Hybrid is the Future of B2B Sales

Hybrid is the Future of B2B Sales Since B2B buyers are using more channels, B2B sellers must, too. As COVID-19 restrictions fade, B2B businesses want nothing more than to get back to normal. But a recent Salesforce survey made it clear that getting back to pre-pandemic might not be possible nor desirable: 58% of reps believe their role has been permanently altered. The pandemic—and the required shift to remote, digital interactions between buyers and sellers—exposed major challenges to the old commercial approach. It also unearthed new opportunities. According to research by McKinsey & Company, more than 90 percent of enterprises plan to sustain the changes made to their sales force structure over the past year to enable hybrid. And more importantly customers want to be served in this manner, and sellers want flexibility in how they work. To achieve these goals and optimize sales ROI, B2B sales organizations will need to continue their shift to a hybrid, remote-first model and embrace four proven success factors. The Value of Digital COVID-19 was a massive disruption, yet for commercial businesses, it accelerated changes that were already underway. Before the pandemic, top-performing organizations relied on digital channels to serve customers. In fact, many customers used digital self-serve solutions to research products and services before they ever interacted with a sales rep. But the commercial processes at many B2B organizations were still based on traditional sales methods—primarily oriented around field sales reps traveling to see clients in person. More than just salespeople working out of their home offices, hybrid selling is a flexible, scalable—and frequently more profitable—way to reach buyers. It utilizes a combination of channels, including remote and e-commerce, to serve customers where they prefer to buy. Because of its omnichannel nature, it enables broader and deeper real-time customer engagement. On the seller side, as of December 2021, more than 90 percent of B2B sales organizations viewed today’s B2B omnichannel reality as equally or more effective in reaching and serving customers than it was before COVID-19. This percentage has steadily increased from 54 percent since the beginning of the pandemic Similarly, B2B buyers are increasingly comfortable turning to digital and online channels to meet their purchasing needs. In fact, B2B buyers use up to and sometimes more than ten channels, including online and digital, as part of any given purchase, which is double the number of channels five years ago, and up from seven channels only two years ago  While buyers have clearly been willing and able to engage in an ever-expanding omnichannel ecosystem, sales organizations have often not kept pace, wondering whether or how much buyers would actually spend in a fully remote or fully hybrid model. The answer is many buyers are willing to spend big on a single transaction using a remote or self-service model. Seventy-one percent of buyers are willing to spend more than $50,000 in a single transaction, and 27 percent would spend $500,000 or more. Quite simply, digital needs to be at the forefront of every customer interaction. Sellers must offer engaging and intuitive e-commerce solutions to buyers across the entire customer experience, from initial research to the transaction to post-sale service. Throughout, sales and marketing leaders should use digital to better understand the performance of their teams and make smarter, data-driven decisions with respect to both improving execution and managing people. Field sales are not dead, however. While digital is undoubtedly leading the way in sales calls and customer communication, there will be some need for in-person engagement in the years ahead. It’s critical for businesses to examine their customer base to understand where such interaction is still necessary and how it can work seamlessly with digital outreach. Shift Field Sales Reps to Hybrid Interactions The era of old-school “road warriors”—field reps who traveled to client sites 280 days a year—is over. In-person visits can be effective but, given recent advances in digital connectivity, they are also highly inefficient and often unnecessary. Some aspects of sales will likely always happen face-to-face with field reps, but COVID-19 showed the value of remote, digitally enabled interactions. To shift from field work to hybrid interactions, companies must empower field sales reps with new digital tools, such as analytics-enabled CRM systems that can deliver insights from all sales channels. Additionally, artificial intelligence, already common in sales CRMs, should be used to suggest the next action in a sales cycle. Supplementary training and mobile tools can support these actions, showcasing opportunities across a pipeline. Four Ways to Supercharge Hybrid Sales Teams that outperform invest in systemic changes to improve remote sellers’ ability to sense and respond to customer needs by focusing on agility, customer insights, capabilities, and technology. Prioritizing the following four areas can enable other sales organizations to join the ranks of the outperformers. Agility: Go remote where possible and where customers prefer it—but don’t abandon in-person sales completely Hybrid sales structures expand upon the pre-pandemic version of inside sales, creating an agile organization in which the majority of selling is conducted virtually and resources are deployed dynamically in response to customer opportunities. In-person engagement doesn’t go away entirely, but it is reserved for specific accounts and moments that matter, such as very large customers with complex needs, or for important opportunities, like buying a new product or solution, where buyers have signaled their preference for face-to-face engagement. Insights: Harness customer and seller insights end-to-end The need for sales representatives to log accurate and detailed information into customer-relationship management (CRM) systems does not disappear in a hybrid setting, but the efforts yield a higher return. When qualitative and manual inputs are combined with data from digital customer interactions, a richer, more timely set of actionable insights emerges. In a traditional, in-person-based sales model, many sales teams struggle to collect and analyze insights from the sales process. Qualitative information is especially challenging to collect, since it depends on individual representatives taking clear notes, faithfully logging calls and meetings, and recalling conversations accurately. In a hybrid world, gathering information and generating actionable insights becomes somewhat easier,

