Author: Jay Mitchell

Holistic revenue performance series I: Demand progression

February 13, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Sustainable revenue performance ensures your organization is meeting its goals and finding its success not just here and now but into the future. Yet achieving profitable revenue year after year is no simple task. There is no golden egg solution. You will time and again meet internal and external challenges.

Yet with a well-oiled revenue engine, any challenges you come up against will be mitigated or side-stepped altogether.

At Mereo, we have developed a unique approach to revenue performance that leverages the inherently interdependent operational disciplines of demand progression, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement.

This week in the holistic revenue performance series, we will dive into demand progression and learn the greatest pitfalls affecting B2B organizations, how to overcome these and how this piece of the revenue performance Blueprint will help you win an unfair share of the market.

Discover your ideal buyer. Become their ideal solution.

Common Demand Progression Pitfalls

Demand issues often appear cut and dry. And in reality, the core of the issue is simple: The market demand for your solution is not meeting your projections to make it viable to continue providing the solution.

Diagnosing why this lack of demand exists, though, is not as simple as saying, “No one wants or needs your solution.”

There can be a number of reasons for low demand, with a number of causes both controllable and market-influenced.

Overall Lack of Leads

The phones are not ringing, nor are sales’ calls being answered. The email is full of messages, but they are from internal staff and your Seth Godin e-news subscription. This is a case of no demand. And with no demand for a solution, no need, there is rarely going to be a transaction or gain from either sellers or buyers. There can be many reasons for a lack of demand, from a poorly launched solution to a marketing effort full of activities and no actual strategic campaigns with purposeful target or end goals. The first step in understanding why you are struggling to generate demand is to diagnose what is blocking the funnel, what is the roadblock on the buyer’s journey. Is it that the buyers do not believe they have an issue worth solving? Or is it that they do not know you have a solution to their issue?

Missing the Goldilocks Zone of Leads

As sellers, we are always looking for buyers who are just right. Yet, some organizations never lay out what “just right” actually means. Is your ideal buyer an X company or a Y company? Does your marketing team know that? How about your sales team? What about your product teams? Without a formalized ideal buyer profile, marketing tends to keep stirring up demand as best as they can, which can create a pipeline full of unqualified opportunities salespeople cannot do anything with and that the product team does not have a solution.

Confusing or Misguiding Leads

If your product, sales and marketing teams are misaligned, you can bet that your target buyer has experienced confusion and possible frustrations in their buying journey — which virtually guarantees they will seek out and opt for an alternative to your solution. Likewise, with misalignment, your teams may suffer internal confusion of who the target buyer even is that either results in a lack of leads or a pipeline full of poor-quality leads.

Demand Progression Solutions to Win

While demand progression solutions vary on a case-by-case basis, there is a demand progression framework we lead from here at Mereo to provide selling organizations real results.

Audience Readiness

This is step one. Is your audience, your industry, your market prepared for the solution you have to offer? Is there a status quo you must overcome in order for your target to even consider your solution? Do they understand how it will work or integrate? How it will benefit them? Who you are and how you can deliver differently than any other competitor?

This phase is focused on:

Understanding specific target pain points
Building market awareness
Managing market perception
Fostering thought leadership and credibility

Demand Development

Once your audience is readied for your solution, it is important to leverage their interest and broad understanding to develop your leads. Marketing takes a lead role here, followed by salespeople reinforcing the value messaging and differentiation as it pertains to your target’s pains, needs and goals.

This phase focuses on:

Deploying lead generation campaigns
Implementing demand capture campaigns
Holding sales discovery sessions
Leveraging other lead nurturing capabilities

Sales Process Alignment

Lastly, your leadership team needs to have a strategy for delivering predictable profitable revenue. This means keeping a pulse on and optimizing the buying cycle, competitive environment and your very solution with your sales process and related activities. This process is not a once and done situation but rather something you should track and regularly review for further refinement to best achieve — and exceed — your revenue goals.

This phase focuses on:

Aligning the sales process to the buying cycle
Aligning the sales process to the competitive environment
Aligning the sales process to the solution

Real Results Realized

Axway was transforming from a product provider to a subscription-based service without a formal plan in place for go-to-market success and organizational alignment. They were facing demand generation issues. They had to figure out how to align their fragmented organization around differentiated value messaging. They needed direction for leveling up their global sales teams and prepare them to close marketing-generated leads.

