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on this week in sales we're going to be taking a look at whether it's finally the end of the line for b to b sales calls we'll be looking at a recent of the state of deals report that suggests that b2b decision making is happening faster than ever before a bit weird right in the middle of a global pandemic i will uncover how sales enablement works in a socially distant world and a whole lot more and uh unfortunately for you guys it's just me will baron on this week in sales this week our friend our co-host victor antonio is currently in the middle of a a big storm the internet is down i hope him and his family and the dog is safe um so yeah you have to put up with me running through some of the news this weekend victor we'll hopefully be back next week to add his insights to all of this so we'll start with this report from mckenzie who says the most notable sign that digital sales have come of age is the comfort b2b buyers display in making large purchases and reorders online and this is seemingly a new phase of b2b selling this hasn't been buyers have not been comfortable of making these purchases in the past now ing to mckinsey there was this prevailing wisdom that e-commerce was mainly for smaller ticket items i don't know like well in the commercial world in the b2c world it's buying shampoo i think it's brand new right for companies like tesla for example to allow you to spend 50 100 000 on a a car online but that's the prevailing wisdom from the b2c world but the b2b world the prevailing wisdom was it's for smaller tickets items and things that you just need quick you don't care that you're paying a premium on this product or service you just need it now and so you don't want to deal with sales people you don't have to go through customer service you just want to get the deal done and the item in hand so people typically perhaps are fine to have a lower level of service because it's been bought online or pay perhaps a premium for it but that has all changed mckinsey again say notably 70 of b2b decision makers are now open to making uh fully self-serve or remote purchases purchases online of an excess of fifty thousand dollars so that's probably catching a whole chunk of sales people listening to this episode of this week in sales and it's most my deals are below fifty thousand dollars with the training that we do and the sponsorships on the podcast and all that side of things so i would be in that bracket so that 70 to b2b decision makers would make a purchase online of a value up to 50 000 27 would spend more than half a million dollars so that's where all of this i feel has really changed forever if somebody and say a cmo is willing to buy marketing software that's maybe not fifty thousand or a half million dollars in one go but they're willing to over the course of two or three years it's going to cost that and they're willing to do that online without speaking to a salesperson sales has changed and this report i think uh kind of gives some evidence to what me and victor have been talking about for the last month or so the report also says the amount of revenue generated by video related interactions has jumped to 69 since april of this year and 43 of all b2b revenue comes from video engagements now this is not news to me it's probably not news to you if you've been listening to the show probably not news to you if you're watching this on youtube either it might be new to you if you only consume all this content on audio but videos where it's at we all want to engage there's so many levels of communication extra levels of communication that happen through a video call versus a telephone and look telephone just voiced on voice conversations you know it's different for a podcast because you're consuming this probably whilst you're importing data into hubspot or salesforce so you're going for a run or you're walking your dock you're consuming this as an addition to another task that you're doing but a two-way conversation a phone call the only reason that they didn't start off being video calls is bandwidth and technology human beings we would always preferred to have had a video call if it was available and clearly it wasn't available 100 years ago and it now is ubiquitous and is available now so there's so many layers of communication that happen on a video call that we're unable to uh see or communicate or to take in over a voice call that this is this shouldn't be surprising to anyone but the question i've got a rhetorical question because victor isn't here for me to throw it at him and put some pressure on him to uh to pull my rants out of the the ditch here and to make it palatable for you guys my question is that if 70 of b2b decision makers will spend up to 50 000 online what's holding back the final 30 of decision makers because it could just be very naturally organic and rightfully so that these individuals like me selling medical devices back in the day the surgeon wanted to have their hands on the device that they're going to be physically put inside a patient and until they've checked the ergonomics that their massive hands small hands the angle that they prefer the type of procedure the way the patient's like lying or prone or whatever in the procedure itself until they've managed to check all that maybe they are not comfortable in buying maybe that wraps up that final 30 percent now i'm sure that 30 will reduce i'm sure some of those purchases will eventually be and we're going to talk about this later in this week in sales maybe there's virtual ways to show off some products or services or features or benefits that people uh holding people back from buying online now but if you're selling in an old-school