Around 900 salespeople contributed to the research. 89% of them feel burned out and 54 % are actively looking for a new job. If this data is an accurate representation of the wider seller industry then it’s worrying and something has to be done to reverse these increasing trends.

According to Gartner, there are 3 main ‘complexities’ that burden sellers. At number 1 is Customer Complexity This refers to the ever-growing number of stakeholders – often from different business units – who will be involved in the decision process that sellers need to identify, engage and manage.

This ‘burden’ and challenge doesn’t come as a surprise to us as we talk to sellers everyday about this exact problem. Here is a summary of learnings from those seller calls:

• Seller organisations have not mapped and documented the typical wider stakeholder/decision team for what they sell
• Sellers are typically getting <30% engagement coverage across stakeholder teams
• Sellers are too focused on senior decision makers (economic buyers) and lack wider buying team stakeholder engagement
• Sellers struggle to earn the right to engage with some senior and specific functional persona stakeholders
• Sellers make the mistake of trying to sell to each stakeholder ahead of understanding the stakeholder
• Sellers are too one dimensional and don’t adapt for each stakeholder
• Sellers don’t have planned steps to move the needle with each stakeholder
• Sellers don’t understand the dynamics between the stakeholders in a decision team
• Sellers only have a vague understanding of stakeholder influence levels
• Sales leaders struggle to clearly and easily see who and what their sellers know when it comes to stakeholders
• Less than 1% do any form of stakeholder mapping in sales (including relationship or powerbase or DMU mapping)

Decision Stakeholders

Let’s take a brief look at the key metrics of customer buying today that are driving the need for stakeholder mapping in sales, especially in complex and enterprise deals:

• There are typically 11+ stakeholders involved in a purchasing decision
• This can occasionally flex up to nearly 20
• Stakeholders come from high, wide and deep across an organisation
• They can be categorised into three core groups – decision makers, approvers and users
• Their responsibilities will span across strategic, operational, financial, technical, contractual and compliance
• They make buying decisions by consensus and committee

Individual Stakeholders

Stakeholders will vary individually, so it’s important to fully understand each of them :

• Their level of influence
• Their position on change
• Their level of involvement
• Ease of access to them
• Their level of support for you

Supporting Sellers

The ‘burden’ of managing the wider buying team will only get tougher and sales is now as much about people management as it is about opportunity management.

Companies and their sales leadership need to do more to support their sales teams and reduce customer complexity by providing them with the training, tools and support to be more effective in stakeholder engagement and management.

Recruiting, refining and retaining successful teams should be high on the agenda of every organisation and more effective and successful and relationship stakeholder mapping in sales will contribute towards reducing the feeling of burnout and a desire to find a new job.

Equipping sellers

Reducing seller burden is the upside of using stakeholder mapping in sales, but the primary outcome is to improve sales results to benefit both the salesperson and the business.

Using online documents for this task is not the best solution due to their limitations in terms of capabilities and ease of use for both sellers and the colleagues who support customer engagements. The ideal scenario is a stakeholder mapping tool that integrates or synchronises with your CRM, however, this is currently limited to a handful of CRM’s including Salesforce, Dynamics, Sugar and HubSpot.

SaaS based stakeholder mapping tools vary in their level of capabilities from basic to comprehensive. The majority of solutions focus on mapping stakeholders at an account level highlighting general seller perspectives such as decision roles, status, access, path to deal and other basic selections.

More advanced solutions enable sellers to create generalised stakeholder mapping for an account plus more specific mapping at each opportunity level. This is important for sellers with multiple opportunities into an account because whilst a buyer may be for change and your supporter on one opportunity they could be the opposite on another.

The dynamics, politics and opinions vary from deal to deal, so its important to be mindful of this when selecting the right tool for your team.

How it helps sellers

An organised method of stakeholder management is better than a disorganised and random method which will achieve little except contribute to the burden of customer complexity.

Viewing customer contacts with little or no relevant attributes or structure is the same as any text based list, it provides no context of status or understanding. This is what you get from the vast majority of CRM systems, contact records.

Sales is already complicated, stakeholder mapping helps to reduce that complexity because visualization is better than reading, it provides greater clarity. Being able to see who and what you know and who and what you don’t know helps you focus on the steps you need to take to reduce the risk of a no-decision or loss and increase your chances of a win.

This not only improves the sellers opportunity management but also makes deal reviews and QBR’s more informative and productive.

B2B sales is like jigsaw puzzles, you have to have all of the pieces and know how they fit together to complete them. By using stakeholder mapping in sales you give your team the solution to reducing customer complexity.

Boxxstep Advanced Stakeholder Mapping

Boxxstep is the most comprehensive stakeholder/relationship mapping tool available and it brings together other stakeholder focused tools such as Mutual Action Plans and Win-Loss performance feedback for a seamless buyer-centric strategy.

Stakeholder organigrams include:

Account – Contact Reporting line, Politics, Ownership and Focus
Opportunity – Contact Politics, Ownership, Deal Influence, Deal Buying Stage and Consensus Alignment

The dynamic visualizations enable sellers to easily see:

Account – Contact general Business Support, Involvement and Influence
Opportunity – Change Position, Solution Opinion, Vendor Preference

In addition to this a single click and sellers can capture and manage stakeholder profiles for each opportunity including any their criteria, concerns, challenges and objections.

Check out Boxxsteps relationship and stakeholder mapping capabilities and see for yourself

Conclusion

Stakeholder mapping in sales has been seen as a nice to have feature but things have changed. Increased customer complexity means that sales teams need a better way to capture, manage, share, action and review who and what they know about each customer stakeholder team. Using the right tool/platform will not only reduce the burden of customer management complexity it could also increase your win rates.

Now is the time to consider using one.

Note: For information and not explanation the other two major burdens on sellers identified in the research are Product Complexity (ever-growing set of products, solutions, and use-cases) and Internal Complexity (policies, procedures, processes, methodologies and systems).

The term drives the purpose and intention of the plan creators – to close a deal.

That’s not a good thing, if anything in today’s markets, it’s counterproductive.

Let’s start with the start

The original close plans were created by sellers keen to drive a prospect to close by a forecasted date.

This was when buyer relied on sellers for education and they allowed them to take the lead in the engagement.

