Sales leaders face several challenges in 2024. As a result, performance rates across B2B sales teams are slipping:
- Buyers are more risk averse. So, generating a healthy pipeline is exponentially tougher, win rates are on the slide, and sales reps are falling behind on quotas.
- Businesses are tackling many disruptive external forces – from economic instability and market volatility to supply-chain disruption.
- Customer expectations are evolving faster than ever – experience, rather than price or product, is a big differentiator.
- Uncertainty is rife, undermining confidence and hindering strategic sales leader decision making.
It’s apparent we’re at a huge inflection point:
- 42% of companies are reporting a decrease in win rates
- 61% of sales reps are finding selling more challenging than a decade ago.
- 69% of sellers are falling short of their quota
- Sales cycles are longer than ever (14% longer)
- 44% of deals are slipping
Inflection points occur when old models or strategies, in this case sales methods, threaten to stifle goal achievement, revenue growth, and competitiveness. When an inflection point is reached, it’s a clear sign that new ways of working need to be adopted – new ways of thinking, behaving and executing B2B sales experiences.
And experience is the key here. Without undertaking a change process and reimagining sales strategies, a business simply cannot grow in a predictable and sustainable way.
Grasping the opportunity of sales behaviour change
Everything points to the need for sales reps that are buyer-led and experience-driven. Sales reps with such a mentality to growth demonstrate the following behaviours:
- A focus on the buyer’s needs, goals, and targets rather than their own.
- A desire to improve the lives and businesses of the customers they work with.
- A need for constant self- improvement – educating themselves on what good looks like to the buyer and adapting their behaviours accordingly.
- A personalised approach, tailored to every individual buyer and every interaction touchpoint.
- A two-way exchange of value – learning from every interaction, and in turn delivering relevant and proactive advice.
- An ability to de-risk their sales process by constantly qualifying their approach to buyers, and affirming value at every touch point.
The good news for all sales leaders is that these behaviours can be replicated to drive scalable behaviour transformation, enhance the sales experience, and drive predictable revenue growth.
Identifying your inflection point and shifting your sales approach
The first step is understanding when you’ve reached this inflection point and investing in impactful sales behaviour transformation. This should include training that sales teams can truly buy into, is relevant to the needs of buyers, and importantly is continuously reinforceable to set your business up for future growth.
The time to act is now. Failure to respond to this moment could see faster evolving competitors poach your best people and target your valued customers.
Flume can help you turn inflection to iterative improvement
Our game-changing sales training programmes transform sales team behaviours through a unique 4-stage intervention program, ensuring long-term adoption of new practices and consistent performance improvements.
Through insights and research, our experts have up-to-date, deep understanding of how buyers buy, and therefore how that impacts salespeople and how they sell. This ensures all programmes and content are consistently modern in approach.
We’d love the opportunity to tell you more.
Download our new whitepaper on How to Drive Predictable Review Growth, or get in touch to explore how we can redefine sales training for your organisation, and help you build a new breed of sales reps that will super-charge revenue growth.