way of knocking on doors you are knackered um again i'm not speaking of a victor here this is totally my own opinion but this is just data after data after data that you need to be selling online you need to be you need to use a internet based selling methodology okay so next up panda doc release the state of deals 2020 summer edition although it's not summer it's i don't know right here i can see the rain out the window it's absolutely thrown it down now and i think it's in the middle of a storm so i don't know if we've caught on to this later or what but pandadoc a leading all-in-one document automation software released the state of deals 2020 summit edition now what did they find they found that what post pandemic buyers are making decisions faster than ever before and the data shows that despite the expectation for slower sales as a result of the pandemic the completion rate on deals from april to june actually jumped up and the volume of deals initially decreased early on in the pandemic but then rebounded up and we're now up by over 38 of june now i'm gonna get i'm gonna this is just one source they could just have a certain specific type of customers that are doing well in this pandemic depending on the size of the organization maybe they cater to and sell to um small to medium-sized businesses or the enterprise so all this data is massively skewed but it gives us some indications right so a couple of thoughts on this what's causing decisions to be sped up is it that the market is doing really well there's tons of money out there all the budgets that have been held back have now been released and it's a great time to be a salesperson or is it that companies are struggling they they need solutions they need to take action quick otherwise they're not gonna be able to make payroll and budgets are being flung out there just to try and get the company out of the the proverbial that they might be in with the state of the economy that we're living through right now i don't know this report doesn't help us um make these decisions or or pull kind of pull clear conclusions out of it and of course more deals doesn't necessarily mean the same amount of revenue perhaps sales people perhaps you guys are doing an incredible job of just getting anything through and doing deals of five grand 10 grand rather than the 50 grand deal that you're hoping for which may have took longer you're you're happy just to squeeze out a few smaller ones and just take up whatever budget is available again we can uh speculate on some of this but without a wider source which doesn't exist other than gartner reports and forester reports and things like that it's difficult to pull data from a smaller source like this now next up i thought this one was interesting accenture completes acquisition of a b2b sales firm called n3 so for anyone who isn't familiar accenture is a multinational professional services company they do all the kind of stuff that you as a salesperson really don't care about all kinds of consulting hr uh hedgehog assaults and all that kind of thing accounting basically all that kind of stuff that happens in the background that when you close a deal and you think you've saved the organization all the other stuff happens that's what they're involved with but the important thing here they've got a revenue or reported revenue of over 40 billion so big important company right now n3 who's been acquired as an atlanta i'm quoting here an atlanta based b2b sales firm that combines specialized talent with artificial intelligence and machine learning every buzzword you could possibly imagine right and they enable smarter more efficient sales interactions and a quote from manish sharma group chief executive of accenture operations says bringing n3 into accenture family will better enable us to help companies influence purchasing decisions at critical stages so what they're doing here right they are pulling in lots of data to enable their sales teams their marketing teams to do a better job at selling and this is clearly the future this will trickle down from companies who can acquire other organizations to put a proprietary system in place this will trickle down and there'll be startups that will be throwing this information at you as well and it mentions very specifically here it helps purchasing decisions at critical stages of the sales or buying process and that's where we need this intel right we don't need intel that barry is having a fantastic day when you're just about to cold call him fine you you're capable of pulling that information out yourself aren't you you don't need a whole host of servers doing machine learning and ai algorithms to help you with that but what you might need help with is the fact that barry's ghosted you he hasn't heard back you haven't heard back from him for for two weeks now and you've gone on his linkedin profile and he's still posting on there these are the the critical points of the sales process when the the quote has been sent or when you're waiting to receive the purchase order these are the points where deals can seemingly go from 100 you tell your sales manager 100 this is definitely gonna happen to it falls apart in an absolute incident you don't hear back and you've no idea what's going on so this is where i believe a lot of this data can come in of the data can reference uh for example press releases of purchases of deals of acquisitions of partnerships that might have scuppered your own deal if you're doing deals of that size it could pull in data from hires and fires and and linkedin profile data and people giving congratulations on different deals being done and things of that nature as well and you can if you can pull in enough data if you can pull in