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How Sales Has Changed

@ 2016 Drift.com, Inc.All rights reserved.

Written by: Jess IandiorioDesigned & edited by: Erik Devaney

No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the copyright owner and publisher, except in the context of reviews.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 • How Buying Has Changed

Chapter 2 • How Selling Has Changed

Chapter 3 • Sales Process

Chapter 4 • Sales Tools

Chapter 5 • Sales Skills

Chapter 6 • Sales Measurement

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Introduction

Growing up, I always looked forward to shopping trips. I say “trip” because it was a minimum of 1.5 hours in the car to the nearest mall. But the experience of back-to-school shopping with so many stores and choices was a real luxury. We would even occasionally travel 2.5 hours to Montreal to get the “European flare” of clothing. I now know that was more about the US to Canadian dollar conversion, but back then all I knew was I was having an experience.

Going into our small town for the basics was one part necessity, one part social visit with all of the storeowners. With very few stores, the options were limited, and the relationships were key to getting a special item you wanted.

And then I grew up.

The internet was born and access completely changed. Today, I rarely set foot in a store. What’s more important: I don’t

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want to. What used to be a luxury is now an overwhelming burden. Just try stepping foot in Bed, Bath, and Beyond during the holiday season without a gameplan, with floor to ceiling products, and not have a panic attack. Too many options; too many choices.

I just want to plug in a simple search term, one click checkout, and get back to life. If I show up at a store, it’s because I already know what I want, and I’m required to show up to get it.

And I’m not just a buyer of consumer products. When purchasing products for business, it’s the same thing. I want to do research myself without someone’s influence, find a way to verify a product is good (from someone I trust), and throw my credit card down.

I’m savvy, I know what I want, and I don’t want to be sold to.

I’m every buyer.

What follows is an in-depth review of how buying has changed, how selling has changed, and how sales professionals need to change. As demonstrated by 20-year sales veterans from internet-based businesses, we also showcase the four areas change has been forced: Process, Tools, Skills, and Measurement.

-Jess Iandiorio

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Chapter 1: How Buying Has Changed

My story is not unique. Today’s buyer has access to the majority of information they need before they even talk to your sales team (if they need to at all).

Paco Underhill, famed shopping scientist and author of Why We Buy (published in 1999!), said in that book:

“Few websites will permit you to see if a particular item is in stock in a store near you, order it, pay for it, and then go in person to retrieve it. In other words, a hybrid cyberphysical transaction.”

Well Paco, you called it. And now it’s table stakes, and called

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“site to store,” although “hybrid cyberphysical” transaction sounds far more futuristic.

This digital catering to consumers who know exactly what they want is the norm.

Steven Power, President of Yodle Brand Networks, has spent 20 years selling at companies like Shell, ReachLocal, and Bigcommerce. He very clearly articulated the change in today’s buyer:

“I think we’re in one of the most exciting and simultaneously challenging periods for the way in which buyers have changed in the last 20 years. The change is profound.

1) Buyers have phenomenal information. They really understand their markets, products, services, features, pricing, and alternatives better than they ever have. We’re dealing with highly educated and informed buyers that are really in control of their purchasing decision.

2) Decision-making cycles have become must faster, more sophisticated, and more horizontally integrated through social networks and mobile communications. People can find out formally and informally through their networks if a company and product is good or bad to deal with, and if they deliver, instantaneously.

3) I don’t think customers are sold to any more; I think they buy. It’s much more about truly understanding a customer’s problems and needs, if you’re relevant and appropriate, and then helping them uncover, discover, and develop the solution

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on their terms. We’ve become guides, facilitators, and success coaches; we’re not sales professionals anymore.”

For internet businesses, the sales dynamics have changed significantly, especially with the advent of freemium business models.

Acquia, a leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences, operates with a free version of their Acquia Cloud product. Tim Bertrand, their Chief Revenue Officer, said:

“Buyers are a lot more educated when you as a seller come to the table. A buyer 20 years ago may have picked up a pamphlet or white paper at a conference, or found you through an analyst or word of mouth, but there was a lot less research they were able to do. Today, buyers have typically done their own research, played with the product, talked to others who use the product, and gone out and done analyst research before you even discover them.”

The ability to “try before they buy” has become the norm for buyers across both consumer and business products. Especially in software where buyers not only have more access to information, but have been burned in the past by false promises.

