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B2B Sales Strategy for Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Fintech I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run, and I want to share some thoughts and tips and best practices to think about as we're starting to get our sales motion back to pre lockdown levels. So when I think about what the post COVID-19 recovery looks like for sales professionals, think about just how much buyer expectations have changed. While these changes in buyer behaviors and digital transformation were very much going full steam ahead prior to the pandemic, the extended lockdown brought about even more rapid digital transformation. Many experts have pegged a decade of digital transformation happening in a matter of weeks, in a matter of months. All of a sudden, tens of millions of people became super comfortable with virtual meetings and virtual social gatherings, researching and making purchase decisions. 100% online. That would have been unimaginable to think of being 100% online before the pandemic. When I think about all of the companies that historically held back on openly and transparently sharing information on their websites prior to the pandemic, all of a sudden they were forced to rethink that premise and become way more transparent out of necessity. This most definitely accelerates the need for sales professionals to be seen more as consultants, subject matter experts, teachers and advisors rather than just another sales rep. Just another account executive. Certainly we want to get you out of the vendor box. It's much less about repeating information that people can find on websites and on social media because they're already self-discovering this way before they get to a conversation with you. There's plenty of information about the kinds of goals that you help achieve, the problems that you solve, how people weigh the pros and cons of different options and solution choices within your category, and all the information they could possibly want to discover about your product and service and your competition online. Most sales professionals really should be thinking about repositioning themselves to implement a true doctor/patient style type of relationships where sales professionals first diagnose what's going on with a prospect in a particular prospect's account and their goals and their challenges, and determine first and foremost whether your company can actually help them and whether all of that's a good fit before you even suggest the next logical step. And this is really a game changing shift in context that all professionals all B2B professionals in infrastructure, software, and fintech need to be thinking about. Now. As sales professionals come out of isolation as they start to hit the road again. As field events, as field visits to prospects and customers become more the norm, sales professionals are going to find that they're no longer the gatekeepers of information. Search engines, crowdsourced review sites, and social media have already won that bottle. They were already very much on the way to winning that battle prior to the pandemic, prior all the lockdowns, and it just really accelerated in the last several months. And as sales professionals maneuver out of isolation and hit the road again, they need to be much more selective about the kinds of prospects and customers that they engage with so that they're always in a position to be seen as teachers, as thought leaders, as subject matter experts, as true consultants, more than just another salesperson pedaling, a commoditized product or service it really is crucial to get out of. And just as importantly, stay out of that vendor box, doing your homework ahead of time, investing in customer insight that gives you and your company an unfair competitive advantage. These are all super important and more important than ever, because if this is all entirely new to you, it definitely will require a change in your mindset, change in your positioning, a change in how you approach your prospects. And one of the best resources that I can think of that will get you a tactical playbook is to go look up The Challenger Sale from Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon as its lessons are now even more important than ever. And the whole idea of decisions by committee, the whole idea of sales cycles getting longer, decision-makers getting more and more risk averse. And even more importantly, not just answering the questions that your prospects have, but sharing unique insight about the questions that they ought to be asking that, you know, they should be asking because you have a ton of experience working with similar companies and you're helping them think through these issues that more than likely, they just haven't given enough thought to yet. What is the new normal going to look like for the next generation of sales professionals? They're going to have to be way more comfortable using technology to anticipate and accelerate sales processes. If you think about the sheer number of boomers that were retiring, I think pre-pandemic we used to see figures thrown around like 10,000 Baby Boomers a day retiring. It's very unlikely that people in those roles are replaced by somebody else who's just about to retire. No, they're being replaced by somebody who's 10-20 years earlier on in their career, who is extremely comfortable navigating a digital buyer's journey. So it's super important to make sure that you are now relevant in that context. The new playbook includes complete comfort with using video conferencing as a way to accelerate and build trust faster. That's what this is all about, right? Is educating and building trust -- as a way to use personalized videos to explain and earned mindshare. Smart social selling as a way to add value to people's social posts rather than just spamming the heck out of their comments or spamming the heck out of their LinkedIn inbox. By the way, if you're not sure if what you're doing is adding value and you think you might be perceived as someone that's spamming the comments, or spamming the inbox, I'd recommend you shut that down temporarily and think about what best practices look like for being seen as a true subject matter expert and trusted advisor in that space. So it's critical to really be able to do your homework ahead of time and what's going on with that prospect and what's going on with that account that's really driving this initiative. And this enriched context and all of the details that you'll find in your CRM are more important than ever. And really mandatory for what it takes to build a compelling story around all of the user-shared data. I always talk about when you're engaging with a prospect. You know what they've explicitly shared with you. Like when they filled out a form: their first, the last, the company, their email address, their company size, the four or five things that they know that they've shared. However, there really is no excuse for you not to go into your CRM and look at okay, I can see what channel they came from. I can see what kind of content they are interacting with. I can see how many times they've been back on our website, how many pages they've viewed. I can see the titles of all of those pages, so I can start to weave in my mind what kinds of emails they're interacting with, what kind of pages they're reading. So I know what when I go into that meeting, what they're super interested in, talking more about. It's really, really important that you figure out that doctor patient way of being able to nail relevancy with that particular kind of person and understanding those topics, understanding their pain, understanding not only again, what they've explicitly told you about themselves, but all the things that they can observe. if they're attending webinars, if they're watching videos, if they have downloads. Anything that you can glean by looking at your CRM to figure this out is going to be even more important than ever for staying relevant in what the new normal looks like for B2B sales, especially in infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and fintech. What are you doing to make sure that you stay on top of your game? Let me know in the comments below, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'm super easy to find on LinkedIn: Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run. And I wish you great success in navigating the new B2B technology sales journey and what's required for all B2B sales professionals to upscale their game going forward.