Can Sales Be Fixed?

Today the T-REX conference kicked off in downtown Durham! A great day of fantastic speakers, actionable content, and amazing networking at the beautiful Carolina Theater in Downtown Durham. This conference provided an opportunity to learn from sales, marketing, and executive leaders at some of the best tech and B2B organizations in the world.


The show kicked off with keynote speaker, Andy Paul, Founder, The Sales House. Can Sales Be Fixed? Can B2B Sales Be Saved? This is the question proposed per two trends converging with the steady influx of innovative tools and technologies in B2B sales and the continuing decline of overall B2B sales performance (as reported by sales research reports.) In his talk, Andy Paul challenges conventional wisdom exploring whether we're tracking the wrong metrics, training the wrong skills, stunting the development of our sellers and disproportionately allocating our sales resources to activities that don’t materially impact the buyers’ decisions. Andy also provided possible alternatives that could halt and reverse the downward trend in sales productivity. Here is a recap of top wisdom points shared:

• Add value: Sales interactions must add strong value or the client will only by on price. Being to add value is the core to all selling. Buyers have more information and access to data then ever before so sales resource must bring above and beyond value to the sales interactions. Help them ask the right questions and guide them to best decisions for their business.
• Always look for ways to add value to people. For example, instead of raising quotas by 10% to grow your business consider are you investing in your team by 10% to help them sharpen their skills to be able to perform better by 10%.
• Be mindful of "confident incompetence"! People generally overestimate their abilities, skill, and talent. People generally are emotionally not super strong as evaluating and fixing areas of themselves that need to be improved. This can lead to confident incompetence. Always be open to improvement, change, and access your skills and performance honestly!
• Productivity: Focus on productivity targets. Know amount of time spent on winning and losing deals. Measure on rate of improvement and productivity like time to proposal and closing business versus just measuring based on quota. How many hours did we spend from initial contact to close. How many sales hours, customer visit hours, emails, and calls went into closing deals. The time metric is your currency in sales.
• Pipeline coverage: Remember quality vs. quantity. You want quality opportunities inside the pipeline and funnel, not opportunities that will suck your time and lead to no sales. Focus. Less is more. Quality and right fit leads with right focused time wins!
• Increase Win Rates: Focus on efforts that help result in more wins. Ask yourself will this tool, process, or technology help us win more? Sell to people who are open and want to buy exactly what you are selling. Not sell to a big ocean of potential buyers who may be interested in something like what you are selling. Engineer your process so you focus on right client profile that lead to highest win rates.
• Focus on the middle: Execute strongly on the middle of the funnel not just throwing leads into the top of funnel or closing. Prospecting is not where sale is won as the main value of winning sales happens in the quality work executed in MOFU (Middle of Funnel)
• Give Sales A Tri: You never win a triathlon in the opening swim part. You win it in run and bike part that follows. In sales you never win in the prospecting side, but we seem to spend to much time focused on lead gen. We need to give our sellers and our own time focused effort on selling to the right people.
• Train pets; educate people. Spend at least 20-30 minutes a day of dedicating education of your sales team members to show you care and help them increase their skills. Show you care. Invest time in their development. Book club, podcast, webinar, or talk. Don't think you are to busy selling to take time to "sharpen the saw". Read 1 book a month in your discipline and within 12 months it can result in being top 2% of earners in your field.

Thank you Andy Paul for great speech! A special thanks to Vince Beese and Eric Boggs from T-REX for the great event and sponsors like Pendo and Barfield Revenue Consulting for supporting!