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How to Solve One of the Biggest Problems in Sales

By Chris Beall

Following up with prospects and customers is a staple of sales. Everyone knows they “should” do it. In fact, you could argue that CRM systems exist primarily to support following up, broadly speaking.

Think about it this way. Contemporary CRMs define a “lead” as someone worth a follow-up attempt, to be converted into a “contact” (a person) at an “account” (a company) when that follow-up bears fruit – sometimes when a discovery conversation is scheduled or maybe when that conversation discovers there is an “opportunity.” Opportunities are worked through defined stages until they close as wins or losses.

It all sounds very neat and orderly. Interest, followed by contact, followed by discovery, followed by opportunity, followed by closing. A nice, linear process.

The Real Flow of Your Sales Funnel

We call it a “funnel” to recognize inevitable attrition along the way. Then we do “funnel math” to figure out how many leads need to go in the top of the sales funnel to produce the desired flow of closed deals out of the bottom.

The sales funnel metaphor tells us lots of important things. But, unfortunately, it paints a picture that leaves out the most common – and, therefore, the most important – outcome of any sales interaction. The flow of the funnel makes us pay attention to the positive flow: the conversations that end in yes! The shape of the funnel tells us that no is also heard along the way.

The Proper Approach to Your Sales Funnel Math

But what about those other two sales conversation outcomes: “not me” and “not now”? Are they important to our funnel math?

It turns out that a conversation that ends in “not me” can, if handled deftly, yield a referral: a semi-magical lead that has a good chance of being reached and being the right person to talk with. Referrals transform so-so leads into “right parties.”

In terms of funnel math, however, a “not me”  doesn’t really do anything. One “Ray Wrong” becomes one “Rae Right” – nice, but it creates no real change to how many leads must go in the top to make your sales goals.

If the obviously positive “not me” doesn’t affect funnel math much, then it would seem “not now” would do even less. After all, if someone isn’t ready to do business with us now, shouldn’t we boot them out of our funnel and send them back to the marketing department to be nurtured until ready to engage in our sales process?

You see, “not me” is treated like dark matter – that stuff that makes up 60 percent of all the mass in the universe. Dark matter bends space-time so galaxies spin way faster than they should, yet it is invisible to us and our instruments.

In other words, dark matter dominates the shape and velocity of our “funnels” (the Milky Way and all those other galaxies) but doesn’t yield new stars or even a little light to brighten up our dark skies.

Two Problems with Prospects and Timing

Why does the “not now” factor dominate and cause so many salespeople to have conversations with prospects who say they’re not ready to make a purchase right now? There are two factors:

  1. Product replacement cycles tend to be long. When we buy a product (or a service to solve a problem) we usually aren’t looking to replace it for about three years. That means an intrinsically qualified buyer (our dream client) is only in the market for our category of product for one out of every 12 calendar quarters. That means a perfectly executed sales conversation with a perfectly qualified buyer will yield “not now” almost 92 percent of the time. That’s dominance!

  2. There is only one reliable way to find out if the timing is right for the prospective buyer to consider your product category: have a live conversation. Sure, there are vendors who claim they have dark matter detectors that can tell you when buyers are ripe and ready to make a purchase. But none of their techniques based on publicly available – and, therefore, competitively irrelevant – data can compete with a skillfully managed conversation.

So, we have a 92 percent dominant sales factor – timing – that can only be reliably determined by a rather expensive measurement: a conversation. Our standard funnel treats this dominant set of potential opportunities as “disqualified” and sends them back to marketing for nurturing. In other words, they’re thrown away in the vain hope they will come back on their own when they are ready.

But what if we could capture that 92 percent instead of throwing them aside? The effect on our funnel should be massive! This is especially true if we are capturing them, and our fiercest competitor is using the standard “send them to marketing for lead nurturing” program.

It turns out that, by using one simple mechanism, we can do that: by systematically following up “not now” conversations with (wait for it…) conversations! These can certainly be interspersed with the usual email “drip campaign,” (by the way, who named this anyway? Is being dripped on really that great?), but the key is the follow-up conversation itself. An email, no matter how full of compelling content, won’t give you the answer to the question of whether “now” has arrived.

The Benefits of Following Up with Phone Conversations

The good news is that the numbers work strongly in your favor, three ways:

  1. It’s usually easier to get prospects on the phone when making a follow-up call. The “2017 Follow-Up Conversation Study,” which analyzed almost 20 million dials in 2017, found that follow-up dial attempts reach the right party 1.35 times as often as cold dial attempts. This is not because these people are psychic and know it’s their favorite salesperson calling. It’s because follow-up lists consist entirely of people who have answered the phone before. In other words, the first conversation (or cold call) yielded one additional piece of information: this person is more likely than average to answer phone calls.
  2. The same study found it is 1.68 times easier to set a meeting from a follow-up conversation than from a first conversation. The reasons for this are more subtle. First, if the timing is ever going to be better, it will be in the future – and, on a follow-up call,  the future is now! Second, the conversation is easier to get started with rapport, because you can begin where you left off – especially if you wrote your future self a mini-script based on the previous conversation. Third, it is possible that humans are more likely to listen to someone whose voice they have heard before.
  3. The combined effect of harvesting all this “not now” dark matter is that follow-up conversations are 2.26 times more efficient than cold conversations end to end – from the dial attempt through setting the appointment. This is like having your team of 10 sales professionals magically turn into a happy band of 26 without spending a penny.