Sellers used Excel or Word documents to list out who needed to do what and by when to keep the deal on track to close by their desired date.

Were they successful? Sometimes, generally when selection was a done deal and the preferred vendor wanted to get things moving.

What’s changed

Everything has changed.

The way your customers decide and buy has changed.

• There are significantly more people involved, each with a say in the outcome as decision makers are reluctant to sign off unless everyone is aligned to support the decision.
• Buyers’ self-educate and no longer rely on sellers for research information, which results in them engaging with sellers much later in the buying process.
• 70% of buyers have stated that they would prefer a rep-free buying experience.

Which means that sellers need to rethink how they collaborate with buyers and what types of plans could still be effective.

Let’s not get hung up on the doom and gloom research data, there is still an opportunity here for smart sales teams to navigate these choppy waters successfully.

And it starts with forgetting about closing and to start thinking about enabling.

Enabling what?

The net result of more people being involved and significantly more information being readily available is that buying has become difficult and takes much longer than expected.

The fear of messing up (FOMU) means that inaction and indecision is widespread amongst company buying groups (check out The JOLT Effect).

No-one wants to make a bad decision that they regret, the perceived safer option is to do nothing because the pain of same is known but the pain of change is unknown.

So instead of creating sales close plans sellers should think about Outcome Enablement Plans, sometimes known by other names such as Mutual Action Plans or Collaboration Plans.

What’s the difference? One is about what the seller wants and the latter is about what the buyers need. A different mindset will lead to a different plan, a plan that is created to enable the buyers to achieve their desired business outcomes or goals.

Creating a plan

Now that you understand the reasons why sellers need to help buyers navigate the complexity of buying let’s look at what makes a collaborative plan and gives sellers the opportunity to differentiate the buying experience.

A sales close plan lists a bunch of activities associated with a deal sign off, including all the steps that lead to it.

An outcome enablement plan focuses on helping a broad group of customer buyer contacts make a change management decision.

In the majority of cases, it is a decision/selection that they may not know how to make because it is not something they do often or have a process for.

This creates an opportunity for sales teams. Why, because you will have done many similar projects and are therefore able to provide advice and guidance.

To maximise the benefits for buyers, create plans that include and achieve the following:

1. Clear objectives, purpose and outcomes the plan was created to help buyers achieve
2. The roles of people that would typically be involved
3. Dates that align with the buyer’s schedule
4. An ROI or Outcome achieved final step, never ever have a plan that ends with contract signing (that’s a sales close plan)
5. Content and tools that help with the ‘Why Change’ and ‘Why Now’ decision. Avoid too much ‘Why Us’
6. Content and tools that help with each key milestone or stage outcome, make it easy for them to learn what they need to know to maintain progress

Remember, when you create a plan make it a two-way mutual plan that both parties contribute to. It’s a living plan, so keep it updated as things change

Other uses

These plans can be used in a variety of different situations, not just for new business.

They can be tremendously helpful for both buyers and sellers in a contract renewal process or when onboarding a new customer.

If the plan is just for internal use, then sales close plans could be a helpful way to align the internal team. But as far as buyers are concerned you need to rethink your plans away from selling and closing.

Benefits of a great plan

A well-crafted, well positioned and well managed plan can result in a win/win outcome for both the buying and selling teams.

Buyers can be collaboratively guided through a difficult change decision process.

Sellers can achieve more predictable results because great plans improve deal velocity and close rates.

Whether you’re using document-based plans or a digital online tool like Boxxsteps plans it’s time to evolve your sales close plans into Outcome Enablement Plans.

That’s easy. It’s any account you decide is key to you and your business.

It doesn’t have to be a monster account that will generate millions, but of course they’re nice to have.

A key account could be a single new business opportunity that you’re focused on winning.

A key account could be an opportunity to expand in a company where you currently have a small foothold.

A key account could be a global account which involves engaging and managing contacts across different companies, divisions and countries.

Whatever you determine, key account relationship mapping software tools are a must have if you want to successfully navigate the complexity.

What complexity?

There is a term we hear all too often and that is – Complex Sales and Complex Selling.

This is misleading as it’s coming from the wrong side, selling is complex not because of the sales process but because of the buying process.

If you don’t know by now that buying has changed, is complex and difficult, then where have you been.

Buying has become complex due to the continuing increase in the number of people involved in company buying decisions.

It’s now well into double figures, but don’t take our word for it, check out the extensive research carried out by Gartner.

Sceptical about this number?

Most sales leaders and teams are because they don’t identify and engage with everyone involved.

It is all too easy to engage with the active and obvious buyers in the process, yet the ones we don’t identify often have influence or the power of veto.

Alongside this increase in the number of buyer contacts involved there’s also been a decentralisation of buying power. This doesn’t mean that decision makers are no longer decision makers, because they are.

Winning deals is about getting a collective yes from across the larger group of contacts.

Decision makers sign off once consensus has been achieved or a committee has aligned.

They don’t want to move forward without the agreement of all stakeholders, line managers, users and others involved or impacted with the decision.

Everyone has to buy into the way forward to ensure they’re behind it when a project starts.

The difficulty in achieving alignment and consensus agreement across the buying committee is a key contributor to the growing number of opportunities that end with the customer doing nothing (it’s above 50%).

Selling involves people management, and people are complicated. How you understand and help them will determine your success.

Why map a key sales account?

Most salespeople know the answer to this, but for those that are unsure here’s a basic introduction.

Relationship Mapping is the most well-known term, but it’s also referred to as Stakeholder Mapping or Powerbase Mapping.

In its simplest form it’s the visualisation of your customers organisation chart with a sprinkling of influence connectors overlaid.

Showing hierarchy and the levels of buyer influence in the process helps focus sales teams on the right people and activities.

But this doesn’t go far enough to reflect the new levels of complexity.

Influence is important, but you have to dig deeper in your buyer discovery.

Creating a basic sales relationship map

A relationship map is not a do once to tick a box and complete an objective activity.

It’s an evolving aid for sales teams that needs to be updated regularly based on what they’ve learnt.

A complex sales cycle could be 6, 9, 12 months plus and during that period salespeople engage and discover information that needs to be added.

