STOP Wasting Money on Sales

Those of us that have been around have seen this scenario played out over and over again. Here's the scenario: Company X has experienced steady success but suddenly they miss their quarterly number and everyone scrambles to try to determine why.

How did we miss our number?

How many sales reps met their quota?

Who missed their number?

Which deals were we counting on that didn’t come in?

So what's the go-to solution? We’ve seen this played out as many times as there are sequels to Mission Impossible. The CEO gives the directive to hire more salespeople because, after all, having more dialers dialing or more feet on the street will solve the challenge through brute force. It's like this strategy was taught in an entrepreneurship class or something? I must have missed that day's lecture.

Here's the problem. The buyer's journey has evolved at a breakneck pace while sales processes, for the most part, have remained stagnant. Today, 70% of the buyer's journey is completed before a buyer ever speaks to or interacts with a salesperson or prospective vendor. When the buyer does engage with the salesperson, the salesperson is at a tremendous disadvantage by having less time to fully understand, diagnose, and prescribe a solution (compressed selling time) because the buyer already believes they know exactly what they need.  At the Revenue Path Group we believe these situations, which are being repeated thousands of times a day, are the driving force into the creation of The 3 Deadly C’s.

The ability to adapt quickly has become a matter of survival for companies of all sizes and all industries. Today, becoming a commodity in your buyer’s eyes is the #1 threat to your business.

And what’s making it worse?... Decision making teams keep getting bigger and your salespeople are ignored until the very end of the buying journey.

The right meetings, with the right people, seem impossible to get, pipelines are misleading, and with more than 50% of FORECASTED business NOT closing, CEOs are getting burned in the boardroom. You have to start selling the way today’s buyers buy or you will become irrelevant.

Yet, few have stopped to ask “How does our sales team fit into today’s buyers’ journey? What is their function, and how can they win in the modern world?”

So here's my question. If 70% of the buyer's journey happens before they interact with a salesperson, then why are companies spending 70% of their sales and marketing budget on sales? Why spend such a disproportionate percentage on the area with the least impact? It's no wonder that for 7 consecutive years companies have wasted up to one trillion dollars.

Would it not be more prudent to better understand the steps within the buyer's journey and to invest in the right content and assets focused on sparking the interest of the buyer as they're doing the research (awareness and consideration stages), before opinions have been created?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

So how do you get started? Where can you begin to understand what your buyer's journey really is? I would start with my customer data. According to research cited by McKinsey, organizations that leverage customer behavior data to generate behavioral insights outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin.

Today’s age of acceleration has unleashed The Three Deadly C’s (Commoditization, Consensus Decision Making, and Compressed Selling Time), creating a new no man’s land we call The Void. It’s where you’re losing deals that should be yours and where your margins disappear. How you confront The Void will determine whether you stay relevant, or just become another commodity.

Overcome the Three Deadly C’s, close the void between demand building and sales, and prepare your team with the tools they need to win right now with the Revenue Acceleration Program (RAP).