Mereo stepped in as the consulting partner. And with our solutions, we helped Axway realize organization-changing results. Learn more here.

AXWAY’S DEMAND GENERATION WINS

{Selling Power TV} The Why Behind Winning and Losing a Sale

January 23, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Selling Power’s Gerhard Gschwandtner interviews Mereo President, Jay Mitchell, featured on Selling Power TV.

Surge into 2020 on the marketplace’s pulse

December 12, 2019

Jay Mitchell

If I am a sales leader, what should I be doing in the final weeks leading up to the new year?

It may be a good time to revisit past losses and refine value messaging and differentiators. But it also is equally important to look for the opportunities and threats the next year will bring for your B2B organization. And this means looking at where the market is headed.

Your Own Primary Research Initiatives

As a leader you should always be attuned to industry and marketplace news and reports, and there are many great industry thought leaders and navigators to help. But for greater, more specific insight into your selling world, consider venturing out on your own as well. This means gathering your own primary data.

While this sounds scary and a bit like a school assignment from day’s past, it can actually be a natural, enjoyable journey.

This simply amounts to taking the time to have conversations with your existing buyers and the high value prospective clients. Ask to take your buyer out to coffee or lunch. Try to go above and beyond an intrusive email or phone call and take a moment to build more value and gain greater insights for the future. Meet your buyer on their turf, on their conditions, where and when it is easiest for them.

And these interactions should not revolve around your B2B organization’s 2020 plans. I challenge you to not say a thing about your business unless your buyer outright asks. Instead focus on them. Ask:

What are their initiatives for the coming year?
What are their concerns, pains and fears into this new year?
What is standing in their way?
What opportunities look promising?

With this firsthand market pulse research, you will be able to tailor your entire organization’s sales strategy, planning, messaging and conversations around real and relevant data. Go above and beyond — and surge ahead into 2020.

For regular, outside selling insights to support your primary research, follow Mereo on LinkedIn.

Access Regular Insights

Use your past sales losses to inform your future wins

December 5, 2019

Jay Mitchell

The end of the year marks a time of reflection — for individuals, for communities and even for B2B sales performance.

All B2B organizations keep a pulse on sales numbers, and most review these against yearly and quarterly benchmarks as well. But there is a distinction between reviewing how well your salespeople may or may not have met the mark and gaining real insights into what is working and what is not.

Where does the difference in review come into play?

Rather than breezing through numbers and making a rally cry of doing better, you must learn to sit in the discomfort of your losses to truly come out of them for the better. Sales teams need to dig deeper to uncover actionable insights and effective strategies of change. And there are three areas your losses should inform and affect into the future.

Create More Compelling Use Cases

The first step to successfully engaging a buyer at all is ensuring they see the need to be engaged. In other words: they need to understand their pain. They need to suddenly feel exasperated by their pain. And then they must be able to envision a future where this pain has been resolved and imagine the great ease and success that follows.

In essence, you must help them overcome their status quo. Get them out of their office chairs to take action.

Look at your past losses with prospective buyers or past buyers. Did they see a compelling reason to change their current situation (e.g. productivity from automating elements of a manual process)? Did your salespeople show them or merely dive into your solution right away?

At this point, even with compelling conversations and use cases, the action they take may not amount to buying your solution. But by this stage you have already created value for them, significant at that. So the chances they will consider you for more insight and more help are substantial.

Revisit Your Value Proposition

What you sell is not a product or service or even a technology platform or experience. Buyers are not searching for another gadget or gizmo on which to spend their dollars. They want value — so you sell value as the outcome.

But sometimes the value you think you are offering is not as compelling to the buyer as you would think. And even if it is truly revolutionary to your target audience, the value is often not communicated clearly — and in the right messaging framework to convince your buyer.

Revisit your past sales cycles and trip-ups. How can you add even more value for your buyer? How have you been communicating your value in the past? How well are buyers understanding what this really means for their future outcomes or do they just understand features of your solution? Are they seeing this value consistently across your website, your sales presentations, your leave-behinds, your conversations, your social media? If not, why?