Mapping out a customer’s organisation can be overkill and create an overly complicated relationship map. If they’re not involved, or can’t help or hinder you, then why include them.

Polarise your efforts on mapping out the buying committee showing everyone who you’ve identified will be or needs to be involved.

Plot each of these buyer contacts with direct or indirect reporting lines as your starting point.

Now it’s time to add some relationship indicators between contacts.

The sales industry is full of elaborate terminologies to define or categorise a buyer, my recommendation would be to use words that are easy to relate to so that anyone who sees the relationship map can understand what they mean. The simplest way is to use connectors based on what you’ve seen, heard or discovered showing:

• who is allies with who?
• who influences who?
• and who is in conflict with who?

You don’t need much explanation to interpret them.

Conflict does not necessarily mean something personal; it should represent individuals with conflicting views, opinions or directions.

More advanced mapping

There is value in a basic relationship map, but taking it to another level increases your ability to understand the who, why, what, when and how.

A collective yes is achieved from individual yeses.

Each buyer contributions with a vote, recommendation or influence.

Adding some additional colour or icon indicators about each buyer increases the benefits of the map.

What you add will depend on what you see as being valuable to visualise.

Here are some ideas:

• Your relationship with them
• Their role in the process
• Your frequency of access to them
• Their position on change
• Their view on your solution fit
• Their preference to win
• Where are they in the buying process?
• Who’s your Champion?
• Who’s key in the process?
• Who owns the business problem you solve?
• Who’s aligned with who?

The visualise aspects of your relationship map are clear, but you need to go one step further.

Because every buyer contributes to the decision you have to capture more information about them.

No matter what their role each buyer will have challenges as well as criteria and concerns that will influence their recommendation or decision.

By adding this detail, you see what you know and what you don’t know, it focuses you on the gaps in your knowledge and which buyers you need to work on.

If you don’t know this then you’re reducing your chances of getting their vote.

Who benefits?

Salespeople are demanding professionals when it comes to allocating their time. Their primary goals are to defend, develop and win.

– Defend the existing customer base
– Develop the existing customer base
– Win new customers

All three scenarios involve a wide group of contact buyers, so all three goals would benefit from relationship mapping.

It’s not just for salespeople, it’s for sales leaders as well as others in your organisation that support customer engagements.Sales leaders need to know that their team know what’s going on in their accounts and opportunities. A well-maintained relationship map provides the proof and the basis for productive reviews and coaching conversations.

Sales is a team sport, without the back up of many colleagues’ deals won’t get done. The more they understand who’s who and what’s important to each of them the better equipped they are to add value in the sales engagement.

When salespeople leave undocumented information is no longer available to those that need to pick up the baton. Momentum is lost, and in many instances so too is the business. Maintaining a good information is essential for sustained sales success and why key account relationship mapping tools are vital for sustained success.

Tools to use

The principle of key account relationship mapping tools is not new, it’s been around for decades.

There are still many sales professionals who swear by it and map out customer organisations in PowerPoint.

This helps, but it’s limited and is a pain to update and collaborate with others.

Good key account relationship mapping tools should connect to your CRM, as this would be your source of contact data.

The majority of relationship mapping tools available only work in conjunction with a CRM, and often it’s limited to Salesforce.

In addition to this, the relationship mapping feature in some of the tools is part of a bigger and more expensive sales process platform which makes it a broader decision to consider.

If you use a CRM with no options available then there are a few relationships mapping tools that can work as a standalone solution. It adds a little extra work to manually import your contacts via a csv file, but the upside of using it makes it all worthwhile.

Conclusion

People buy from people is still relevant today, but it needs to be updated to lots of people buy from lots of people because teams have to engage and sell to groups.

The complexity of having to engage and understand a broad group of buyers will continue to grow and that’s why relationship mapping is so important.

The ability to capture and visualise buying information about these people helps everyone involved.

Relationship mapping is not just for sales teams, organisations that have perfected internal collaboration to win business make it available to their wider team.

If you want to transform your sales activities and key accounts then it’s wise to start building relationship maps, then update and review them regularly.

If you want to align your selling with your customers buying and see the benefit of key account relationship mapping tools then take a peek at Boxxstep’s Relationship Mapping capability, no other platform comes close to enabling you to focus on and help your customers buying committees.

The growth of the Buying Committee, Decision Making Unit or whatever you choose to call them has led to selling becoming far more about people strategy and management.

The objective for sales teams is to convince a wider collection of buyers (people) from across an organisation to make a decision, not only a decision to make a business change but also a decision to to choose them.

Why are they like a jury?

A jury is a group of people (typically twelve in number) who come together to reach a verdict in a legal case on the basis of evidence submitted to them in court.

Both sets of lawyers will assess each member of the jury and their questioning, evidence and closing summaries are all designed to influence each juror to come down on their side.

When they can’t reach a unanimous or majority agreement on the evidence after hours, days and even weeks in the biggest cases, it becomes a hung jury and the judge will discharge them.

Despite hundreds of hours of legal team preparation, court questioning and arguments the accused is neither acquitted or convicted, neither the defence or prosecution win. There is no decision.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Thankfully there are way fewer hung juries in courts than there are no-decisions in company buying.

Brace yourself because the next part makes for depressing reading.

Between 40-60% of sales opportunities end with the customers doing diddly squat, zilch, sweet Fanny Adams. If that is not clear, it means they do nothing, they decide to not make a decision on change.

Why are jury’s similar to buying committees?

It’s the number of people and how they make decisions.

Research shows that the typical number is 11+ in B2B buying decisions, this can flex up quite a bit depending on what you sell.

Right off the bat sellers are expected to get a collective yes from a similar number of people that lawyers seek to get a collective guilty or not guilty.

Whether in court or in customer engagements getting this number of people to agree is a challenge.

People by nature have individual thoughts, concerns and opinions, getting them all aligned can be like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling.

Lawyers cannot rely on convincing a few members of the jury and sellers can’t count on a few fans/supporters to get their deal over the line.

Just like a jury decision, buying decisions are not made by one or two people (not often anyway).

And just like in a jury there will be buyers who have stronger voices and influence in the vote than others.

When you think about the number of individuals involved it’s no wonder that customer buying decisions are both difficult to achieve and take much longer than expected and all too often end with the dreaded do-nothing outcome.

