“The behaviors of B2B buyers have changed dramatically over the last few years as they rely on digital channels to augment the buying process.”

“Unfortunately, sales organizations often still try to force B2B buyers into a linear buying journey that transitions buyers in between marketing and sales experiences.”

“Gartner research has found that 75% of buyers now prefer a rep-free experience. But that could be because they’re not getting the right kind of digital experience.” 

“B2B buyers who encountered consistent information from the supplier website and sales reps were more likely to complete a high-quality deal. 

Sales leaders should maximize opportunities by:

• Using website tracking and seller action plans to be digitally immersed with the customer and fully aligned with their needs. 

• Unifying sales and marketing efforts in a digital sales room to close deals faster and more effectively.

• Improving commercial potential by embracing revenue enablement technology.”

• Realign candidate profiles on skills and behaviors: Align competencies to actual work, audit job descriptions and recruit from non-traditional sources. 
• Refocus diverse talent attraction and retention: Promote visible diversity in leadership, eliminate negative perceptions and create consequential accountability.
• Resolve compensation disparity and bias: Conduct pay equity audits, implement objective compensation policies and influence CEO, CFO and board of directors.

“Most tech investments are not focused on the sales manager.” 

“There needs to be a plan for how managers can make better use of existing tech, and this requires equipping them with insights to provide better guidance, and to see where risks and opportunities lie.”

“Sales manager technology should either reduce burden and help focus, or increase impact – ideally both.”

“Three ‘secret sauce’ technologies that help sales managers achieve this include:

• Revenue intelligence to better identify revenue risks and take appropriate actions, before it’s too late. This allows managers to spend less time on things like interrogating sellers about pipeline and forecasts.

• Conversation intelligence to gain better insight into issues that might derail specific deals. Use this to increase win rates, tailor coaching to the specific nuances of each deal and scale coaching efforts and replicate winning behaviors.

• Rep performance management to become aware of and alleviate issues that block individual seller growth to improve their productivity and, therefore, drive stronger sales performance.”

“Although data literacy is considered a top priority for many sales leaders, there are four key trends that indicate it should be deprioritized: 1) increased seller workload; 2) stratified sellers roles; 3) technological advancements; 4) evolution of RevOps.”

“Rather than dragging sellers down by overemphasizing data literacy, CSOs should guide them with insights by following these three principles: 

• Tailor insights to seller experience. Take a walk in their shoes to see whether insights are getting the right adoption from sellers, catalyzing the right behaviors, and driving the desired results. Adjust where necessary.

• Use your revenue technology as a catalyst to creating and distributing insights. Prioritize seamless integration over feature richness, but be sure to use technology to augment human judgment rather than replace it.

• Foster trust in data through plan-language stories and proper governance. Maintain regular dialog between sellers and sales operations.” 

“Following these principles will enable sales leaders to advance sales operations to be data-literate champions of insights.”