enough um context during these different parts of the sales process that you'd never be able to do yourself now if it was a massive if you were doing a merger acquisition a deal of that kind of size you've probably got a group of analysts or consultants working with you to do some of this background digging and to stay on top of it to make sure that you've got the pulse of the the deal on on track and you're on top of everything but other than that we're gonna have to rely on machine learning and ai now with that said last week we uh posed the question should sales technology companies should sales enablement companies people who are selling to sales people essentially should they be acquiring training and and pushing out essentially sales training and sales content into the marketplace to add an extra layer of value to the the customers and their customers businesses now i spoke to us the name it was to remain anonymous which is fine but i spoke to a ceo uh the you know the the head honcho over really cool sales technology company and he was quite open and frank of his comments i'm gonna i'll quote some of them here and he said i'm allowed to share i guess the gist of things of our conversation as long as we don't call him out on things now he said the reason the main reason why these sales and input companies still software companies don't invest in a sales training element to their product is that and i'm gonna quote him here it's a scary proposition for most sales technology startups because if you include training or even quote unquote best practices within your software well then your software becomes liable your software becomes liable for the promises that you are making to the end user now if you pick on any company here but say like you've got a a sales automation an email automation system that you're selling the product right well if you say well we on average we give you a 10x return on your investment of out of product spend with us via increased revenue on your side when you use our software now if you just make that claim you throw it out there and the end user the buyer uses your software and they don't get those kind of returns from it then you can say well well you're just not trained you've not used it appropriately you need better sales training here's some recommendations and please keep using our software because we can see you know that you could you could keep selling someone you could upsell someone on the back of the data that you have of emails getting opened and all that side of things but if you included very specific training and then the end user used followed your system and used everything that you'd shared with them and still didn't have results then you've got nowhere to run and so that's when litigation comes in that's when refunds come in and so that's why ing to this anonymous ceo you are unlikely to see companies acquiring sales trading organizations for that very reason but he did say you will find so andy paul is a sales uh sales trainer sales expert i've had him on the salesman podcast a bunch of times he has his own sales podcast as well nice guy he said the ceo that i spoke to said that there's likely to be more andy porter called an andy paul style hire so it would be a sales trainer who creates content on his own or her own getting acquired by these companies and then becoming an advocate of the company that they are now employed by and the content that they were producing on their own now just goes into the larger organization's marketing funnel so they're acting more as a tool to get attention and marketing as opposed to a a trainer that's helping customers and i don't know about andy paul specifically here but this is just an example that was given to me and so the content and the individual as an advocate of the company they're creating marketing content as opposed to training people on how to use the software and actually improve their sales results so that was the the the yin and yang that was given to me by the ceo they don't want to get sued they don't they don't want that kind of hassle even if the product is great you're just opening up litigation for for no reason essentially and people do want to acquire experts in their field they do want to acquire a marketing collateral and material so hopefully that wraps up that question that i posed to victor last week that gives us somewhat of an objective opinion on things from someone who's in that space who has the the ceo definitely has the money to make acquisitions if he chose to so next up microsoft ignite showcases the first project cortex ai tool for sharepoint there's lots of brands there's lots of words here but the importance of this is the cut this content management tool the new tool learns to extract important or relevant semantic information from documents for use in workflows or enforcing policies now there's a whole bunch of stuff down here but essentially what they're trying to do is give a buyer an ability to create a rfp or request for proposal from data as opposed to what happens typically again i'll give you a clear example here what we used to do hopefully i don't get sued for this or the company gets sued fixed i don't know the legality of this but we would give and when we knew that a deal was going to happen and an organization had to go through a rfp they had to go through a tender process legally or otherwise before they could spend that cash and again i used to sell to the nhs here the government so that was a legal government requirement for this to happen in larger organizations there's no legality to it but they choose to get multiple quotes and rfp the heck out of individuals who are never going to get deals done and just so they can justify the