That’s not to say it’s impossible because there are plenty of salespeople killing it today, and its not all due to great brand, products or pricing.

Some salespeople are difference makers and know how to identify, engage and enable the wider buying committee to achieve a positive decision.

It’s vital to understand that companies are making committee-based buying decisions because execs and senior leaders seek to achieve consensus within their teams.

What to do?

Lawyers do not take shortcuts in the legal process, and sellers shouldn’t either in the sales process. Sadly, it happens all too often in their buying committee activities.

I would not want a lawyer representing me who didn’t prepare and execute thoroughly, because the jury will likely make an unfavourable decision.

And I think that salespeople who do the same can expect similar buying committee results.

Here are a few things you should do to mitigate the risk and achieve better results:

1. Research and map out the typical functional personas involved in recent deals (won and lost). Dig high, wide and deep, leave no stone unturned to ensure you understand how your customer decisions are made and who’s typically involved.
2. Once you have a benchmark, identify and engage with the equivalent personas in your opportunities as a starting point.
3. Complete buyer discovery for each opportunity because the benchmark is your guide not your limitation, there will be a few extras that might pop onto your radar.
4. Understand each buyer and what’s important to them (their challenges, criteria, concerns, position on change etc.)
5. Plan the steps to address what you’ve discovered about each buyer that will help influence their recommendation/vote.

The days of relying on one or two well positioned friendly contact buyers to win a deal have gone.

Of course, there will be the odd exception but as a rule you can assume that the number of people involved in buying decisions will be well into double figures.

Failure to acknowledge this and have a strategy will generally end in disappointment, but it doesn’t need to be this way.

Do not assume that contact seniority means power because influence is often more powerful than authority.

Decisions can emanate from any level in the buying committee.

Think like a good lawyer, put the work in.

#BuyingCommittee

Help your customers on their buying journey they say.

Provide content to guide them through the decision process they say.

All great advice.

What an opportunity for sales teams to stand out from the crowd.

And what happens?

Sales teams send them a load of sales crap because we can’t help but make everything about us, our training and instincts mean that we shine the spotlight on ourselves.

The vast majority of content is created to promote and sell our own propositions.

There is nothing wrong with that as part of the overall engagement, but this doesn’t help our potential customers navigate the complexity of deciding and buying, it only adds to it.

Think about it for a moment.

You, along with all of your competitors, create a mountain of content and insights which confuse the hell out of your prospects because everyone states that they’re the best in many different ways.

Buyers then have to spend a big chunk of time sifting through all of the crap from sellers to work out what’s real and what’s relevant.

No wonder decision processes take so long or end up with the customer doing nothing.

The reality is that product differentiation is bloody tough, and almost impossible to prove during buyer engagements. Sending them your contrived and biased crap has little or no positive impact.

It’s well known that buyers are struggling during the buying process, so do yourself a favour if you want to be remembered create neutral content that helps them decide, not just content about you.

Gartner have coined the term Buyer Enablement and it’s the idea of creating materials, programs and content that help a customer in their own process of decision making.

The concept is absolutely what is needed.

Unfortunately, the ways that it’s being interpreted is different to what was intended.

Buyer enablement is not another flavour of sales enablement.

A key concept in sales enablement is to ‘influence’ whereas buyer enablement should be to ‘help’. Many in sales struggle to separate and manage the two, despite the vastly contrasting meanings.

Influence – to affect, control or manipulate something or someone; the ability to change fluctuating things such as thoughts or decisions.

Help – make it easier or possible for someone to do something by offering advice, services or resources.

And in this case the ‘do something’ is to make a decision.

Sales has been a distinctly selfish profession, but it has to change because buyers and buying has changed.

So, before you send them your piles of sales crap to influence them think about what you could send to help them.

Here’s a simple way of considering what you need to create for buyers:

Buyer enablement = Focus on ‘Why change and why now ‘?

Sales enablement = Focus on ‘Why us‘?

Remember, buyer enablement is a priority over sales enablement, because without the decision to ‘change‘, and ‘now‘, there is no opportunity for ‘us‘.

You, along with some of your competitors, will have solutions to their problems or goals and in many cases, buyers will struggle to separate one vendor from the other based on the trumpet blowing content they’ve received.

Don’t just rely on whitepapers, customer testimonials, case studies and any other look at me content, put yourself in the buyer’s shoes.

The buying process will comprise lots of people and lots of jobs and tasks that they need to complete to enable them to move forward.

How can you help them?

The buying experience, that’s how.

Gartner’s research showed that 62% of buyers would prioritise doing business with companies that differentiate the buying experience.

Sounds good, right?

OK, let’s rethink what we provide to buyers.

Not everything can be resolved with marketing collateral, whilst it may be interesting and sometimes insightful, it does little to move the needle in the buyer’s journey.

There are many questions that buyers ask themselves during the decision process before they get to vendor selection, these can be showstoppers that could ultimately contribute to a delayed or no-decision?

They include:

Is it the right time to change?
Can we afford to change?
Can we afford not to change?
What could be gained if we changed?
What do we need to know?
What do we need to consider?
What do we need to prepare?
Who needs to be involved?

Creating simple offline/online tools to help buyers answer their own buying questions can be a game changer in the buying experience. They can be input based files or web-based tools.

Here are some ideas, including some that Gartner identified:

DIAGNOSTICS – To assess if they are ready to make a change.

BENCHMARKS – That allow prospects to compare themselves to others based on important business measurements.

CALCULATORS – That help them to build their own internal business case. The obvious option would be ROI, but make sure this also includes the ability to build in internal costs, not just the costs of the solution purchase.

CHECKLISTS – To ensure that they done all of the right stuff. Who better to advise them than you based on doing many similar projects for others?

DECISION MAP – Who are typically involved? Deals get delayed because different stakeholders and buyers are added to the discussion late in the process. Give them the heads up on the typical roles/functions that should be engaged based on your experience.

Conclusion

Sales teams are struggling to figure out what they can do to significantly improve their outcomes.

More product and domain knowledge can help.

More sales training can help.

Better sales processes can help?

More sales tools can help.

But they help the seller not the buyer.

Improving your selling does not make the all important buying part easier.

Combine any improvements you make to your selling with improvements in the customers buying experience with you.