Today’s buyer makes their decisions with input from many sources. Not only do you need to ensure you have a solid value proposition targeted to your buyer — you need to ensure it shines across all your platforms.

Refine Your Differentiation

After you have (1) convinced your target buyer that they have a pain significant enough to overcome and (2) you prove your value to help overcome that pain, you must face the music of competition.

“She has a point about my pain, too,” your buyer says. “She has proven she can add value to my organization as well.”

This leaves the last and final question of the buyer that makes the difference between landing a sale and seeing one handed away to your competition next door: “What makes you different?”

Rarely is the answer one thing. Yet, you likely cannot overburden your buyer with a whole laundry list of what makes you the next best thing since humans discovered fire.

Rather, as a buyer, you need to ensure differentiation is apparent in:

The value of the solution you are offering
The interactions with your people and platforms
The uniqueness and memorableness of your company

You should not have to tell your buyer why you are different but you should rather be showing them all along the buying journey. And in looking at your past losses, you must ask yourself whether or not you are doing this effectively — and if your differentiation is valuable enough for a buyer to choose you over all the other alternatives.

It is challenging to revisit our failures — and yet as Thomas Edison has been famously quoted for saying:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found one thousand ways that won’t work.”

For more, watch this interview on Selling Power TV where Selling Power founder and CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner and I discuss the why behind winning and losing a sale.

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{Top Sales Magazine} Sales Kickoff Planning: Common Sense, but Not Common Practice

November 15, 2019

Jay Mitchell

We are officially past the first week of November, with sales kickoffs around the corner. If your sales kickoff planning and content creation is well underway, bully for you.

These are large events that involve a large number of people in your organization and, more importantly, have potential to drive your revenue growth into the next year. It is of course common sense these events would have a level of long-term planning.

But if you are among the industry majority, the sales kickoff is a nagging line-item, placed behind a slew of short-term action items. You certainly have your venue or facility. But the bulk of the work is waiting to be done. And fast.

The Staggering Common Practice in Sales Kickoff Planning

Too many teams wait until November to begin sales kickoff planning. And by this time, they start digging in, realize how much must be done and start sounding fire alarms.

You may recognize this scenario and may very well be living it now. But you may also be asking: How could it be any different?

I do not know what my teams will look like in the new year.
I do not know what next year’s product portfolio emphasis is yet.
Summer was busy and no one was around for sales kickoff planning meetings anyway.
My team and I are in the thick of the fourth quarter.

While all these are valid points, the truth is, with this common practice last-minute planning, you are already behind and will continue to be behind next year, the year after and so on, if you maintain this precedence.

In doing so, you risk a sales kickoff that not only wastes leaderships’ and employees’ times but also fails to successfully inspire and enable the teams to launch into the next year.

According to Brainshark research, almost 75% of sales kickoff attendees say their company’s meeting would not earn them an A grade, while 29% rate it at a C or below (2018). If this is the result, why have one in the first place?

Refreshing Common Sense Sales Kickoff Planning

It is imperative to start sales kickoff work in the summer at the latest (for a Q1 meeting), even with all the above concerns threatening to hold it off. Remember, you can work through the nitty gritty details later. The foundational plan and messaging will set you up for greater success down the line.

Operating under the assumption you have already locked-down your venue for the event, come summer it is time to plan how to leverage that venue as a foundational pillar for your sales kickoff. How many sessions will be held? How many breakouts? How long does each piece of content and session necessitate? How many people will be invited? Will you hold a sales kickoff in more than one geography?

In the months following, you will have a guiding plan, so you and your product and marketing teams can invest necessary cycles during the fall to generate solid, effective and relevant content for the event itself.

This may seem an obvious process, but as we have already established, common sense does not mean common practice. And if you are among the masses, stick with me as I help you through the end of this year’s sales kickoff planning and execution.

Sales is ultimately successful only with marketing’s help — and vice a versa

November 14, 2019

Jay Mitchell

Sales and marketing alignment remains a pervasive issue derailing selling organizations.

According to HubSpot research, one in four companies indicate their sales and marketing teams are either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned.” And this misalignment is costing B2B companies 10% or more of lost revenue annually.