Understanding in a demo that a product can conceptually meet a customer’s needs is not enough before a purchase is signed. They need to touch it, and maybe even customize it, before they’re willing to part with money. But this does come with an

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advantage: Faster sales. Tim continues:

“We’ve done enterprise deals in under 60 days. It’s because the buyer already has our product, and they’re already in a deep decision-making cycle by the time we speak with them. That’s dramatically changed the game for the length of the sales cycle.”

Forrester Research recently published a complex graphic showcasing the B2B Buyers Journey, which is how the highly educated and experienced buyer comes to be:

Today’s education process uses all devices and all vehicles possible. Print is almost non-existent as an influential force (goodbye, print advertising!). Peers and social proof have

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emerged as a critical part of the entire buyer’s journey. What’s promising for sales pros is they still play a critical role across the awareness, research, and comparison process, not just the transaction. They just have to play it differently.

There’s one element in this image that is hard to quantify, but has become essential: Trust. Adam Zais, Former head of Sales and Marketing at Wistia and Chief Revenue Officer at Robin, has been selling over 20 years and identified the 800-pound gorilla of today’s sales cycle:

“Sales used to be more about manipulation than anything. Now there are no manipulation points. There are emotional points that become levers, but they’re not about information. There’s much more focused on trust. It’s not about likability, it’s about trustworthiness. That’s the emotional base sales rests on. Trust is about honesty and integrity. Differentiation is coming down to service and trustworthiness, rather than product features.”

The manipulation of the past lead directly to buyer skepticism that exists today. Mark Rudolph, Chief Revenue Officer at Ghostery, said:

“Traditionally a lot of buyers would spend millions of dollars on software and it’d become shelfware and they’d never use it. Even SaaS originally, people would be willing to buy an annual or two year contract because the cost was so much lower, but they still didn’t end up fully using it.” This lead to skepticism and overall lack of trust, creating a tough environment for reps to build trusting relationships with buyers.

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So there we have it: Today’s buyer is highly educated and experienced. They’ve researched your products and your competitors down to the feature level, and is likely in a trial. They’ve also backchannel referenced your company through analysts, colleagues, and friends. They are not out to be sold to, they’ve shown up to buy and they’re figuring out if they can trust you. One would think that’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but it isn’t. Adam said he’s always coached his sales teams with a simple phrase:

“We don’t sell things, we just help people buy.”

But, what’s the best way to help the right person, at the right time, in the right channel?

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Chapter 2: How Selling Has Changed

“One of the worst things to happen to sales was the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.” -Adam Zais

For decades prior to ecommerce and the dawn of software-as-a-service with Salesforce, “hard tactics” were lauded as the way to sell. “A. B. C. Always be closing” is the infamous line Alec Baldwin spoke in Glengarry Glen Ross to show hard tactics.

To counter this, Tim Hurson and Tim Dunne published Never Be Closing. Hurson and Dunne explain that selling isn’t about manipulation. Instead, today’s successful sales professionals are driven by helping their customers.

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Zig Ziglar, may he rest in peace with 24 books to his name, is credited by many for training sales reps in hard tactics such as the presumptive close. His most famous books are Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know and Secrets of Closing the Sale.

In Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig states:

“The prospect is persuaded more by the depth of your conviction than he is by the height of your logic.” -Zig Ziglar

This is no longer the case. Steven Power talked about the changing nature of the salesperson’s knowledge and skills in order to close a deal, and that it’s no longer about hiring “a big hammer with a lot of conviction and determination”:

“The best sales reps today have high self-awareness and are tech savvy. You need people who enjoy serving and helping solve problems, even more than they want to close deals.

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They need to be able to help people see and understand your solution, how it’ ll work for them, and why doing business with you is fundamentally better. They need to be thought leaders, evangelist, and technically adept in order to convince today’s buyer.”

Salesforce not only created the new SaaS world, but they also used what they learned and told sales professionals how they should operate in it. Aaron Ross (Formerly Salesforce, now founder of Predictable Revenue, Inc.), and Marylou Tyler (CEO of Strategic Pipeline) published Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com in 2008. Every single person I interviewed for this book referenced it as essential reading for salespeople today.