By creating customer focused content, tools and programs that help them in their process of decision making you are also helping your own chances of achieving your desired outcomes.

It’s a win win.

Check out our blog ‘What is Buyer Enablement?’ to learn more about how to help your customers to decide and buy.

An opportunity without a sales champion is an uphill struggle, or as some experts say – No Champion, No Deal.

Buying complexity has increased, and the old ways of the buyer/seller dance are no longer effective.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to be successful from the outside, that is why having a sales champion on the inside is or should be the goal for every sales professional.

Gaining a true Champion can be like receiving the ‘Gold Ticket’, but all too often many of the prerequisites for this contact are bypassed and the person that sellers rely on is more ‘Fools Gold’.

Common Mistakes

As a general rule salespeople are social gregarious creatures who favour being liked.

They mistake being liked by a buyer contact as a sign of an ally, someone who is on their side.

They mistake someone who likes their proposition as someone who will support the selection of their proposition

Why are these mistakes?

Buyers can like multiple sellers and multiple propositions.

Buyers can also be gregarious social creatures and liking you and your proposition makes them a fan, not your sales champion.

Another common mistake is that salespeople are often magnetised towards perceived authority based on hierarchy.

Titles do not automatically come with influence in the buying process.

Times have changed, the majority of decisions are now made below the c-suite and exec level.

They rely on their trusted teams to make a recommendation/decision, with justification of course, before they sign off and approve.

Finding a real Champion at the top level will undoubtedly put any sales team in a preferential position, but they’re not so easy to get.

Finding buyers with ambition who are looking to climb the corporate ladder off the back of driving beneficial change for the company would be the ones I’d target.

Qualification includes having a Champion

The importance of having a sales Champion now forms part of popular qualification processes such as MEDDICC which is widely used by many companies, especially in SaaS and tech sales.

MEDDICC views a Champion as someone who:

• has power and influence
• acts as an internal seller for you
• has a vested interest in your success

With well-defined processes like MEDDICC salespeople are driven to tag someone as their Champion in order for a deal to be recognised as qualified, another tick in the box.

Sales leaders push their teams to have a Champion on every opportunity, but rarely do they fully analyse the substance behind the selection. Ticking the box doesn’t mean it’s true.

The Coach

Another hurdle that trips many salespeople up is mistaking a contact that coaches them as their Champion.

The coach is different, whilst they may provide the inside track and aid progress unless they have power, influence and will proactively be an advocate for you then they are not your Champion.

Coaches shouldn’t be ignored; they are another piece of the puzzle. Your customers buying committee will most likely comprise contacts, coaches and champions. That’s right, plural, having multiple Champions is achievable.

What makes a great sales Champion?

The status of your sales Champion should not be given away too easily.

If someone is your Champion then you will have had to work really hard to get to this level of relationship.

If they’re your Champion then your management and colleagues will assume this is a relationship of substance with a person of influence.

Here’s an example tick list you can consider for benchmarking who is or isn’t your sales champion for an opportunity.

• Are they committed to solving the business problem that your solution addresses?
• Will they be a proactive advocate for change internally?
• Do they have influence and political credibility in the process?
• Do they have a personal stake in the outcome?
• Will they make introductions to others in the buying committee?
• Will they be guided by you on what questions to ask and what objections to expect?
• Will they be a proactive advocate for your solution within the buying committee?
• Will they share your Insights with their relevant colleagues?

One of my favourite sales experts is Jeff Hoffman who makes it even simpler.

He narrows the requirement for a real Champion down to two things:

1. They will fight as hard to get it through in their internal world as you have to fight hard to get it through yours, so that you’re equally pulling the oars in the same direction.
2. They have to be a rule breaker for the betterment of the company.

Jeff recommends you identify the right person, then try closing them to be your Champion.

Then be honest with them when asking, give them the definition of what you see as being a Champion, the worse scenario is that you can qualify them out.

If you don’t know Jeff then you need to. Check out Sell Hoffman and sign up for his Tuesday with Hoffman webinars, they’re both insightful and fun.

What now?

Revisit your existing opportunities and challenge yourself. Do the people that you’ve identified as your Champions live up to that status?

If they do then great, if they don’t then circle back.

Review if they can, and will be your Champion

A Sales Champion is someone of real value to you and their own business, don’t dilute it by setting the benchmark low.

The sales champion is part of a wider buying committee that you need to identify, engage and manage.

Check out our blog Customer Buying Committee or a Jury to learn how customer buying committyees work and make decisions.

Mutual Action Plans, Customer Success Plans, Joint Collaboration plans, it doesn’t matter what you call them they’re a way for sales teams to potentially change the way buyers think of us, and in doing so, improve our results. The principle behind them is a plan that is supposed to make buying easier. They’re usually created by the seller, but they’re even better when done jointly with the buyer.

These types of plans been around for a while in Excel and Word format, but in all reality, they’re often biased and contrived seller-centric Close Plans masked as being created to help the customers. Typically, the milestones in these plans end with place order/award contract, that says it all about the primary focus.

But the winds of change have brought some fresh thinking and technology advancements, and smart sales teams have figured out that Mutual Action Plan software can give them an advantage over their competitors.

Before we jump in on how these plans can change your results let’s start by looking at the B2B sales industry and how the need for them has arisen.

Selling today

Selling is tough right?

But so is buying, it’s probably even tougher.

Your customers are taking longer to make decisions, and often the decision is to do nothing.

It’s not because they didn’t have a need or a budget, it was just easier to stay with the status quo. What does Xanax do sexually, often impacting libido, it influences the central nervous system, reducing anxiety, potentially affecting arousal. Learn more about its effects by visiting https://www.piedmonthomehealth.com/managing-your-blood-pressure, and gain insights on this medication’s implications. Selling creates change and change creates challenges for buyers, and if the road to change is complicated then, if possible, they’ll try to stay where they are.

Doubling down on your sales efforts doesn’t mean you’ll win more deals, often it’s wasted effort because it has little or zero impact. It’s more likely that your efforts go unnoticed or they can create confusion or friction with buyers.

Shouting louder and more often is not the way you want to get noticed.

Getting on your prospects radar is hard, product fit and differentiation is your next hurdle.