Sales and Marketing Intersections

It may seem like sales and marketing are disparate departments, but in fact they should be considered more akin to offensive and defensive players on the same team.

Marketing can defend and uphold the brand sales is carrying toward the goal.
Marketing can block any unqualified prospects from sales’ zone.
Marketing can nurture quality leads and prepare sales’ buyers at every stage of the buying journey.
Marketing can keep the buyer from reaching the competitors’ content by gaining an unfair share™ of the market that sales can reinforce and run with.

When Sales and Marketing Are Playing on Different Sides

While effective sales and marketing alignment can reap tremendous awards for all involved, more often than not, we see these departments choosing to scrimmage one another rather than join forces.

Where does the disconnect come into play?

Yes, marketing can provide great assists and defense to a sales strategy, but they often lose their status in the eyes of sales when they create materials that are missing the mark for the key messaging or actual usability in the field. Marketing’s skills do not always translate into effective strategy, and this is especially true if they are blindly designing or writing brochures and banner ads without any inkling as to the end purpose, no matter how well-crafted.

Think of it like this: When sales is failing, more money is not invested into marketing. And some organizations in the past have realized sustainable revenue performance with no or little marketing help. Even back to our analogy, the defensive team is not scoring the goals, rather assisting the offense from doing so and keeping the competition from winning instead.

Yet, the potential of a marketing and sales fueled organization is powerful. According to Marketo and Reachforce research, sales and marketing alignment can help businesses become 67% better at closing deals.

And having compelling, consistent messaging and materials support for the early buying journey and beyond after salespeople introductions can set your B2B selling organization apart from others, especially in today’s digital world.

The first step is to align your teams to the same goals, strategies and frameworks.

Struggling with sales and marketing alignment? Learn more about how our solution marketing and sales enablement support has helped others like you.

See the Proof

3 ways sellers can make sense — not noise — for buyers

November 7, 2019

Jay Mitchell

Sellers have a greater opportunity than ever to become a trusted advisor to their buyers.

In a recent Gartner Inc. research report, “Redefining the High-Performing Seller for the Information Era,” 89% of the more than 1,000 B2B buyers surveyed indicated that they found information encountered during a buying cycle high-quality — but the abundance of quality information ultimately hindered their decisions and trust of the information, leading to a smaller action that would have less disruption than originally planned.

Gartner is referring to its new selling insight as a “Sense Making” revolution, something I discussed in this previous article.

But how can sellers put this information into practice? What exactly is sense-making — and what do buyers need made sense of most?

Sellers Should Identify and Make Buyers’ Pains Clear

The No. 1 thing buyers need clarity on are their pains. Where are the areas in their business that are keeping them from growth and success? What is harming their process, their customer experience, their mission? What are they missing that will help them do even better?

CSO Insights released a study of 500 enterprise buyers where buyers identified the conversation topics they want to explore with sellers. Specifically it was when a business challenge is:

New for the buyer (34.1%)
Perceived as risky for the organization (21.1%)
Perceived as risky for the buyer themselves (19.1%)
Complex (e.g., impacted several departments) (16.2%)

One of the hardest things for buyers is to break out of a status quo, even if harmful. But if they have already reached out to your selling organization that means they are looking for answers on what exactly it is that is going wrong or, more so, what could go even better.

It is up to salespeople to listen intently, to ask the right questions and to provide a thoughtful analysis of the buyer’s pains.

This conversation may be difficult. It may feel the unpopular act to point out issues and shortcomings. But this honesty and insight will help buyers make the sense they need to move forward in their decision-making process.

Sellers Should Make Sense of Buyers’ Solution Options

If, according to Gartner’s recent research, the large majority of sellers are promoting high-quality content with differing messages — which should your buyer believe to be true?

When a seller has already listened to and helped the buyer understand their pains, they have established a strong foundation of trust and confidence.

To take that relationship a step further means more sense-making commitment and honesty.

Avoid focusing just on your solutions and their benefits, and rather talk about the spectrum of their top options for addressing their pains — while taking control of the message by emphasizing your differentiators and value language. Help them find their solution, their best solution. By doing so, you will be a helpful hand with a strong voice in their discovery and interest stage of the buying cycle.