To summarize, “not now” timing is the dominant problem to be solved in B2B sales. Like dark matter, it makes up the bulk of our sales conversation universe. But, unlike dark matter, it turns out there is a simple way to tame the bad timing problem: systematically follow “not now” conversations with appropriately timed future conversations.

What’s even better: Follow-up conversations are cheaper and easier to get, more pleasant to have, and have much higher yield than first conversations!

In a way, there’s nothing to solving the biggest problem in sales. Here’s the formula:

  1. Use cold conversations to manufacture follow-up opportunities – and some meetings.
  2. Have follow-up conversations to set more meetings or at least to manufacture more follow-up opportunities.

Problem solved. Must be time to go back to figuring out that dark matter thing.

Hear Chris Beall speak at the Sales 3.0 Conference March 12-13 in San Francisco, where he will present “What Every Sales Leader Must Know about the Artificial Intelligence-enabled Salesperson” with Bruce Lewolt, CEO and Co-founder, BrainX and JoyisJoy.com.

Chris Beall is CEO of ConnectAndSell. He has been participating in software start-ups as a founder or at a very early stage for most of the past 30 years. His focus has consistently been on creating and taking to market simple products that can be used successfully the first time they are touched, without taking a course or reading a manual. His belief is that the most powerful part of any software system is the human being we inappropriately call a “user,” and that the value key in software is to let the computer do what it does well (go fast without getting bored) in order to free up human potential.

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Three Ways B2B Sales Leaders Can Enable Channel Partner Success

By Jason Angelos

In the search for growth, companies have undertaken significant steps to rapidly extend their indirect sales networks and engage new types of channel partners. But many firms have failed to underpin them with the capabilities and policies necessary to enable insight, influence, and collaboration across these extended networks.

Just 21 percent of B2B leaders today say they have total control over their sales networks and overall customer experience, and another 84 percent have no visibility into sales partner opportunity pipelines, according to a new study on B2B customer experience from Accenture Strategy.

The report highlighted that 90 percent of B2B leaders around the world believe customer experience is central to the growth agenda of their companies, but very few are getting it right. Those with little control or oversight of their partners’ sales, marketing, and customer engagement channels are at a significant disadvantage.

Without the right CX capabilities, B2B companies can’t build relationships with loyal customers who spend more, they miss out on growth opportunities that reside outside the traditional sales cycle, and they incur huge opportunity costs by failing to capture renewals.

If B2B firms are to tap the potential of their extended channel networks, they should trade in the traditional “light-touch” partner management strategies of the past in favor of “ecosystem orchestration” – an approach that enables the flow of information, resources, processes, and services across a partner network to deliver compelling customer experiences and drive selling opportunities.

There are already signs that B2B companies are ready to pick up the baton. According to the study:

  • Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of B2B leaders acknowledge they want to get better at leveraging ecosystems to deliver superior CX.
  • They are embracing data-driven approaches and endeavor to understand their partners’ performance and priorities as well as their own.
  • Companies with effective partner lead generation and coaching are 63 percent more likely to beat their indirect channel revenue goals.

In short, what’s needed today is a sales ecosystem that works as an extension of the core business and enables trusted relationships with select partners. These key partners don’t just pass along a product or service to customers; they share resources and insights to deliver better CX and create value. As B2B leaders ponder front-office investments, better customer data management and insightful analytics have the potential to be the currency that drives ecosystem growth in the future.

To enable sales success, B2B leaders must:

  1. Regain visibility and control – Take control of B2B CX by replacing traditional partner management with an ecosystem approach that treats all partners as an extension of internal operations. Ecosystem orchestrators view partners as more than service providers: They are enablers of new business models and customer strategies. The focus should not be on ensuring territory coverage or sales volume, but on co-creating value by delivering exceptional customer experiences.
  1. Build true partnerships – Businesses can deliver truly compelling experiences only if they are armed with deep insight of their customers’ preferences and habits. To enable connected insights and build trust across the ecosystem, companies should establish feedback mechanisms and data sharing processes that clarify key roles and responsibilities for improving CX and sales. Partners need to be engaged and encouraged to share customer insights through value-adding activities such as customer events and sales lead generation, building true partnerships that deliver clear value.
  2. Leverage data to foster connected growth – B2B companies are behind their B2C counterparts in using technology to understand customers and devise CX strategies. By rolling out better customer data management technologies and embedding advanced analytics into CX processes, B2B companies can quickly bridge this gap.

B2B leaders recognize the imperative to reinvest in customer experience, but they are struggling with a loss of control. As they grow their indirect channels, this issue will only get worse.

With their future growth prospects at stake, B2B executives must determine how to improve CX while ceding more of the experience to their partners. The answer lies in adopting an ecosystem mindset and focusing on building a connected and trusting environment with value-adding partners who can co-create new experiences that delight customers and help deliver connected growth.

Jason Angelos is a senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, where he helps global organizations plan, architect, and deploy innovative and highly agile sales solutions that drive more profitable growth. With nearly two decades of experience, he specializes in sales spend optimization, price and profit optimization, execution and operations excellence, sales talent enablement, and digital selling and dynamic channels.