For most sales teams this has become borderline impossible to achieve, after your pluses and minuses are compared to your competitors the customer is none the wiser on who to pick.

The old adage was that in the absence of relevant differentiation then price becomes the criteria, but even this is no longer a straight forward conclusion because it assumes the customer will buy from someone.

The people who decide and buy receive so much information and content from sales teams, subtly (or sometimes bluntly), telling them why their company and proposition is the biggest, the best, the fastest, the most reliable, most economical or whatever other words they can use to stand out. It actually produces the opposite reaction. Buyers struggle to work out what’s real and what’s relevant, if everyone is the biggest and best it creates analysis paralysis.

They can’t differentiate one vendor from another. Can you now see why so many sales opportunities get lost in the buyer’s abyss? Put yourself in their shoes, a buying experience full of complexity, confusion and conflicting information.

The future of selling

You may have heard the term ‘helping is the new selling’, and if you’re a hardened seller then you may view this with scepticism, because this is not how you’ve been trained to sell.

This is a good point to summarise the many hurdles that sales teams face today:

1. More competitors
2. More competitor marketing
3. More competitor collateral

Which adds up to lots of vendors who look, act and sound the same.

Let’s sell based on product differentiation! Hmm.. good luck with that in the sea of sameness.

Let’s follow the left jab with a right hook – decision making complexity:

1. More people involved in the process, and the number is growing
2. Making decisions collectively and by consensus
3. Buyers with a lack of relevant experience and knowledge

Can you see why selling and buying have become tougher for all those involved?

Please don’t discount the concept of helping as this should be the underlying purpose of the mutual action plan

Buyers don’t know

Time for a bit of honesty.

Do you really know what happened when your existing customers brought from you?

Don’t take a wild guess, I mean really know what they went through before buying from you.

Who was involved (by role/function) and when?

What important questions needed to be answered across the group?

What milestones had to be achieved?

What constraints did they have to work around?

What objections and/or concerns were raised within the group?

What information was helpful and what did they not have that they had to work hard to find?

What was the sign off and approval process before you got the order?

These are just some of the questions you need the answers to.

Most salespeople have never concerned themselves with tedious procedural activities, but if they did, they could be opening Pandora’s box.

What you’ll discover is that a lot of the time buyers DON’T know how to buy what you sell.

It may be that it’s something that they buy every 5 to 10 years, so in all likelihood there isn’t a process nor internal knowledge about it within their team.

This buyer inexperience and uncertainty is a fantastic opportunity for smart well organised sales teams, but only, if managed well!

Where can you start?

It should be obvious by now; you need to understand what happens before your customers buy from you.

Don’t think of buying as the generic high-level processes identified by many sales experts with headlines like – ‘The x stages of a customer’s buying process’, because it’s a 10,000 ft category view, you’ve got to get close to really understand.

Take the time to template the different and common milestones that they went through, which roles/functions were responsible for the milestones, and what information/knowledge helped them complete the job.

If you’ve got multiple propositions then create a template for each of them.

Personally, I wouldn’t give this responsibility to a salesperson, ideally allocate someone with project delivery skills who are best equipped to do this as they often have a different mindset and approach that is more appropriate.

The important thing is to identify the points in the process that your customers didn’t anticipate because they don’t have the experience in buying what you sell.

Speak to friendly customers, learn first-hand so you can understand the details that will enable you to create Mutual Action Plans that help future customers avoid the pitfalls.

Creating Mutual Action Plans

You can still use the traditional document versions, however, the digital options available present greater flexibility, capabilities and methods for collaboration, plus they look better.

A Mutual Action Plan must include the basics:

• The desired outcomes the plans are created to help the buyers achieve
• The major activities that need to be completed, by who and when
• The status of each activity
• Identify members of both the buyer and seller companies, this is a collaboration between teams

Structure without relevance is pointless, focus on the details of the most important activities and milestones.

One words of advice, don’t start with a plan that has a list as long as your arm. Start with the headline milestones so as to not overwhelm the buyers, then add more once you’re underway.

When to use Mutual Action Plans

The right deals, in the right way and at the right time. OK, that’s obvious.

Complex and enterprise sales are perfect because the buying cycle tends to be longer and there are more things that need to be done by more people.

Consider the deal value as well, they’re probably overkill for low value sales. Set a minimum value as part of your process, but don’t make it rigid.

Timing is everything, many sales teams are too cautious and don’t want to introduce them until significant momentum or even preference have been achieved.

We recommend introducing the concept of a plan early to show an understanding and experience of their type of project. But don’t start with a full-blown bespoke plan, ease them into the idea with a typical template to get their buy-in. If they’re receptive to what they see then step it up and suggest working together to create a plan for them.

Don’t limit using Mutual Action Plan software to the buying process, it can also be incredibly complementary to the on-boarding process once you’ve secured a new customer.

Boxxstep’s Mutual Action Plan software?

For a start we don’t call them Mutual Action Plans. Buyers are less worried about mutual success and the word ‘Action’ doesn’t always generate the right response.

We created the term – Outcome Enablement Plans – because it focuses everyone on the primary objective, which is to achieve the customers desired future state and outcomes.

Our plans are just part of our wider focus on buyer engagement and enablement across your prospects buying committee. A more holistic approach through the different phases of deciding and buying.

We start with Engage to focus on who’s involved, what’s important, and the dynamics between them, including relationship mapping.

Then we move to Collaborate (Outcome Enablement Plans) and leverage what we’ve already discovered in Engage.

Our plans include everything you’d expect but we take it to a new level of buyer collaboration and enablement.

We include a buyer/seller Chat feature and we created Needs Mapping and Insights Mapping. They’ve elevated and improved the buyer’s impression of the sales teams that use them.

Conclusion

Always start with the purpose in mind, the plan should help the customer navigate the complexity of buying to meet a specific date and achieve specific outcomes. This is NOT about you, its about your customer.

If you do this right, you’ll be differentiating the buyer experience. According to Gartner nearly 2/3’s of buyers said they would prioritise doing business with companies who do this, so how you sell can be more important than what you sell.

Mutual Action Plan software can benefit both parties, as sellers you could see significant upside in both deal velocity and close rates.

A great plan can be a Win/Win.

You can learn more about our Mutual Action Plan sofware by by arranging to see it in action.

