Sales Strategy Insights for Sustainable Business Growth | Growth Sigma

When we think of “customer experience”, we often equate it to the digital experiences in the B2C space which have transformed how and where we eat, meet, travel, park and shop, et al. However, in the B2B space, orchestrating a seamless CX is considerably more complicated. The “actors” in the buyer journey are still very human, each with their own set of motivations, preferences, and sometimes unpredictable behavior. The acceleration of the distributed workforce brought on by Covid-19 has only made organizational alignment more challenging. It’s no surprise that RevOps is gaining steam given its role in aligning teams to deliver a unified and consistent customer experience. RevOps leaders should approach the journey to scale with a thoughtful focus on developing the three organizational capabilities present in high performing companies.

While the buying process takes 22% longer than five years ago, B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales. The net effect is a substantial compression in the window of time that sellers can influence the outcomes of a deal. In a world with a vast wealth of information, scarcity is derived from whatever that information consumes, and it’s consuming the finite attention span of enterprise buyers at an accelerating pace. Unlike market-takers, market-makers aim to create the narrative for their solutions well before the sales team gets involved. This is where the partnership between sales and marketing can enable a market-making machine built to create and service its own demand.

We know the substantial performance delta between companies which follow a sales process and those which do not. As leaders, our responsibility to our investors and our employees is to be strong corporate stewards and enablers of profitable growth. In the enterprise B2B space where sales cycles are often an enterprise-wide pursuit, it takes both alignment and organizational discipline to better execute and demonstrate the results we’re accountable to deliver.

While Americans rebalance trillions of dollars in assets in their 401K plans to stretch returns 75-100 basis, we often fail to adjust the investments we are making in our sales and marketing portfolio. If an investment manager has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns at a given level of risk, why do we relieve our sales and marketing teams from the same accountability for more than a trillion dollars of annual spend?

Are you ready to scale? It’s a simple question, yet it requires thoughtful deliberation. It’s not a question of “if” - scale is a must for any company looking to survive amidst a flurry of new market entrants and innovative business models. It’s more a question of “when” because the consequences of poor timing can be significant.

The constraints of the growth phase are particularly pronounced in B2B organizations, especially those selling complex products and services. The best customer-facing leaders recognize the strategies which helped them grow are not the same ones needed to achieve profitable, scalable growth. To operate at scale, the components of the revenue operations system must be both optimized and aligned to consistently achieve four objectives.