sales that they are going to make so this tool the goal of it is to automate this whole process because what we used to do was build a great relationship let's get the sale basically done before the rfp was even raised and then we just add a few features and benefits onto the rfp we'd get them kind of edged in there that we knew our competitors wouldn't be able to cope with so if our if our we're selling cameras here right if our cameras are 4k uh interlaced and our competitors are 4k progressive the way that it projects and scans the image then we would put in the interlaced version into the rfp the competitor couldn't compete with it even though the end result is exactly the same but that one thing would mean that a box could be ticked and procurement could very comfortably and easily spend their money with us so this is looking like they're trying to put the end to this it also could be used to filter automatically rfps it could be used to filter individuals who don't meet requirements they could be used to on the expense side of things so i don't know how many of this weekend sales listeners are field sales people probably not money at the moment with the pandemic and the the lack of ability to knock on doors right but i know with a company car it was pain in the ass to do my expenses and hopefully some of this can be automated by ai and that source is cio.com next i had a message from i won't call you out just in case uh you don't want to be named with a product manager over at salesforce because we've been talking a lot about gong recently we've been talking a lot about um salesforce coming in and just wiping out some of these startups with the um voice recognition and and and contextual feedback to salespeople on sales calls and he sent me a message that sent me to a link over at salesforceben.com and salesforce has announced einstein call coaching for video they've got it for audio and it looks like they're doing some really cool stuff there and this is a great opportunity for me to just mention if you've got any uh tips if there's anything that you want covering on this week in sales drop either victor or myself a message on linkedin it's probably the easiest way to get hold of us or you can email me directly will salesman.org and we will cover it whether it's a you've got some pr news that you want us to take a look at but i will say it's probably best if you want to be included that you just include a couple of paragraphs that isn't marketing pr spiel and uh and you get real those of what's really going on that's more likely to be included in the show but yeah thank you senior product manager over at salesforce for that link we appreciate it next up we've got a post from rollzeau.com.com it's entitled the future of travelling is immersive now this article is talking about tourism going different places using vr goggles engaging with sights and sounds and tourist attractions in vr but i thought this is really fascinating because if we can do this to a high enough standard that someone would not travel to paris to see the eiffel tower because they can do it in vr in 99 accuracy and i think there's a i may have at least two or three films mainly starring uh arnold schwarzenegger and people of that era of where this this is going to demonstrate it as future technology but if we can do virtual tours and to this article talks about using to increase hotel bookings rather than just seeing pictures you can walk into a hotel google maps do this in some places where you can kind of click and move around but if you can do this fully interactively digitally this has massive implications for the sales process because well well i guess there's two elements to this one the most basic thing sales demos a completely different experience if you can even if you're just selling a software product if you can virtually sit next to someone and talk them through the product that you're going and point at things on the screen and engage with them and see their body language and see whether they're interested in this that will change demos forever but having said that and as i was processing that in my head the other side of this is that if we can do all this virtually and this technology exists and again it's ubiquitous and everyone has a virtual headset even if when you go to the office that's the only time that you put it on it belongs to the company that you work for as opposed to something like an iphone which everyone has well then there isn't going to be products where you sit and look at a screen because the screen will be augmented realitied in front of you it just changes absolutely everything maybe some of this can then be automated and do you need a sales person when the likes of of gong.io and salesforce and i'm sure hubspot are on the case with this as well when these epic organizations pull in so much conversational data why don't you just create an avatar that sells if software can tell you you should be doing this you said this word you did discovery too hard you're talking about the competition you mentioned price too early if software can tell you all of these things and they can essentially learn and build a database of what to do and what not to do in real time with a potential customer maybe we don't need sales people for a lot of these um i don't want to say lower level sales roles but sales roles where you're essentially doing customer service maybe a lot of these can just be disregarded now there's a human element to this of do i want to speak to a human to make a large purchase and the data from the top of the show shows that 70 people maybe they want to speak with a person but they don't need to see you it can all be done digitally so what's the stop the software companies