New customer insights for your sales strategy

By Aldwin Neekon

The B2B tech sales strategies we got used to don’t work anymore

B2B technology sales has always been competitive, but it’s gotten incredibly hard recently.

For the last 10 or 15 years, the predictable revenue model was a reliable playbook for B2B technology sales.

The idea (grossly simplified) was that you generated a ton of content and your leads found it on Google search. You called them inbound leads.

You also hired a dozen SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) or BDRs (Business Development Representatives) to cold-call and email and message your prospects.

Marketing would generate leads.

SDRs would set meetings for the sales executives.

Sales executives would close the deals.

The trouble is, these sales strategies aren’t working as well as it used to.

Even the people who invented these sales strategies agree this isn’t working anymore.

Marketing teams have generated so much content that it’s hard to be noticed in the noise. There’s no end in sight either as every company and a lot of their individual employees keep cranking out more videos and blog posts and podcasts and LinkedIn carousels every day.

SDRs have sent so many cold emails and made so many cold calls that the default move is to ignore all calls and unsolicited emails.

This leaves your account executives wondering how they’ll hit their quota.

What are the sales strategies and tactics that can get us back to success?

Three things haven’t changed.

Defining your target audience

You still have to have intimate knowledge of your ideal customers, what they need, what frustrates them, what their options are, and why you can help them in a way nobody else can. Knowledge of your ideal customers goes beyond personas and avatars. At the very least you should find a way to discover your customers’ B2B buying process.

Crafting compelling messages

You still have to get them to notice and act on your clear value proposition. This is a bigger exercise. It starts with understanding the customer.

Remember that what your customers tell you at renewal time, or at purchase time, or when your stuff is broken is couched in their political or business needs as they relate to you. These may not be what they really need. They’re just what they need from you in the current transaction.

Converting your pipelines

You still have to keep their attention long enough to guide them to becoming a happy customer. This has become extremely difficult. During longer sales cycles involving larger purchase teams, it is a tall order to somehow compel everyone involved to keep your solution as a priority throughout the sales & purchase process.

Use peer conversations to cut through the noise, re-engage, and close deals

One of the sales strategies that is still performing well is peer conversations. Use a properly executive Executive Roundtable to get leads’ attention, re-engage them in conversation, and guide them to becoming a customer.

It works for two reasons:

1. Customers are still interested in what their peers have to say, even when they’re tuning vendors like you out.
2. Hardly anybody else is doing it. Some people are. But relative to other sales strategies and marketing strategies, this is an underused gem.

You can do all kinds of B2B customer research where your ideal customers tell you what they want. Or at least they tell you what they want you to think they want.

But only at an executive roundtable will they tell their peers what they actually want.

If you run an Executive Roundtable the right way, they’ll almost forget you’re there and enter into a surprisingly candid peer conversation.

It’s a simple process I’ve outlined on a lot of posts here, but if you’d like an ebook that goes into it in much more detail, please download my Executive Roundtable Essential Guide.

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