Why Sales and Marketing Alignment is Essential

Why Sales and Marketing Alignment is Essential How to Improve Customer Relationships and Business Value with Sales and Marketing Alignment Sales and marketing misalignment is extremely common, and companies with divided sales and marketing teams that function separately are putting themselves at a disadvantage.  Both your sales and marketing teams share objectives but achieve them in very different ways. Despite these differences in approach, ensuring that the two teams are aligned is critical to your business’ success.  Sales and marketing alignment is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing return on investment (ROI), sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth. According to data from Marketo, companies with strong alignment perform better, reporting 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.  Common Problems that Sales and Marketing Alignment Can Solve Today’s complex B2B buying cycle introduces new challenges for marketing and sales alike. However, when sales and marketing align, many of those problems can be resolved.    Challenge: Sales is ignoring most of the leads that marketing sends to them. According to research from Marketo and ReachForce, sales ignore up to 80% of marketing leads, instead spending half their time on unproductive prospecting. Since sales have prospects to recycle, (A Solution to Lost Leads) they’ll spend their time focused on older leads if marketing is not providing another option. If sales and marketing take the time to align on goals, lead definition, and handoff process, both teams will spend their time more effectively on promising leads.  Challenge: Sales and Marketing have two different strategies. Sales and marketing alignment is vital for both organizational success and boosting morale. In order to sync up, sales and marketing teams should schedule regular meetings to keep track of shared goals and communicate freely about workflow, obstacles, and wins. Ensuring both teams have a voice when setting strategies and planning content will be the most impactful at each stage in the buying process.   Challenge: Complex and redundant workflows. Sales and marketing alignment not only unifies leadership and combines shared goals and targeted Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but it can also simplify workflows by sharing tools. Instead of marketing logging into one system and sales into another, both teams can use the same dashboards and tools, including customer engagement platforms.   Challenge: A clear marketing ROI cannot be established. It can be difficult to show the true value of your marketing program without a direct response or purchase to measure. This is especially true for B2B marketers focused on lead generation programs with long, complex sales cycles. To demonstrate a clear marketing ROI, you must be able to track and measure impact in an integrated fashion across all sales and marketing systems.  Challenge: Shorten sales cycle and go to market faster. The way the B2B buying process has evolved has resulted in a more complex buying cycle and a massive shift in customer relationships. Buyers are choosing to delay interactions with sales and tend to ignore traditional tactics such as outbound phone calls and emails. To meet customers where they are, sales and marketing professionals must work together to shorten the intricate new type of sales cycle. This includes synchronizing segmentation, targeting, content development, contact strategy, nurturing, engagement, closing, and customer support Components of Sales and Marketing Alignment In order to have a truly coordinated sales and marketing team, everything must sync up, including goals, roles, systems, and technology:   Aligning goals. Marketing projects are often long term, including setting a foundation with strong branding and generating qualified leads. Marketers look at metrics and focus on increasing brand recognition, as well as scoring and nurturing leads for the long haul. Salespeople, on the other hand, are looking to meet quotas, help solve problems for prospects, or be the personal touch that someone is looking for. They want to know what the marketing team can do for them now, so that they can make the sale today.   Aligning roles. Often, sales and marketing departments view their respective roles in the revenue generation process quite differently. Sales worries about meeting quarterly goals, while marketing believes they are the only ones thinking strategically. Sales wonders why they have to generate their own leads, while marketing complains that sales ignores everything marketing generates, and so on. Coming to a common understanding of roles can help to remedy these inconsistencies.  Establish shared terminology. Once you have established a regular communication cadence, make sure everyone is speaking the same language. Shared information needs to be understandable and accessible to both teams. Create a set of definitions that everyone agrees on. What constitutes a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) must be agreed upon. Another suggestion is to create a service-level agreement (SLA). This can help eliminate confusion and solidify the roles in each department.  Adopt an ABM strategy. Account-based marketing is a relatively new strategy in the B2B space. While 92% of B2B marketers have an ABM program, 64% were started within the past five years. ABM strategies join data management with marketing automation to create personal campaigns for your top B2B prospects. It breaks down barriers between marketing and sales by integrating the buyer journey from lead generation all the way through the sales funnel. Another major benefit of using ABM is its focus on engaging all the members of an account’s buying committee. And make no mistake: Personalized engagement is what customers expect. Fifty-nine percent say that tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their business. To make this happen, marketing and sales have to combine their resources and work together to develop a strategy for identifying accounts with the highest revenue value for their business and personalizing communication according to their needs and preferences.  Aligning systems and technology. While ABM is a strategy, the tools and technology that you use to implement ABM programs have a big impact on your success. As more customer interactions move to the digital realm, marketing automation is on the