making some kind of avatar that sells on your behalf we've almost got it at the moment with companies like drift who can use chat box automation that you know it's not real but because it's contextual it knows what page that you're sat on it knows what pages you've engaged with before it can build essentially a tree of content and data and knowledge so that you feel like you're getting a real interactive experience with all this again what's to stop a software company making an avatar that can do a lot of this selling probably better than someone who is untrained at least at first um i think that's perhaps even a scary proposition for b2b salespeople and with that let's wrap up this episode of this week in sales with a audience question so here we have a question from oscar i think it's pronounced winks or winks he says i've been working in sales for about five years i make around 9 000 a month my commission is uncapped but i'm only in the middle of the leaderboard my organization yes i hit my target every quarter without fail i have absolutely zero ambition to climb the corporate ladder or put in any more time or energy into my job i have a great work life balance i live and i live comfortably on this nine thousand dollars a month and he wants to keep doing this until he stops working he says my issue is my sales manager fights me on being complacent and she's always trying to push to get more out of me how do i explain that i'm really happy where i am okay so there are a number of uh if we go to like first principles to answer this question one of the first principles about sales sales targets revenue generation even businesses that are of a certain size revenue has to go up every year now there's real reasons for this right inflation five percent every year your whatever you brought in last year is worth less five percent less than what it is this year so targets are always going to go up companies need to grow if it's a public company they need more profits otherwise they are going to just get hammered by the the the market and people who analyze the market and you're going up with less funding in the business will die businesses that aren't moving forward typically die off now if it's a smaller company and one might call it a lifestyle business a business of anywhere from 11 to say 28 29 people like 30 individuals in an organization that's typically when things are forced to grow quarter on quarter if they are to stay afloat if it's a small business a lifestyle business then you can go to your boss and say hey i'm profitable you spend x dollars on me each week or each month or each year and i generate x dollars and more than that and as long as there's a positive differential and you're not a pain in the ass you're not causing loads of hassle you're probably gonna be just fine but if you're beyond that 30 employees mark of it in the organization it's a difficult conversation to have i would say genuinely now in all seriousness as long as you can keep your head down as long as you give good ideas and you give feedback and you look like you're trying really hard even if um you're only just meeting the obligations even though you hit i assume you hit target to earn that kind of uh that kind of salary each month from bonus each month then just get your head down just plug along this is one of the reasons um i like i like sales as a career for people because it gives you these kind of options say perhaps you wanted to buy a new house maybe your circumstance is changing a few years from now and you do want to buy a new house well then you can get your head down and everything changes if you maybe you don't let off the gas any more than where you are because you're already worrying about you're posing this question to me and victor unfortunately obviously victor isn't here to answer it but perhaps you are asking that question because you're just not interested in the role and that's fine i've had sales jobs where i haven't really cared but i was motivated by what the income could get me as opposed to the job itself and that worked fine as well but i think it's gonna be very difficult doesn't say how old you are didn't say how many years you've got left in your career but if you've got 10 20 30 years left in your selling career and you want to stay that one company that's going to be difficult its own right but if that's the goal you're probably better off getting into some kind of management position where you're not reliant on sales quotas uh fluctuate or you're not affected by sales quotas fluctuating you're not uh maybe go to a sales training role if that's what you want if you really love the company and you want to stay there i feel like though you're fighting a losing battle here sales quotas will always go up there will always be dynamic if everyone else in your team steps up a level and you stay behind then you're at the bottom of the leaderboard in an instant there's lots of things you can't control and so it's very difficult to just tread water in sales as i say on the sales podcast all the time you need to go into sales with a mindset of get in earn the money and perhaps get out and so there we go i think that is the most uh the main headlines of the topics this week again um apologies for victor not being here hopefully he's back next week and his house hasn't collapsed on his head and killed him that would be very unfortunate now that making jokes about it on the show and with that i hope you enjoyed this week in sales if you've got questions you'd like to us to answer on the show drop us a victor or i an email or a message on linkedin if you've got any news you'd like us to cover drop us a message and with that i'll see you this time next week on this week in sales