Enhance Your B2b Sales Qualification for Organizations

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now it's my pleasure to present today's presenter bob apollo he's founder and chief's outcomes officer at inflection point where he works with b2b ceos and sales leaders to accelerate revenue growth through the proven principles of outcome-centric selling so with that bob take it away nick thank you very much uh good morning good afternoon and whatever time those of you who might be listening to this on demand uh i am bob apollo and it's my pleasure to spend the next few minutes with you i'd like to share some of the things i've learned along the way in a career in b2b selling much of it in high-tech businesses and during which uh i learned a number of things about the importance not just of selling value but of acting with values now today uh after retiring from corporate life i now work with a cross-section of clients ranging from scale ups to large corporates helping them to put the principles of outcome-centric selling into practice and there'll be a little bit more about what i mean by outcome-centric selling in just a moment but um let me start by posing the question what do we mean by value now it's the sort of thing that could have a number of definitions and i'm sure that if you go on the web and look them up you'll you'll find a number of uh alternative options here's one that i think's as good as any uh value is the importance or worth of something for an individual a stakeholder group in other words a community within a larger organization or the organization itself but i think there's something a bit more than that um it is my belief and i hope that some of the things we'll be discussing today will help reinforce it is that value doesn't lie in the activity it lies in the outcome the result and this is particularly important when we're thinking about value and our own customers so values well one way of looking at things is as i've said to think of value as the importance or worth of something for individuals groups or organizations and i will explore this in a little while but before i do i want to really focus on the alternative meaning of value and values and those are the principles the standards the behaviors the attitudes that together at the individual level at the stakeholder group level or at an organizational level reflect how um you go about doing your business and the principles upon which that's based and i want to suggest to you and certainly this has been my experience in my career that you can't sell value effectively if you don't operate within an environment in which you have strong values and those values need in my experience to come from the top and those organizational values are about the principles the attitudes the behaviors of a company as a whole the standards that it sets and of course then within the organization there are a number of communities i'll call them stakeholder groups you might think of them as functions or departments and it's the principles and the standards and the attitudes and behaviors that those groups uh apply and i'm thinking in our context particularly of the values of the sales organization and then we've got individual values again principles standards attitudes behaviors of the individuals within the organization now all three are important but i think fundamentally and if you want to create a sustainable culture of value those values need to come from the top now there are many uh elements of value i want to highlight just a handful here that i regard as universally valuable and i'm going to start with honesty and i'm going to develop this point in just a little while because i think it's one of those foundational things that if that is lacking if honesty is lacking it it's really hard to build anything meaningful around it integrity very closely associated with with honesty outlook a positive frame of mind uh responsibility and of course responsibility is often partnered with accountability uh and those two responsibility and accountability together are also a very powerful and essential foundation for a valuable values-based culture and then we've got the motivation the motivation individually of functions or departments and of the organization as a whole and i want to start by focusing on honesty and it's a topic that's become i think particularly visible not only in business but in political life certainly here in my native uk uh we're going through a period where a very significant part of the population questions the honesty and the integrity of those who are leading us and i want to make the point i'm not trying to be political uh organizations and the people who work for them and who represent them need to be honest with themselves before they can be honest with others if we as individuals as departments or organizations get into a habit of lying to ourselves we can't expect to recognize the value of truth to others now how do we create that culture of internal honesty well i i believe very strongly that how we choose to treat and communicate with people internally will define how our employees treat people externally and i think it really starts with insisting on honest conversation and communication upwards and downwards if something needs to be said then say it it also means having a culture of saying what people need to hear not what they want to hear it means demonstrating that absolute focus on ethics and integrity and being unwilling to tolerate any deviation from that it means respecting both our customers and our competitors if we ever get into the habit of bad-mouthing our competitors if we ever get into the habit of bad-mouthing a customer that we perceive to be difficult we'll find it very hard to avoid that spreading i think it's also part of under promising and over delivering of avoiding unjustified bluster and boosterism sticking with the truth back to particular examples in sales it's not trying to close what is unclosable and refusing to pursue bad business being willing to turn away from business rather than take it knowing that we're going to be unlikely to deliver the outcomes that our customer was looking for now unfortunately this essential thread of honesty it could be easy to destroy