The quality and accuracy of forecasting has advanced as much as an asthmatic ant with a heavy shopping bag in recent years.

Last week I was chatting with a global sales leader in a pretty cool and funky software company and inevitably the question about his main problems came up, and he went off on one, the amount of times he used the F word was shocking.

Now this was a successful company with good revenue growth, but once you look under the covers you discover the wart’s and all challenges.

Good, bad and average performing sales teams share common forecasting issues, but, wait for it…………. forecasting is not a problem!

Bare with me as I’m going to state the bleeding obvious, forecasting is not a problem, it’s a symptom of the real problem.

Stay with me, here’s why.

Everyday I talk with sales leaders and I ask them all the same question – “Do you think if your salespeople knew more about their prospects they’d be more effective selling to them”?

Most responses come after a pause to digest the question, but every single time the answer is the same, it’s a categoric yes.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Sales leaders are frustrated with inaccurate forecasting.

Sales leaders acknowledge their teams need to know more about their prospects.

Come on people the two are inextricably linked, and the path to improvement is clear.

How can salespeople forecast accurately if it’s based on missing data, assumptions and guesswork?

If you want to break it down into bite sized chunks, here goes:

Problem – Salespeople don’t know enough about their prospects

Symptoms that the problem exists – Inaccurate forecast

Impact of the problem – Poor business decisions can be made

Who’s affected by the problem – The business

Cause of the problem – Salespeople don’t do enough of the right research and discovery

The more you know about your prospects business problems, buying process and the people who decide and buy, the better equipped you are to understand if they’re a good fit, how to help them and to forecast accurately. It’s simple, but hard work.

I’m not going to get on my soapbox and start ranting about discovery, but what I will say is don’t limit discovery just to qualify an opportunity, don’t make it about creating the chance to pitch, demo and sell. It needs to be much more buyer centric.

Good sales engagements require you to dig higher, deeper and wider, there are very few shortcuts.

In summary most salespeople don’t know enough about their prospects and most sales leaders don’t know that they don’t know.

The fault lies with both parties, but primarily with leadership because they should be drilling down on the most relevant details that contribute to their teams forecast, not on the numbers and dates. It’s what they know and what they do about it that leads to the numbers.

You believe that you need to give them as much positive information about your proposition as possible, right?  Well maybe it’s not helping.

The purpose of this blog is to share a lesser known idea with you on how you can help your prospects in the deciding and buying process by providing the right content and insights at the right time. But before we get to it let’s put some context around why this idea is such a good one.

According to Gartner your prospects spend an average 17% of the total buying process meeting with the different vendors, depending on how many competitors you face on most deals it probably means that you’re getting very low single figure percentage of their time.

Now the following research statistic is stunning, I now understand why so many opportunities end in no-decision outcomes.

    – 15% of the buying process is spent deconflicting all of the different content they receive from the different vendors

Think about that for a moment, they spend nearly as much time trying to make sense of the information as they spend meeting with all of the vendors through the process.

They generally receive a high quantity of high quality content, so sales and marketing can be congratulated on their material.

But prospects struggle to work out what’s real and what’s relevant, and often they hit analysis paralysis.

Every vendor sounds alike.

They all say they are the biggest, the best, most reliable, fastest, whatever measurement will be important to the prospect. It creates a perception of parity.

The sheer quantity of information is overwhelming and its highly unlikely that much of it will ever be read, watched or used. It’s almost as if the sales teams have said here’s what we’ve got that makes us look good, somewhere in there are some golden nuggets that may actually help you. But it’s up to you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Then again, this isn’t a surprise as most content is produced to support the selling rather than help in the buying.

Buyer Insights that help

The process of deciding and buying is complex and chaotic and overloading prospects with general buyer insights and information only adds to the difficulty.

If you plan on relying on product differentiation then forget it as its nearly impossible to achieve because everyone appears pretty much the same to the prospect.

Here’s some more Gartner research that presents sales teams with an opportunity:

    – 62% of buyers said they’d prioritize doing business with a company who provide a better buying experience

You’re probably wondering how buyer insights help the buying experience?

Think of the buying process as a series of job and tasks that need to be completed by the buyer committee.

Different people within the committee have different responsibilities through the process and they will need help to complete them.

Help in the form of buyer insights, content and information specific for the job or task at hand.

Not general information, not glossy look how great we are marketing collateral, but insights that elp those responsible at that specific stage.

This may just put a bit of a hurdle in front of you, a pretty high hurdle as well. The vast majority of seller teams have little or no idea what the buyer teams have to do before they buy.

Thankfully I’ve also written a blog that will help you – Know your customers buying process

It’s involves some work but it will be time very well spent and the results will more than justify it.

Mapping Buyer Insights

Once you have a detailed understanding of your customers typical buying process you can source or create the buyer insights that will help them as they move through each phase.

It’s likely that the buying process will be broken down in to many different jobs and tasks, it will be tough to provide relevant and helpful buyer insights for each of them, so focus on the key activities that move the process forward.

It’s important that you understand that buyer insights does not mean lots of information about how you help them and why they should buy from you.

They should be insights that help them in their process.

This could be blogs (like this one :0), whitepapers, research, webinars, ROI tools etc.

This will require a big change of behaviour as sales teams have become accustomed to providing self-serving and dare I say it biased information.

Buyers are not fools, they’ve become conditioned to expect this stereotypical sales tactic.

So, surprise them, focus on differentiating the buying experience, don’t provide buyer insights that just lead back to you.

Be the source of value that helps them manage the complexity and navigate their own buying process.

I’m sure this must sound counter-intuitive, sellers have to help buyers to buy, really?

Last words

As I’ve written in other blogs you need to forget selling and start helping, especially in the current situation.

Help can only be provided from a position of knowledge. If you don’t know what they need to do, as well as have collated relevant insightful information then how can you help them?

Improving the buyer experience is an opportunity to differentiate. Make it happen.

Enabling your buyers is now vital for sales success, so I thought I’d share a Gartner webinar with you Enable your buyers to boost your sales 

Whether you call it the buyer committee, the buyer group or decision-making unit it’s a growing number of people involved in the deciding and buying for your sales opportunities.