Sellers Should Make Sense of Their Own Claims

Likewise, if buyers feel inundated with an abundance of conflicting information from your competitors, it is vital you address this issue head-on with your own insights.

Even with a strong relationship in the Seek to Serve™ spirit, it is still vital you provide proof to your buyer to calm their concerns about other industry content saying something different from yours.

Proof in practice can materialize as client value stories or other third-party sources who can provide hard outcomes-based and anecdotal evidence to support your solutions and insights.

For help with preparing your salespeople to make sense for their buyers, learn more about the Mereo sales enablement program.

Learn More

Debunking the Top Sales Training Myths

October 24, 2019

Jay Mitchell

Sales training has been a popular prescription for dried up pipelines and below-par performance. While effective when properly administered, there is ample amount of malpractices and over-promises when it comes to sales training.

Read on to learn about the top sales training myths and their counterpoint facts.

Sales Training Is Only One Part of Sales Enablement

MYTH: Sales training and sales enablement are one and the same.

FACT:

Think of sales enablement as a three-legged stool. One leg is supported by sales processes and buyer/seller activities. Another leg stands firmly with effective techniques for selling – and enhancement of the requisite skills. The third leg includes value messaging, where sales are enabled with a compelling solution value propositions including differentiation that an entire organization has aligned around.

Sales training is just one component that takes a seat on this stool, helping salespeople practice and embrace each of these components of enablement. There are many other bits and pieces that go into feeding overall revenue streams and involve the entire organization.

Learn more about sales enablement here.

Sales Training Does Not Stop After the Sessions

MYTH: A sales training session is good enough.

FACT:

World-class professional athletes in sports worldwide have coaches and trainers who support them in both pre- and in-season workouts. They are continually perfecting their craft.

You would not expect the Super Bowl champions to skip offseason workouts and training camp in the heat of the summer and then flawlessly play their opening game of the new season. In fact, even with exceptional coaching, extensive physical training and exhausting workouts, these world champions still make mistakes in their first game.

Why would salespeople be any different? Why would sales leaders (akin to the general manager of the football team) neglect having frontline sales managers coach the sales professionals within the training session itself and not provide ongoing coaching and reinforcement in the field? A football general manager would NOT accept that. In fact, the general manager would expect, and even require, the coaching staff to allocate appropriate time for effective coaching to enhance and reinforce the training, as well as rehearse the professionals’ use of the skills and tools of their craft. For that matter, the athletes would demand it as well. World-class athletes seek out counsel and coaching on how to improve in every aspect of their game, especially in the areas where they are have weaknesses – known and unknown.

Sales leaders need to require the same level of continual improvement to help their sales professionals stay sharp and ahead of their competition. A few sales training sessions a year will not have the effect you think it will on your sales teams.

Sales Training Alone Will Not Save You

MYTH: Sales training will enable your teams for sustainable revenue performance.

FACT

When selling organizations are failing to reach their quotas, salespeople are often the first to blame and sales training is often prescribed alone as the fix.

While training can improve pipelines and sales cycles, it rarely repairs underlying issues a company is accepting as status quo. Sales training too often is void of value messaging. Sales training cannot mend misalignment between product, marketing and sales teams. It cannot promise sustainable revenue performance.

What can is the Revenue Performance Blueprint™, a balance of demand progression, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement. These play out differently for every organization. It is not doling-out these titles per se but rather ensuring there are clear roles and responsibilities for each of these five revenue performance pillars. Because if even one piece of the Blueprint is misaligned, organizations are at risk for failing to sustainably feed their revenue engine. The Blueprint fundamentals are common sense, but not common practice.

Thus, sales training is just a small part of sales enablement, but it will promise no magical cures to a clogged pipeline or a disappointing previous year in revenue. Anyone who promises you that much from sales training alone is overselling and not serving.

At Mereo, we Seek to Serve™ in all we do. Learn more about our holistic approach to sustainable revenue performance and contact us when you’re ready to identify — and overcome — your company’s greatest barriers to an unfair share™ of the market.

Growth Solutions

Buyers want industry navigators — not just thought leaders

October 10, 2019

Jay Mitchell

Today buyers have more access than ever to invaluable information that can guide their needs, decisions and actions. Tomorrow they will have even more. So on and so forth.