I had the opportunity to interview Will Anastas, SVP Enterprise Corporate Sales at Salesforce, to learn how selling at Salesforce has evolved even beyond the lessons in Predictable Revenue:

“Today salespeople need to differentiate themselves at that initial point of contact, not so much by product or company reputation, but by what real business problem they can

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solve. One thing we’re really focused on is how we can create authentic experiences, based on building an understanding of our customer’s customer. We’re training our sales team to experience what it’s like to be a customer of our prospect before we walk in the door.

“Last week a sales rep was preparing to pitch a high-end women’s retail brand, so he went to the store, bought a blouse, and returned it. He did the same thing online. He was able to come to the meeting with real-world examples of their customer experience, and how we can improve it. Next week I’m visiting a gas company. Before the meeting, I’m riding with a gas reader, someone else is going on a sales call, and another person is going on a ride-along with a customer service provider. We’re not going to know how we can help their business unless we understand their customers experience.”

Building buyer empathy is becoming an extremely key ingredient, especially to enterprise SaaS sales.

Ashley Welch spent 20 years in sales before co-founding Somersault Innovation, which takes the principles of human-centered design into the sales process. She trains sales teams on how to be truly curious, empathetic, and customer-centric. She points out that traditional approaches like BANT (Budget, Authority, Time & Need) for qualification come hand in hand with staged questions that serve the seller first, buyer second.

“There’s a difference between being genuinely curious and asking questions about the customers pain, and only

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expressing curiosity by asking questions that relate to what a rep wants to sell. That’s not really about being open and curious. We need to help reps understand what’s genuinely curious and open versus when they’re sticking to only their agenda.”

What Ashley focuses on most is getting an organization to change their DNA and start to think and operate differently. Being customer-centric has to go beyond individual sales tactics and into sales management.

“We start from the leadership down. We encourage sales managers to rethink their pipeline review meetings. Instead of starting with “What did you sell today?” the dynamic of that meeting has to change. Large group calls where everyone is hammered on what they close and what stage their deals are in are dying. They reinforce the bad behavior which is: Close, close, close. Instead, sales leaders are encouraged to kick off their meetings by asking what their reps learned about their customer’s customers. This reinforces and rewards curiosity and empathy, not just sales performance.”

It’s only natural that with a role undergoing such transformation that the management of that role will need to adapt to change as well. Let’s look at how the change in sales is occurring across sales process, tools, skills, and measurement.

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Thanks to our friends at Sales Benchmark Index, here’s a typical lead funnel chart:

Chapter 3: Sales Process

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What’s changed? Demand Generation, The Marketing-Captured Lead, and the Marketing-Qualified Lead.

Freemium models now introduce the new funnel: Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs). In this world, marketing typically executes an inbound marketing approach using content to raise an organization’s visibility, and converts prospects to a free trial account. This is all still considered top-of-the-funnel activity for marketers. But people downloading white papers are no longer considered marketing-qualified leads, and no longer passed directly to sales. This reduces the amount of leads coming in, but what the sales team gets in return are more highly qualified leads. The middle of the funnel is now where all the action is, and sales reps needs to get comfortable onboarding and activating free trialers so they can become product-qualified leads.

Tom Wentworth, Chief Marketing Officer of RapidMiner (Former CMO of Acquia and Ektron), wrote about why he’s killing the MQL in favor of the PQL.

“There’s no arguing that the MQL, and the broader sales and marketing funnel, transformed marketing. It forced alignment, requiring sales and marketing to agree on the traits and actions that made a good lead. It required a good content strategy to guide prospects through the complex B2B buying journey. It drove a consistent set of lead management processes that made it easy to measure conversions at key points. And maybe most importantly, it let marketing prove our contribution to revenue.

“I loved the MQL. I owe my marketing career to it. But now

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I’m over it. I’ve learned that more isn’t always better, and I think the MQL treadmill is slowly starting to suck the life out of marketing.

“Enter the PQL.

“I first heard of the concept of a PQL — or product qualified lead — via Christopher O’Donnell of HubSpot via a post on the excellent OpenView Medium publication. The basic idea is to combine freemium/open source product distribution with an inside-sales model to increase deal velocity. Users qualify themselves by using the product and inside sales exists to support them through the journey and set the stage for a long term relationship with the customer.”

