Building an Insights Engine
To become customer centric in B2B, a company must transform customer needs into a strategy that can deliver a sustained competitive advantage.
Posts from the ‘Business Development’ Category
Sep 20
Embracing Agile
In B2B organizations, agile methodologies can provide more effective results for business development, transforming command and control organizations into vision and delivery ones giving salesman purpose and motivation.
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
To succeed in B2B, business developers should focus on solving the customer pains, or identify the “Jobs to Be Done”
The New Sales Imperative
To make buying easier for customers, companies should adopt a proactive approach and guide customers to solutions rather than just present alternatives.
How B2B Sellers Are Offering Personalization at Scale
To offer personalized solutions for B2B customers, business developers must be customer centric by being aware of industry trends and co-develop projects to tackle their counterpart needs.
Activating the Sales Force for Rapid Growth
To close sales faster, one must turn to existing resources: target the most promising customers, leverage current capabilities to develop customer-oriented offers and efficiently track execution
Is That Customer Worth Your Time?
To improve sales performance, business developers should spend their time with customers with most potential, by increasing the number of interactions and by introducing new categories that would expand the scope of the offering.
The B2B Elements of Value
To extract more value from B2B offers, know well your stakeholders and their expectations.
Sales still matters more than social media
The amount spent, annually, by U.S. companies on field sales efforts is 3X their spending on all consumer advertising, more than 20X the spend on all online media, and more than 100X what they currently spend on social media. Selling is, by far, the most expensive part of strategy implementation for most firms.
The big story is that the internet is realigning, not eliminating, sales tasks, and that deserves more attention in business media.
Stepping up from sales manager to sales director
Turn Yourself Into a Star Sales Leader
It is often said that a great sales manager not always turns into a great sales director. Apart from the business technicalities, the soft skills that fuel a star sales leader are not the same needed for a sales director to outperform.
In this HBR article, Scott Edinger shows some evidences and identifies the most common mistakes made by previous star sales leaders:
- Only attend select calls where your (new) position increases value to customer;
- Act in a supporting role, the star of the company is your salesman;
- Limit your (direct) involvement, other opportunities might need your guidance;
- Don’t be the closer, that’s the role of your salespeople (Always Be Closing does not apply to you anymore!)
- Always Be Prepared, that should be your motto now. Careful planning will improve your positioning on the eyes of the customer and your salesman.
Pedro Antao Alves 