High-quality content and thought leadership is becoming a norm in industries that have a presence on the internet. And while all that information, insight and education is “free” for the tuned-in, savvy buyer, it can also overwhelm to the point of indecision, avoidance and confusion.

In fact, in a recent Gartner Inc. research report, “Redefining the High-Performing Seller for the Information Era,” 89% of the more than 1,000 B2B buyers surveyed indicated that they found information encountered during a buying cycle high-quality — but the abundance of quality information ultimately hindered their decisions and trust of the information, leading to a smaller action that would have less disruption than originally planned.

When a Seller Becomes a Trusted Advisor

If buyers are not finding high-quality information as valuable as originally intended, then what do they seek?

Gartner found that buyers were more likely to engage in high-quality, low-regret deals when they had higher confidence in the information provided and low doubt of the seller. Essentially, when buyers could tell their seller was seeking to serve, not to sell, they gained greater confidence in moving forward with their buying decisions.

Additionally, a recent CSO Insights report found that buyers are keenly interested in talking about four things with sellers:

A new insight
How that insight proves a risk to their corporation
How that insight proves a risk to the buyer specifically
How their buying action could provide them a competitive advantage

Sellers Need to Make Sense

But talking about the right things is not enough. Serving a buyer does not manifest itself in sellers providing buyers boatloads of information, as Gartner has found. It is not telling buyers based on authority, one they may or may not trust yet, that you have uncovered an insight they may easily find contradicting information to with a quick Google search.

Rather, sellers can foster a relationship and build trust by:

Speaking in terms of the buyer’s specific pains.
Providing clarity of the complex, over-abundant information available to them by filtering and processing the information on behalf of the buyer.
Collaborating with the buyer to evaluate the quality of information and helping them arrive at their own understanding.

Sellers who help their buyers make sense of their threats and opportunities, and who do so in a Seek to Serve™ spirit will simplify deal-making and encourage buyers to turn to you for honest, filtered, clear insights that will positively impact their business.

For more Seek to Serve, Not to Sell direction, download our free eBook.

Seek to Serve

Why leadership must ‘sell’ a new solution to internal teams first

September 26, 2019

Jay Mitchell

When B2B leadership has spent months doing their due diligence to develop a solution that has (1) a market and (2) a compelling business case, they are just half-way done before they can go to market.

For that new solution to ever get in the hands of the right buyer, leadership needs to engage and enable internal teams first, including sales, marketing and product teams — otherwise suffer from a solution launch that putters instead of soars.

Solution Education

Your sales and marketing teams are conditioned to sell to your current buyers as they have in the past. But perhaps there is a new audience who will buy this new solution. Or maybe it is an old target audience but with an adjusted buying cycle or different decision makers within the target organization. Without proper target audience education and understanding, this new solution may be presented to the wrong organizations, the wrong people — missing the mark.

In a literal rocket launch, if the engineers do not understand who their astronauts are and what they are capable of, as well as fail to understand where the end goal of landing is, they will never be able to achieve their mission. Things could go down in a fiery mess.

For selling organizations, this simply means product teams must educate sales and marketing around:

Target organizations and buyers
Use cases
Differentiators
Value messaging

Solution Enablement

In this same vein, once the internal teams are educated around the new solution and who it will serve, marketing must take the lead to enable salespeople specifically to connect with the new audience with this new solution. These are press releases, launch events, the value proposition, the messaging framework, presentations and more.

Leadership and/or a third-party expert like Mereo can take it a necessary step further in sales trainings, with role-plays and training reinforcement.

In the background, product teams should be working on the solution introduction in terms of launch date, pricing, packaging, hosting centers, subscription details and more.

This is similar to a team of engineers and other scientists working behind the scenes to enable their rocket launch teams and astronauts to safely reach their mission. You need the entire team to ensure each component will go smoothly, to practice the processes and double check their accuracy and potential for success, before anyone can consider putting human bodies on that craft.

A selling organization fails when they allow their new solution to escape to market without a guiding strategy, essential campaigns and activities to enable and align every internal team member.

Learn more about Mereo solution management here.

SOLUTION MANAGEMENT