Situation: B2B Sales in Transition

 

  • Today’s customers are smart and always well informed.
  • Most customers obtain information about products (and services) in advance through the use of all available information sources.
  • Sales representatives need to know their customer’s strategy and understand where products and solutions are helping the customer to be more successful. To do this he must be able to exploit all the technical possibilities offered by digitalization.

 

Complication:

 

  • To obtain detailed information, customers are contacting their supplier today and even more so tomorrow at a much later stage in the sales process.
  • In the worst case, first contact for a specific request is made after the first decisions of customer have been made concerning the solution and who will be the supplier.
  • The pro-active sales representative not only has to master his products and solutions technically, but also has to understand the customer journey of each of his important key accounts.

 

Key Question:  How to cope with these the challenges?

 

Insight: Develop your people and your organisation

 

  1. Goodbye to organizational separation

Flexibile and agile organizations will respond with different organization solutions to individual key accounts. In the future, not only sales but marketing, as well as the service sector, can be proactively responsible for certain customers. At the same time, you have to ask yourself, which effort is justified or necessary to keep a long-term relation.

  1. New communication channels – new employee qualifications

 

B2B companies find new employees to handle old and new tasks. But even more important is to train the current sales teams in their own companies. This specific sales training is not offered by schools, universities or business schools. Ideally, this training is tailor made to your organisation, your business, your present and future customers and your competition.

 

Development will not happen overnight, it is an evolutionary process. Changes will be coordinated with the digital development of your customers.

 

However, the most important finding is:

 Sales people in complex B2B are selling -today as well as tomorrow- to people,

 not to organizations!