and hard to restore and to touch on a point that i made just a moment ago we need to avoid encouraging people to just say what they think their managers want to hear rather than what they need to hear it's a two-way street i've i've observed cultures where salespeople are unwilling to convey the truth they know about the state of their opportunities to their managers for fear of the reaction and all that does is to postpone the inevitable reckoning when honesty breaks down it can happen because we tolerate out and out lying or more commonly being economical with the truth encouraging anyone to bend the rules for any reason just to get a result and maybe this is the mirror image declaring rules that you don't expect to be followed like the northern ireland protocol establishing expectations that are unrealistic hiding behind semantics all of these things apparently some of them little things trivial things can have a corrosive effect on our attempts to create a culture of values and there are some particular behaviors that can destroy trust and i've seen them maybe you have pressurizing sales people to forecast opportunities that they know and actually probably you know they cannot win in the projected time frame or the predicted value because you want to convey or communicate something to somebody else encouraging or failing to discourage salespeople to share negative information with a prospective customer a failure to be honest setting and i think this is becoming increasingly critical in the as a service world in which so many of our offerings are being sold setting unrealistic or unreasonable customer expectations which are only going to be dashed or tolerating or failing to confront other forms of dishonest unethical or desire undesirable behavior you know forgiving somebody who appears at face value to be a top performing salesman because despite that they are being or you suspect them to be behaving in a way that doesn't reflect the company's values it might be convenient to ignore it but it's completely wrong so and in doing this in setting a values-based culture it's my experience that actions are far more important than words you see it's not what you've written down it's what happens in practice now i had the great good fortune when i was starting my career in technology to work for hewlett-packard in a period where they were seen as an exemplar of silicon valley culture and there's something rather interesting there was an hp way those of you who've worked for hp might be uh familiar with it it talked about that and by the way i think these things are as relevant today as they ever were trust and respect for the individual seeking and expecting high levels of achievement and uh performance conducting business with uncompromising integrity achieving common objectives through teamwork and encouraging flexibility and innovation now these are lastingly powerful values and they were written down in the hp way and some other companies envious of hp's success tried to emulate them and i won't name names but they did it the wrong way around they decided they needed a code of conduct so they wrote it down and hoped that their people embraced it what hp did and what i think the most powerful cultures do is that the code of conduct reflects the behavior that has become you know the appropriate way of doing business within the organization you don't create a values-based culture by uh declaring some ethereal uh mission statement uh or what have you you have to live it and you have to expect your people to live in actions are far more important than words now but values are about people so what about recruiting people who show the right values now there are a number of things you might think about um when you're considering whether or not to hire somebody and i'm taking these examples from objective management groups approach to sales evaluation an approach that today has evaluated more than 2.2 million sales people and has developed some very illuminating benchmarks about the competencies that are important today and there are a number that you'd categorize as being skill set or sales competence everything from hunting or reaching decision making or being consultative certainly selling value qualifying presenting etc now these competencies are typically a combination of skills and experience and typically these competencies are trainable they can be supported by experience and sometimes but not inevitably these competencies can be transferred from one job to another although would be very unwise to assume that somebody who's been a stellar performer in a previous role will automatically do the same in our own environment but those are the skill set related things and perhaps even more important from my perspective the wallop characterizes mindset and these really fit into a couple of categories the first is what objective management group refer to as the will to sell the desire to be successful the commitment to be successful to demonstrate excellence in our chosen profession of having the right outlook of being unwaveringly willing to accept responsibility and accountability for our actions and of course being self-motivated and then there are some other aspects of mindset and behavior some of these i found very interesting when i first came across them and all of them have certainly proven in my experience to be of very high importance in predicting how well somebody will fit into an organizational perform the first one is not needing approval now it doesn't mean behaving in a way where you're seeking disapproval it means doing what you know and believe to be right rather than what you think your audience is hoping or expecting staying in the moment being able to project how you go about buying things into your expectations for how your prospective customers buy things and being aware where there might be a disconnect and dealing with it being comfortable discussing money and being strong when faced with the rejection that is perhaps inevitable from time to time for salespeople not blaming others taking responsibility to ourselves now these these mindsets are collectively attitudes and behaviors and actually i think and maybe this is your experience as well uh they tend to be more