examples of Successful B2B Marketing Strategies". To tackle digital approaches for enhanced sales processes, read "A Winning Strategy for B2B Digital Selling". Finally, explore actionable tactics in "Effective Digital Marketing Tactics for B2B Success".

You'll Discover:

• Why your sales cycles are taking longer and how to shorten them.
• Common obstacles preventing prospects from engaging with your team.
• Solutions to align your sales strategy with modern buyer expectations.
• How to identify and address bottlenecks in your sales funnel.

The B2B Sales Challenges

B2Bs are at a crisis point in their journeys. Marketing and new business success has been on the decline for twenty years or more.  Most believed the Internet would enable businesses to do away with cold-calling and maintain a steady increase of new business.  It never happened.

Instead, most B2B SaaS businesses opted for equity-backed investment, raising capital to reinvest in expansion, R&D and most importantly in sales, marketing and customer success, with the largest percentage of the money raised going to sales and marketing.  Yet still, over 50% of the reasons businesses fail is because of marketing and the same percentages of businesses fail every year crystalising the endemic problem.

As the saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and nothing illustrates this more than the number of businesses still employing BDRs and telesales, with a success rate of 300 calls to finding one person who may be interested. No matter how you dress this up, because businesses are still using a seventy-year-old approach to generating new business, it indicates a significant failure in marketing automation related strategies.

The accepted approach to generating new business is still a one-to-one effort and no matter how much money is raised by a B2B organisation, they will never achieve the necessary ratios of people to profitability to make the business fly.

After twenty years and some of the most amazing technological developments in software and products, the most significant B2B sales challenge is attempting to exceed the B2B and SaaS industry average of $90k ARR-FTE.  This can only be put into perspective when you consider Google is at $2m, Microsoft at $1m and Adobe at $500k.

B2Bs have helped the above businesses to become extraordinarily wealthy by doing what they have told the B2Bs to do, i.e., keep paying them for their automation and SaaS related offerings, leaving you hoping you can scale up your business.  Sadly this has never happened.

Outdated B2B Sales Strategies

Don’t take my word for it, ask your existing board of directors how they purchased their last large ticket item.  Did they get cold-called?  Most definitely not and would never allow themselves to be influenced by a mere salesperson.  Here goes: - 

• The main buyer (CEO or CXO) tells subordinate to research your type of product
• 100% of buyers hate marketing automation form (Demandbase 2023)
• The main buyer kept his/her eye open for alternative options and often found a solution too
• Marketing automation forms are completed by subordinates, not CXOs
• Marketing automation forms restrict prospects from learning
• Marketing automation forms make prospects unsubscribe immediately after they access a page or download a document
• When the subordinate eventually provided various options, the main buyer would ask if the solution they found was included. If it wasn’t, it is now!
• The decision-making process always takes as long as it needs to, and no salesperson could ever influence an earlier close date – without losing gross profit or even the deal itself!

People buy people!  This has long been a mantra for sales trainers, but due to marketing 'hijacking' sales, the necessity of salespeople has been deliberately diminished to the point of some marketing department severely criticising salespeople for being incapable oif doing their sales jobs.  The friction created between sales and marketing was entirely created by marketers who believed they had the upper hand within the business. 

The B2B sales challenge is to redesign the approach to selling products and services, to make selling easier for B2B salespeople, delivering exactly what the customer wants and ceases to spend valuable resources, human and financial on digital strategies that can be proven to not work.

The only reason they continue is because no one has come up with a better idea, until now!

The B2B Marketing Process

• Pay-per-click Google or LinkedIn try to catch everyone and catches no one
• Marketing departments DO NOT identify their total addressable markets, acquire databases, clean them up and then implement dual campaigns of email and PPC
• 100% of buyers hate filling out demand generation forms
• Marketing automation landing pages are misleading as don’t give accurate information or the content is thin and or out-dated
• Websites are not used to help educate, only provide a resource to capture prospect details
• No educational content is open access. Automation forms restrict visibility
• Automation forms hide content from Google search and prospects
• Marketing automation forms are typically used to illicit prospect contact details for BDRs to call
• Marketing departments do not adhere to funnel-based lead scoring analysis from automation platforms as in doing so, they would be unable to achieve MQLs, let alone SQLs and their KPIs

It is little wonder salespeople complain about the lack of leads when marketers are disinterested in the plight of sales and only focus on their KPIs.

The B2B Sales Teams Struggle

Let’s get started with some home-truths we’ve all struggled with: -

• Your performance is down because you don’t talk to enough prospects
• You don’t talk to enough prospects because your BDRs can’t find anyone interested
• Your company’s marketing is ineffective, making BDRs efforts much harder
• If a prospect were interested, they began looking months ago, and not at your product
• Prospects don’t want you to know they’re looking
• Prospects don’t want you to cold call them
• Prospects want to self-serve, but your website has demand generation forms
• Prospects want to self-educate, but your content is all about your company
• Prospects want to work out their own ROI before they contact you, but you haven’t explained it on your website

Salespeople are told to follow the marketing.  Therefore, no salesperson can influence his or her performance.

Digital SaaS-based marketing automation has never worked for B2Bs, yet to disguise this fact, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) was introduced in 2016, creating additional layers of complexity and making B2Bs believe they were unable to make digital marketing work.  B2Bs believed it was the fault of CMOs, hence the average tenure is between nine to eighteen months.

The B2B Sales Process Solution

The solution: is to reach your total addressable market at scale, identify the active buyers, meet them on their terms and facilitate new business by attraction, not interruption. Everything in this strategy is to grow B2B revenue and avoid failure!  This approach ensures that your prospects engage with you voluntarily and positively, rather than feeling intruded upon or pressured.

It requires advance preparation, from adapting website content, website access and exploiting social media, to video, to podcasting and live streaming.

It entails a complete review of marketing and redeployment of some salespeople.

The solution will take approximately four months to activate, will exponentially increase exposure to every identified target market business, and create a stream of new business engagement and enquiries.  It should also reduce current marketing expenditure by as much as 75%.    

Your B2B Challenge...

As a CEO, CRO, VP of Sales or salesperson of a B2B SaaS organisation experiencing low ARR. Poor quota achievement or missing annual targets, your next move is to recommend an internal meeting to discuss this existing problem, and future possibilities and success your organisation could achieve by implementing the salesXchange SYSTEM.

Like everything else, first there must be an agreed understanding of what has happened in the past and for you (the CEO) and board to realise there is an alternative and an answer to the new business sales dilemma.

Then invite me to share my professional experience and explanation how The SYSTEM could affect your organisation.