To add to the challenge the more people involved the longer the sales cycle and the greater the risk of a no-decision outcome, both of which hit you were it hurts.

So, selling has become more about people management than it is opportunity management, bear with me on this one.

The purpose of this blog is to broaden your thinking about your sales engagements as the days of selling to one or two decision makers and getting the deal over the line have long gone.

Buyer committee decision making 

Consensus based decision making is now the norm, decision makers and stakeholders don’t want to sign off and move forward unless consensus is achieved across the group/committee, they want to know that everyone (or at least the vast majority) are aligned.

It’s no longer about getting a yes it’s about getting a collective yes. As soon as you require anything in multiples it becomes more complicated, that’s one of the reasons sales has become tougher because many yeses are more challenging than one

I speak with sales leaders every day and here are some of the main problems they highlight:

1. Their salespeople typically engage with a small handful of people on their opportunities, sometimes a few extra but they’re on a light touch basis
2. In some instances, they only have a few contacts, one of them is their champion who they overly rely on to make things happen
3. There were contacts that their teams weren’t aware of who got involved late in the process and scuppered the deal
4. Too many deals that they count on keep moving to the right on their forecasts
5. They lose deals that they thought they’d win even though they had some ‘great’ contacts that their teams were engaged with who were super positive and supportive about their proposal
6. They thought their team had all of the bases covered but it just didn’t happen, the prospect decided to do nothing.
7. Deal reviews are painful and frustrating because their sales teams can’t explain enough about who’s who in the deals

Have you experienced any, if not all of them’ at one point or another? I spent 20 years as an exec sales leader in high tech and software and I certainly did. All too often.

How you manage your prospects buyer committee is a problem and an opportunity.

But this is not about shortcut selling, effective engagement and management of the buyer committee is hard work, but it’s work that’s worth doing as it will positively impact your results.

Here’s a question for you – How many prospects contacts are normally involved in your sales engagements?

If you’re like most sales leaders you’ll say somewhere between 4 and 6.

Gartner did some extensive research with B2B buyers and discovered that the typical number of contacts involved in the deciding and buying is now 11, it’s even more if it’s a technical solution decision where it’s between 12-14. To be clear, 11 is the average number, there will be companies where it is lower and some where it is higher.

To add to the complexity the research also showed that the more contacts that were involved the higher the probability that no-decision would be the outcome. Getting a larger group of people to agree is one of life’s challenges.

Around 50% of forecasted opportunities result in do-nothing deals, they maintain the status quo. Even taking into account that a chunk of these deals were badly qualified and should never have been forecasted this is an alarming statistic.

Seller-Buyer delta

This research shows that there is a huge disparity between what sellers think and what buyers state.

Why is the delta between the sellers view and the buying reality so large?

One of the reasons is that the buyer committee can be an ever-changing group, there are active and occasional participants. Salespeople should constantly be monitoring change and never ever ignore the occasionals as they could hold power of veto.

Another reason is that 80% of your salespeople don’t identify them. This is probably because the overhead associated with such a large buyer committee is daunting, but essential if more predictable success is to be achieved.

The natural instinct for a salesperson is to home in on the most senior levels, that’s were stuff gets done, right? Maybe, but influence, in many cases, is now more powerful than authority and influence comes from the trenches.

2nd, 3rd and even 4th tier contacts have a say in the outcome. Execs and decision makers trust the recommendations of their teams and sign off committee-based decisions.

They have learnt that decisions that were made without consulting the wider organisation hit hurdles, including one of the most important ones which is user adoption.

Buyer discovery is hard work, buyer discovery requires smart work. Salespeople need to understand the value of doing this work.

Navigating the buyer committee

There are two things that salespeople need to understand about the buyer committee, who’s in it and what’s important to each of them.

Home truth –

The majority of buyer’s state that salespeople don’t understand enough about their business needs, so it’s no surprise when salespeople don’t know enough about what’s important to each member of the buyer committee.

Don’t think sell, think help. Focus on what’s important to them, don’t make pre-determined assumptions, understand the individual specifics relevant to that person. They’re all on the committee and all contribute to the decision.

Every contact will have business and personal motivations, their own KPI’s, agendas and challenges will influence their position.

Buyer Profile

What do you need to know about each member of the buyer committee? The following is the minimum:

• Their roles in the process and their reporting line
• Their individual criteria for making their recommendation or decision
• Their individual concerns around making their recommendation or decision
• Their position on change, for or against it and why
• Any objections they may have about your proposition
• The dynamics they have with other members of the buyer committee

Please do not think this is overkill, remember selling is now about people management, and people can be high maintenance.

Hot Tip

For visual clarity map out the buyer committee. If you don’t have a relationship mapping tool then just use any presentation or graphics application. You’d be delighted at how much easier it becomes if you can visualise who you know and don’t know.

Identifying the buyer committee

A common problem for salespeople is identifying who’s on the buyer committee.

Existing contacts don’t always facilitate introductions, and the committee can expand as the process evolves.

Check out my blog Know your customers buying process for ideas on how to expand your contact footprint.

How would doing this help your sales team?

If you agree that a buyer centric engagement will be more effective for your sales team and that buyer discovery needs increased attention then here’s what you can expect from the results:

• More closed won deals as your engagement strategy will provide you with the understanding on how to get each individual decision recommendation
• Less no-decision outcomes as you’re able to address and hopefully overcome previously unknown obstacles
• Highly productive deal reviews based on providing a greater understanding of who you know, what you know about them and what your doing with each of them to improve your position

Last Words

Some sales teams can rely on vastly superior product or price position to do their numbers, the actual selling involved is minimal. But for the vast majority of sales teams who are in highly competitive red ocean markets every small differentiator counts.

Failure to identify, engage and collaborate with the buyer committee is common, and a missed opportunity.

Everyone knows that the ‘who’ and ‘what’ are fundamentals of successful selling, but not enough salespeople and sales leaders focus enough attention on knowing it.

The more you know about ‘who’ is involved and ‘what’ is important to them the better positioned you are to navigate and manage the buyer committee.

Don’t just think individual yes from a decision-maker, think yeses from everyone. Of course, this is tough, this means more work, but nobody said selling was easy.

Check out how Boxxstep helps through Relationship Mapping

Here’s an interesting article from Gartner on The new B2B buyer journey