coachable skills rather than expecting what's conventionally classified as training to be able to uh improve them and this is why coaching is such an important skill for today's sales managers because attitudes and behaviors are about how each salesperson how each sales manager thinks and acts and they are the essential foundation on which learn skills and experiences can be applied and candidly no matter how good your training is no matter how professionally it's delivered if it isn't delivered onto a foundation of the right mindset it will not have anything like the impact that we hoped for it and again these things mindset is more a matter of one recruiting the right people in the first place and two coaching their potential so hiring people with the right values well one of the things one of my mentors at hp taught me and i've believed it to be true then and i believe it to be true now and in fact my experience has only reinforced it when we're recruiting we need to prioritize attitude and behavior in other words the mindset of the individual over their experience in other words their inferred skill set because i think all of the evidence shows very clearly that it is very significantly easier to develop the relevant skill set in somebody with a positive mindset than it is to turn a negative mindset into a positive one um it's a matter of taking multiple perspectives when we're making our recruitment decisions of course you know cvs have value but very often they're a litany of positive achievement and i think we're always wise to understand the context of those claimed achievements and honestly some of them might be more down to luck than the competence of the individual and we need to know that but it's not just that it's when we interview making sure that the candidate is exposed to multiple people within our organization with different experiences and and expectations things like role plays can be very illuminating when it comes to understanding how for example people are likely to behave under pressure references well yes you know but if people are offering references they're almost certainly going to be uh positive ones and again i think the dialogue with potential referees needs to try and get underneath the surface and understand the mindset of the individual and not there not their skill set and again and i'm a great fan of these uh competency evaluations that benchmark the sales dna the will to sell the key sales competences against um a set of standards which have been shown to be effective in various peer groups and let me just leave you um with a thought here it's not just can this individual sell in fact maybe the more important question is will they sell will they sell in a way that reflects your values in your typical customer situations and benchmarked against the peer group against which they may be competing now i think there's very strong value in evaluating and there's a couple of statistics that i think bear this out 92 percent of candidates who were hired after being recommended by this one turns out to be objective management groups assessment tool you may have others i've found objective management groups to be particularly effective 92 percent of those candidates who are hired after recommendation rose to the top half of their new sales force within 12 months compare that 75 percent of the candidates who were hired despite not being recommended by a science-based evaluation you know who maybe we made recruitment decisions emotionally or maybe we felt under pressure we had to hire somebody three-quarters of the candidates who emerge with a negative recommendation from these sort of evaluations actually end up failing predictably in their new role within six months now if any of you think about the total cost and impact of making bad sales hires i think this is a tremendous argument for investing in doing it right now let's say we have hired people with potential people who seem to reflect the values we're trying to inculcate throughout our organization well then we need we still have a responsibility to convert that potential into performance so yes part of it is training on our offerings and that's classically what a new sales hire will receive in almost any sales organization but it's not enough we need to induct them in our values our company values and we need to establish their expectations not by giving them a value statement but by establishing expectations through our own behavior with them i will always choose to believe our behavior over and above anything that takes the form of the document we need to enable and i do them to identify and target their most valuable opportunities and typically if we're in a b to b environment then um that's a matter of understanding key issues ideal customers key roles and the trigger events that we need to look out for as salespeople in identifying promising current opportunities we need to help them develop their confidence through role plays i'm not sure that some organizations invest any and anything like enough time in this i think it's a really valuable exercise and absolutely we need to invest in intensive frequent coaching and feedback now it may or may not surprise you to know that today's top performing organizations are investing more of their management time in coaching than the ineffective organizations in fact the top performing organizations are investing as much as one third of the manager's time because they recognize how important it is to transfer not just skills but attitudes and behaviors and mindset and that converting potential into performance is also about focusing on outcomes and not just activities not giving salespeople a heavy quantity focused set of targets but right from the start getting the salesperson to focus on the quality of the outcome that their activities are generating the activity is only a means to an end and i'd also suggest to you that it can be tremendously powerful to make sure you capture what they're learning and this is another thing that perhaps doesn't get as much visibility as i believe it should it deserves to and that's not just exposing salespeople to the appropriate training courses however they're delivered a classroom on demand online or what have you not just