(Image source: OpenView)

The material impact on the sales process is it no longer needs to involve cold calling our outbound marketing, if you’re doing it right. It’s less about opening up your daily lead funnel and sending out tons of emails and calling people, and more about reaching out to help trialers get started and be genuinely

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helpful.

What this requires is extensive knowledge of the solution, what it can do, all of the features, and how they work. PQL cycles can take two paths to conversion:

1. Self-service conversion 2. Sales-facilitated conversion

Self-service is for buyers who know they want or have to pay for your product to keep using it, and online offerings meet their needs. It’s as simple as using their credit card.

The sales-facilitated conversion also has process changes. Not only are you contacting someone only after they’ve already been at least intrigued, if not sold on the value promise, but your main job is now to get them to see that the product delivers on its promise from a functional and value-based perspective.

Chris Anderson, famed author of Free: The Future of A Radical Price, The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More, and, most recently, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, had the foresight to know not all free customers are created equal back in 2009:

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“It turns out not all free customers are alike, and what they’re worth to you depends on when they arrive. In the early stages of a company or product, when it’s trying to get traction, free is the best marketing.”

So it becomes sales job to differentiate one free customer from another to figure out who to spend time with. Additionally, the type of freemium model drives different prospect behaviors:

“The Problem with (time-limited) free trials is they discourage full participation during the trial period: Why spend a lot of time learning to use something when there’s a chance that when the time comes to pay you may not feel it’s worth it? Indeed, why start using it at all?”

So sales needs to figure out not only who to spend time with, but also how to get them to invest in the time-limited free program to get the product-qualified.

In addition to time-limited, Anderson presents three other freemium models which all pose their own strengths and challenges: feature-limited, seat-limited, and customer type-limited (big or small, etc.).

Phil Harrell, Leader of SiriusDecisions Chief Sales Officer Strategies practice, talks about the nuances of qualification within the freemium model:

“I grew up B2B sales when the salesperson had more opportunity to qualify via human interaction. Now there’s a lot more digital interaction. The buyer is doing a lot more

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online without talking to someone. Organizations need to set up digital qualification criteria that reads a free users digital body language, and decide what indicates propensity to buy. Companies and salespeople need to find ways to see when a prospect is raising their hand, without them raising their hand.”

This is a massive process change for sales reps to get a handle on. It also can’t be done successfully without harnessing new & emerging sales tools.

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While new sales tools are emerging daily to help the modern sales rep, the good news is most are free(mium)!

Today, you can find free CRM tools, email finders, and you can even get rich prospect profile data with pulls together social & company information on your buyers. It’s never been easier to find people, and find out more about them.

But there’s been a new category of free sales tools cropping up that really help a rep shift from selling to serving. Here are the top four service-oriented sales tools that help you better connect with and drive value for a prospect:

Chapter 4: Sales Tools

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1. Live Chat Software: Messaging is eating the world of business communication. I’ve known many sales reps who connect with prospects and customers over Skype or Slack to offer real-time communication - but that’s only great for once you know who they are and have a relationship. Prospects who come to your website and are unknown also have the need for real-time communication. Live chat software puts sales professionals in a purely helpful role. Companies like Drift (shameless plug) and others offer free live chat products to immediately get the conversation started and help a prospect get the information they need.

2. In-app Usage/Analytics: It’s hard to know whether a prospect has started using the free trial product, unless your team baked that into the functionality, which probably didn’t happen. What you need is context around who’s signed up but is inactive, vs. who’s active, to play the right helping role. Companies like Mixpanel provide usage/analytics data which can trigger information into the sales reps hands to immediately have the right conversation.

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3. In-app Messaging Software: Tired of sending emails that don’t get opened? Those days are gone if you employ an in-app messaging solution that gets seen 100% of the time a prospect logs into your tool. It keeps your messages brief & helpful.

4. Social Selling Tools: Serving prospects isn’t just about helping them understand and use your prospects, it now expands to how you can enrich their life. This largely happens through reading what they read, and sharing what would be useful to them through social media. This blog post showcases 5 disruptive social selling tools that help you exponentially increase the value you provide a prospect above and beyond your product & service.

