The moment of truth arrives when a prospect is engaged in a meaningful interaction with your organization.
For B2B marketers that key point is the response generated from a marketing effort through direct, online or social media marketing.
For sales, it is the sales conversation: that defining moment when a prospect is engaged, qualified and profiled through a dynamic dialog.
The sales conversation is being shaped by a number of strong forces:
- Buyers increasingly prefer online and telephone discussions rather than face-to-face discussions. By necessity or due to communications and online research preferences, buyers have moved away from face-to-face meetings. For more on this, read the post: Selling to the Digital Buyer.
- Buyers don’t find value in sales discussions. Surveys of buyers identify a crisis in the sales conversation: McKinsey found that the two most destructive sales behaviors were inadequate product knowledge and excessive customer contact. In IDC‘s 2010 IT Customer Experience study, over 50% of IT sales reps are showing up to their prospect and customer meetings ‘unprepared’. Forrester Research reports that only 15% of executives believe that sales meetings live up to expectations.
- New offerings lower buyer risk and the need for face-to-face meetings. Buyers can take lengthy free trials and upgrade to a fully functional solution later (i.e. the freemium model). Products can be purchased is small quantities (i.e. online data) or rent, rather than buy, a solution that is hosted off-premise (i.e. SaaS, hosted solutions).
- The weak economic outlook is causing organizations to economize on sales models. Creating less resource intensive selling models is a priortiy for many organizations.
The nature of the sales conversation changes depending on the type of sales: inside sales, outside/field sales and hybrid sales – a combination of both inside and outside sales.
One of the largest beneficiaries of changing nature of the sales conversation is the inside sales function.
CSO Insights, a B2B sales researcher, recently released their 2010 Telemarketing Inside Sales Optimization survey.
According to Barry Trailer, Managing Partner for CSO Insights.
There’s a great deal happening in Inside Sales and it’s all very exciting. The adoption of enabling technology, higher percentage of leads being generated by marketing, and anticipated growth in telesales teams this year all suggest this is going to be an increasingly important segment of companies’ overall revenue mix.
The research indicates that one in seven firms plans to increase telemarketing/inside sales reps by more than 20%.
Last year, in a brief entitled ‘The Rapid Rise of Inside Sales’, SiriusDecisions, a provider of B2B research and advisory services in sales and marketing, is bullish on the prospects for inside sales predicting a doubling of the revenue contribution of inside sales to overall corporate revenue.
For buying models that require face-to-face interaction, the opportunity is not to eliminate face-to-face but judiciously mix telephone and online dialog with face-to-face meetings as the buying cycle dictates.
Stuart Armstong, in a comment on my earlier blog post, pointed out some research from Forbes Insight indicates that the majority of business owners and CXO level executives prefer face-to-face meetings (albeit that the research brief is slanted to appeal to the hotel industry and seems to fly in the face of the analyst research listed above). One of the conclusions by Forbes Insight drawn from the research is that:
Web-, video- and teleconferencing have their role, but the executives in the survey do not expect them to make the need for face-to-face meetings obsolete. Rather, many see the ideal as a mix of face-to-face and technology enabled meetings and conferences.
Question: How do you perceive sales models and the sales conversation changing?
Related Posts
Selling to the Digital B2B Buyer
Destructive B2B Sales Practices
Insights on the Outbound Renaissance