coaching them and investing enough time enough quality management time in coaching but there's also lateral or corrective learning creating an environment where salespeople can share their learning with each other we've already talked about role plays another very powerful element of collective learning is creating a pool of value-related stories and anecdotes that the sales people can tell in the appropriate circumstances to reflect the appropriate message and deliver it reflecting the appropriate values collectively as a group identifying the common obstacles to progress and how to navigate around them something which can only happen if you've created a culture of self-honesty is to encourage the salespeople to acknowledge for themselves and to share with others things that they look back on and wish they'd done or things that they did and regretted because it's not just the individual that needs to learn from this we can all learn from it and anything that they've learned that they wish somebody else had prepared them better for previously if you create a culture of collective learning based on your values and based on the pooled experiences of your sales people everybody's ability to deliver value will be materially increased now i've made reference to outcomes at an earlier stage of our conversation and i want to spend a little bit more time i want to share a few words with you a few thoughts about what i see as the increasing importance of outcomes now there are different understandings of value go back and this is not quite repeating the definition i shared with you earlier but i'm i try to illustrate what i sometimes see in the average sales person or sales organization and they might typically think that value is about the projected value of the vendor's so-called solution it's probably based if you're in a disciplined environment on predicted return on investment payback period and so on and it can be done really well but if it's not done well or if it's not done at all there's a danger that it will be forgotten abandoned or ignored once the sales been closed and i don't think if i'm very confident this is not the way customers think about value it's much more about the actual value the customer derives after implementing the solution in other words the outcome and it's based on real world efficiency effectiveness financial metrics and it's critical to in a world where increasingly selling things on an as a service on a renewable contract basis that perception of value based on business outcomes is critical to their decision to continue to use to renew and to expand your so-called solution and that's where the care flywheel comes in and it may or may not be a concept that you're familiar with i'll introduce it to you briefly it certainly merits probably a a complete discussion of its own and it's about creating meaningful value through each phase of the sales cycle and the buying journey and during the first phase i prefer to call it commit rather than close because we're seeking to get the customers commitment to move forward with us is about understanding and shaping outcomes not just trying to understand what they think they need functionally understanding what business outcomes they're looking for it's about facilitating the buying journey it's about removing the obstacles from that buying journey which are often very significant and of course it's about getting their confidence and securing their commitment to proceed and then we move to the second uh segment of the flywheel adopt and that's really about delivering on the promises that we made and that the customer believed uh when we got them to commit to us in the first place implementing it um ensuring user adoption yes and but i'd say that the role of customer success is is much much more than ensuring user adoption it's actually i believe about ensuring that the customer achieves and recognizes that they've achieved their desired business outcomes so that's a key point in the flywheel now we'd be very wrong i think to abandon the flywheel at this point assuming we've got to it because again in a economy where across a broad range of deliverables our customers are increasingly preferring to consume them as a service then we need to make sure that they renew and we need to do that yes by maximizing user adoption but certainly by making sure at every level within our customer that the value that they've achieved has been fully recognized and that's how we get a commitment to renew and that's also how we build the platform for expansion er because if we've secured their confidence if we've helped them to adopt if we've ensured that they've achieved the business outcomes if they've given us their confidence to renew with us then we can seek out opportunities to expand to widen the usage to seek new projects to secure their commitment to expand and then initiate another buying journey now this i think this cycle more faithfully uh represents the true nature of a sales organization's interaction with its customers and the classic five-step qualify to close conventional sales process now why do sales people need to care well i think in part it's because we wanted to recognize that customer satisfaction and profitability is actually directly linked to the ability to create incremental value um so if we focus on commit and adopt only you know our goal is to win the order it doesn't guarantee successful adoption and in any renewal-based environment if we focus on commit and adopt only that approach is never likely to be profitable in any as a service environment when we broaden our focus to the next element of the care cycle and we do a professional job of it we focus on commit adopt and renew our goal is to ensure that the customer is motivated to renew it reinforces the importance of demonstrating that they've achieved the desired outcomes uh that approach is typically profitable then from the 18 to 24 month mark most of the studies that i've seen suggest that as a service businesses that's about the break-even point you may be lucky enough to be in a business which is better than that but that's the average and that's partly down to the cost of the initial sale so you really need to make sure you can't just focus on order taking