This article was adapted from a presentation given by Alex at at the Revenue Acceleration Festival in May 2022 when he was Director of Commercial Sales at Outreach. At the time of this publication, he's currently Director of Sales at Catalyst Software.
My name is Alex Kremer, Iâm the Director of Commercial Sales at Outreach.
In this article, Iâll talk about the key to unlocking predictable and efficient growth and how we go about doing that by solving âthe sales execution gapâ.
Hereâs our main talking points:
- The sales execution gap
- B2B sales is complex and dynamic
- What does the sales execution gap look like when the system is failing you?
- Close the sales execution gap with engagement & intelligence
Letâs go ahead and dive in. đ
The sales execution gap is widening
You (whether it be a rep, a team, or organization) have the potential and the ability to hit massive numbers and to provide value to the world and your customers - but the actual performance, the numbers you end up producing fall way short of that.
This is the sales execution gap.
The traditional way that many organizations have gone about trying to solve this problem by hiring more sellers or introducing new products.
More volume, more activity, more leads, and it's still not working and itâs now an outdated type of model.
The question becomes: what is going on in the marketplace today that's causing this gap? Especially when the typical way we used to solve it is no longer working?
This is a very important question and if you're not asking yourself this, you're gonna be left behind in the dust.
B2B sales is complex and dynamicâŚ
The B2B sales world is more complex and dynamic than it has ever been. You're getting pinged on Slack or on your email, you have Zoom meetings back-to-back, and you're also getting Instagram and Facebook hits.
Thereâs noise everywhere.
People are also busier than they have ever been before. Whether itâs in meetings and traveling, or taking care of their kids while theyâre working from home, itâs tough.
While thereâs more noise that you need to break through, once you do break through how do you get people to engage with you?
With dozens of stakeholdersâŚ
Now, between seven to nine people are engaged in every single decision process. The most recent statistic is saying between 15 to 21.
It's no longer one single person making a decision on behalf of a department, but instead dozens of stakeholders in units from each department.
If I'm talking to a sales operations team, there's five to six people from that department evaluating this.
That's in conjunction with the sales organization, who has five to six people making this decision as well as the marketing organization and so on.
⌠and hundreds of seller-buyer interactions
People have already made the decision on which product or vendor they're going to go with even before they've had the conversation with anybody from the sales team because buyers are being flooded with more information than ever before.
You can get information through whitepapers, live webinars or even research you receive from a colleague. Whatever it might be, people are smarter and in a new age of leadership, technology, and B2B sellers.
What does the sales execution gap look like when the system is failing you?
When you look across an entire funnel of how a prospect goes through the customer journey, thereâs three different parts:
- Prospecting,
- Deal management,
- Revenue forecasting.
If I have 100 different types of sellers, there's most likely 100 different ways people go about prospecting. How do you create a process where everybody is doing the right thing so there's no longer inefficient prospecting?
Then, once you get these people engaged, how do you make sure that when people are showing up to the meetings, theyâre being effective?
Inaccurate revenue forecasting will impact both board confidence, and your confidence in making your decisions which will impact shareholder confidence in you.
Close the sales execution gap with engagement & intelligence
The engagement and intelligence platform starts with the activity, then moves towards understanding how people are responding and interacting with that activity.
Once that has occurred, youâre getting the data that tells you whether or not itâs working - and you can form an understanding of how to continually optimize your process.
Activity
Just because it worked the first time doesnât mean it's going to be working the second, third or fourth time. You need to gain visibility in order to understand what is resonating with people vs. what is not.
For example, at Outreach we sent urgency-oriented messaging to our prospects pre-Covid. Once Covid hit, we realized we were getting very little responsiveness and people werenât engaging with us the right way.
We actually ended up doing some A/B testing to change to more empathetic and softer messaging with how we engage with the market.
This change in messaging strategy paid off and we were booking more meetings.
You need the entire funnel open and visible to you to know how to make those changes, and the messaging has to be different for different audiences.
A C-level person is most likely getting hit up a lot more than a frontline manager, so you need to have a lot more personalization to stick out through the noise and get them to engage with you.
A frontline manager might not be getting hit up as much, so you can have a bit more of a one-size-fits-all approach to your messaging.
Communication channels in your messaging are also important. Someone in sales leadership might engage more with calls, whereas someone in IT or security might engage more with email.
You need to gain an understanding of how the activity should happen.
Interactions
From there, we also need to understand what the sentiment of the responses was. If all the responses youâre getting are âI'm not the right personâ or âunsubscribeâ, and youâre doubling down on that message then itâll produce more negative outcomes.
You need to open up the black box and start to understand whether the responses youâre getting are good or bad responses.
Meetings
Once youâre getting meetings, you need to make sure people are actually showing up to them by doing a repeated process around confirmation of the meetings and sending them relevant information to make sure they're showing up.
If they don't show up, there needs to be a process that makes sure you're following up with them in a consistent manner.
Opportunities
Landing the opportunity relies on how well that rep goes about answering questions with confidence so that they can be seen as a trusted adviser.
There needs to be a process, platform, and technology that shows the difference between you and your competitor - and a content card that can pop up to support what your rep is saying in real time.
It needs to be up to the manager to have an effective conversation and know how to support the rep to become a better sales professional.
Always having a continuous feedback loop across the entire process.
This is the new age of go-to-market and what needs to change is both how organizations sell and coach the reps to be better sales professionals and leaders to accurately forecast up chain.
This is how the C-level, RevOps, the board, and the shareholders start to feel confident that this is a finely-tuned machine thatâs operating well. All we have to do is execute and run the process.
Optimize
As long as weâre running it, we will start to see when it's going well and when it's not. When itâs not, this is a way we can better optimize.
If you're not at least aware that there's an opportunity to improve, you will be behind.
If you do not get on the bandwagon of leveraging technology to support yourself, your organization and your customers, you will become irrelevant very soon.
Concrete results
The activity month over month increased by 400%. We have a 26% positive response rate and a 39% objection rate on all the 400% increase in activity we did.
We're booking 50% more meetings, people are showing up more to those meetings (and I can see the no-show rate on those meetings). I can then even see how many of these first meetings are turning into a follow-up meeting.
In the end, you can predict how much revenue youâre going to be producing. This is how organizations will need to sell and if you are not, you'll be left behind.
Takeaways to ponder about
Technology
- How are you arming your organization, preparing people and giving them the tools to be effective?
Coaching & leadership
- This will lead into your ability to be leveraging the technology to support you to do so and developing your people or being a strong leader and inspiring your people.
Culture
- Organizations are changing in terms of how theyâre supporting people to feel more fulfilled at work and to feel like they're part of something greater than themselves by tapping into more mental health and awareness around this.
There's a new wave that is coming about and you have to get on board and learn how to surf and swim because the times are changing, and you need to be part of it.
Thank you.