you've got to focus on commit adopt and re renew if you have any chance of being profitable but then if you focus on the full care cycle all of those elements including finding uh proactively finding expansion opportunities your goal is to maximize lifetime customer value to them and to you and of course that means we need to find new ways of creating new incremental valuable outcomes and that approach again ing to all of the studies is one that results in progressively increasing profitability over the customer life cycle so if you're in any industry in any business where renewal is important today or will become important in your future you i would suggest need to think in these terms you need to invest in making sure that all four segments of the care cycle the care flywheel are properly invested in so let me try and draw some conclusions you always sell value more effectively if your organization is aligned around the right values values come from the top organizational values influence shareholder stakeholder group rather values i.e departments or functions which in turn influence individual values you can't be honest with your customer if you've got a habit of not being honest with yourselves we need to hire for attitude and behavior over experience and we need to invest in inducting our sales people into our culture and to reinforce that through intensive coaching i've highlighted what i believe to be the power and impact of collective learning and focusing our sales people on outcomes on the quality of what happens as a consequence of their work rather than on raw activities and managing that whole care cycle commit adopt renew and expand so those are a few thoughts that i hope you'll find relevant to what you're seeking to achieve in your organization and i hope some of the ideas have resonated with you if you'd like to learn more about any of these ideas uh i welcome it if you could drop me a line to bob at inflectionpoint.com or you can visit the website .inflection.com so there we have it and i think it's time now to hand back to uh nick thank you bob um and appreciate uh the insightful presentation um and in addition to uh reaching out to bobby at the inflection point website or his email address uh you can also leave a note in the exit survey um and we'll pass that um that you'd like to you know to hear more from him um through along right along the bob now there's still time to enter questions for the q a session so to give everyone a little bit of time to do so um just a few quick words on leverage point uh so uh what is leverage point uh for those of you who aren't familiar with us uh we offer a sas solution that creates interactive digital value propositions that help sales team tell these value stories in a more powerful customer specific way how does it work well first product uh product marketing and pricing team members can construct these uh custom branded value models and messages to create a value proposition that helps tails sales tell a story they can then publish that into a cloud-based library that's accessible by every rep at your organization to customize in real time for each individual customers and prospects needs finally starting with the first sales call teams can modify the customer's baseline data in real time in order to create a unique business case to buy that the prospect can leverage internally to drive the deal forward and these value propositions can be used from the beginning to the end of the sales process and into post sale as well so early on they're really useful as flexible case studies and call prep and in building sales confidence qualifying opportunities and in engaging customer executives as you move to the middle of the sales process leverage point value stories provide custom value analyses as an important consultative selling tool that really address pre-sales challenges when you get to the purchase stage the value proposition then becomes a shared business case which is collaboratively agreed between sales and customer sponsors and ends up serving as a buyer's internal financial justification to purchase um which becomes a real asset for sales teams when it comes to pricing negotiations um so using leverage point who wins uh well everyone really um so on average our customers achieve five to fifteen percent higher close rates and five to twenty five percent higher prices when using leverage value propositions these can be presented live then it into powerpoint and then upload it into salesforce um and so if it really fits neatly into any um sales and marketing stack so if you found any of that compelling would like to learn more about what leverage point does uh feel free to drop us a note in the exit survey and we can set you up with a custom demo um featuring uh something that's specific to your industry so now it is time for the questions and answers so i'm going to get my camera back on and uh dig through some of the questions uh so bob uh are you ready to roll i'm ready to roll alrighty um so is there an overlap between um the values that made for great sales people and ones that make for great sales of leaders absolutely um and in fact i mean there's probably a a superset of the values that we look for and expect from sales leaders but many honesty integrity the willing to speak truth to power uh you know all of those things uh are highly relevant necessary and valuable for salespeople for frontline sales managers and actually all the way up through the sales leadership stack and you know if we're expecting our sales people to behave in a value-centric way ing to our culture then it's very important that everybody that they look up to conveys the same signals and behaves in the same way makes sense uh let me see what we have for our next one uh oh uh so kpis a couple questions on kpis so um in terms of uh kind of the best value-centric teams that you've worked with are there certain kpis that matter more than some others and i think a related question is uh you know are there some kpis that you know are tend to be overused and don't really align with um you know outcome-centric um sales teams yeah so firstly let me sort of make a statement i'm not saying in any way that activity levels aren't important but i think an obsession with activity levels in other words quantity over quality has a really negative impact on trying to create a value and a values-centric culture just as it's important that we understand the business outcomes that our customers are seeking to achieve our own internal metrics are much more valuable when they reflect outcomes and an outcome might be not that i completed a call but that the customer committed to do something an advance that reflects progress in both their buying journey and in my sales cycle so actually we can look at outcomes uh as a very important internal kpi or or metric because outcomes inherently reflect the quality of what we've done and not just the quantity yeah uh that makes sense um and points to the need for a good revenue operations team to kind of make that a reality um so in terms of the care cycle a couple questions on that one um so what levers do organizations have at their disposal to i guess for lack of airway saying it get um sales people on board with it well you know um and you need to look carefully about this um if some measure of compensation for example or performance measurement it is down to the customer's clear acceptance and usage of the solution and not just down to the customer taking so the salesperson taking an order for it that can be very helpful you know part of compensation uh or measurements being customer satisfaction not just customer usage so you you know you want to set the expectations correctly before you take an order um now would that always result in some amendment to compensation maybe not but it might it ought to uh trigger a proper coaching discussion with salespeople who appear not to be setting the right expectations with their customers because that's only going to harm the organization that they work for so again integrating customer success into the sales cycle making sure that because the salesperson's understood what business outcomes the customers looking for that information is relayed to customer success if and when the customer is handed over so the customer isn't forced to go through the rigmarole again as if they'd never talked about it yeah and that's that's a trend we're seeing a lot to the uh the evolution of customer success uh from the kind of the sas software space into other industries so yeah it's evolving in a couple of dimensions one in any industry where renewal or expansion are important customer success is important and i think in the early days customer success was probably more focused on ensuring usage and adoption uh and reacting to issues in a timely fashion but i think there's a bigger view of customer success now and that includes making sure the customer success team is having discussions about business outcomes and delivered value and building a positive mindset in the customer where way before renewal comes up as a question the customer has already recognized the value of what they've been achieving yeah and we we see that a lot um with uh some some of our customers as well you know using similar leverage point value propositions in the sales process and then carrying that over into the um post-sale environment so that's definitely a trend um you know to keep an eye on um i think we have uh i got a few questions i'll probably group together for our last one uh so some industry specific questions so a good way to probably summarize them would be are there any sort of organizational practices uh for lack of a better way of saying it that you see in specific cert specific to certain industries that result in sub-optimal value realization by the way yeah i think there are patterns but i don't think they're inevitable so so for example if industries see themselves as operating in a very transactional mode you know uh competing on the basis of price and delivery or or or specification um then they often have less uh sophisticated approaches to understanding what the customer's outcomes are um so you know industries where let's say a very significant amount of their businesses repeat business but not based on renewal about re-consumption um every time but i tell you what even if in those industries if you can lay a foundation of perceived differentiated value then your chances of continuing to grow with the customer of earning profit and so on i i i think these concepts i i draw a little matrix and on one side of the matrix i think about so is the customer on a familiar or an unfamiliar buying journey you know if they think it's a very familiar journey they've got processes for buying if it's unfamiliar they need to be educated and they probably recognize that and then on the other dimension is and the is this a inevitable or a discretionary purchase and when you've got the convergence of an unfamiliar buying journey plus a discretionary purchase then a focus on value and on outcomes and on not just answering why choose us but answering why change why act now how do we get this project approved internally versus all of the other competing projects well at that intersection uh the sort of approaches i've been describing become particularly relevant essential yeah um and i think um that why that why change um and generating urgency is you know another another good reason um you know for all businesses to you know think about the outcomes that they provide to their customers so um that's i just want to thank you for a great presentation bob um and then moving on to next month's webinar um as always make sure you're pre-registered in the exit survey we have another great session scheduled um we're going to be talking to mark stiving he's going to be talking about how value conversations can impact the um sales process from the very top of the funnel at the beginning of the customer journey all the way down to close and beyond so um the impact of value conversations is something that i think will be really relevant to the marketing and sales folks in the audience so make sure you pre-order any exit survey um and that's gonna be it for us today so i want to thank everyone for taking the time to join us a big thanks to bob for sharing his insights as always and from those of us here at leverage point and inflection point um have a wonderful rest of your week uh take care everyone take care thank you you