Jill Rowley, employee #13 at Eloqua who built the marketing automation space and now is the foremost expert on social selling, recently contributed to the Mikogo blog “Sales Trends in 2015 - Predictions by 14 Industry Experts.” She wrote:

“I am hopeful for a mindset shift from selling to serving. Sales professionals need to move from using LinkedIn as their online resume, to managing their digital reputation. Instead of optimizing for the recruiter; optimize for the buyer. Here’s how:

• It’s no longer Always Be Closing; it’s Always Be Connecting. Your network is your net worth. Nobody likes to be sold to. We’re living in the Age of the Customer where buyers have choice and voice.

• Sales professionals need to read; read what their buyers read and share that content across their social networks.

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• Sales professionals learn how to listen; listen to the conversations being had on the social web. Social Selling is about finding and being found. Social Selling training for your Sales team is NOT OPTIONAL because a fool with a tool is still a fool. Oh, and if you suck offline; you’ ll suck MORE online. #Don’tSuck.”

Tom Murdock, AVP of Sales at Fuze, has been scaling inside sales teams his whole career, and has made significant investments in social selling tools and measurement:

“We’ve implemented a social selling index at Fuze. I think it’s really important that reps be seen, in the earliest days of the sale process, as a thought leader beyond your products. We know that sharing helpful content about our market in our networks is well-received by the buyer because it shows we’re in-tune. We’re assessing our reps on how well they’re connected to buyers that could influence opportunities, and how good they are at selling and influencing in channels beyond phone and email.”

These service-oriented sales tools help sales reps help prospects in an extremely valuable, real-time, and contextual way.

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The way I researched the change in sales skills was to asked everyone I interviewed: “What do you look for when hiring a sales professional today?”

Unanimously, SVPs & CROs do not look for length of experience and an extensive “rolodex.” They don’t even look to hire from competitors anymore. The new criteria are simultaneously soft and hard:

“We hire people that are intellectually curious, passionate, want to work hard, and smart. Those traits far outweigh someone that has a rolodex.” -Tim Bertrand

Chapter 5: Sales Skills

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“I always look for the intangibles. I don’t care if they come from the industry. I don’t care where they went to college. What I care about is: Are they smart? Are they driven? Do they have the right work ethic? You can’t teach that stuff. I can teach you how to sell, and I can teach you about the product, but I can’t teach you to be totally psyched to get up every day and go out and make money. Work ethic, desire, grit, scrappiness, genuine curiosity and the ability to get creative I value a lot more than if they went to an Ivy League School.” -Will Anastas

“We hire people with high self-awareness.” -Steven Power

“I hire people who want to help people. At Wistia instead of sales their title is ‘Customer Happiness.’ Instead of writing champion letters, they’re helping people with the free product. Some may say that’s not a sales activity, I say it is. Everything you do today is about earning the right to have that customer tomorrow.” -Adam Zais

“I’m looking for someone that can demonstrate a willingness to self-invest. That might be the person that put themselves through school, is taking night classes, or did something to improve themselves. I think that sales and the marketplace is constantly changing, and you want someone that’s willing to evolve with the market. Not only is the sales model changing but the product is constantly being innovated and iterated on, so you need that person who’s not only curious but interested and invested in learning.” - Mark Rudolph

“We hire people who are tech savvy. People that come from

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a service/technical background often make the best sales guys because they know what they’re actually selling.” -Steven Power

“The most successful sales guys are tech savvy and completely up to speed on the product and able to go toe-to-toe with any prospect, without needing pre-sales or solution architects in the room to answer questions.” -Tim Bertrand

It’s clear: High EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), tech savviness, and desire to help, combined with the classic work ethic, are required today.

But there’s one word that didn’t come up that I know they all would have said “Yes!” to, and it’s debatable if this is a personality trait or a skill: Empathy.

When asked what books he’d recommend new sales reps to read, or not to read, to succeed in sales today, Will said:

“There’s one book that transformed my thinking about how we can understand our customer’s customers. Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, is actually perfect for sales today. You have to be vulnerable and put yourself out there to understand your customer’s customer and establish empathy.”

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Understanding buyer psychology is not necessarily new, but looking at your own psychological behaviors and how they can impact sales process can be groundbreaking in enterprise sales today.

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With the sales role transforming, measurement also takes on a new life. It’s no longer black and white. It used to be “You made your number or you didn’t.” But there are new (added) measurements:

1. Real-time engagement 2. Social engagement 3. Free trialer activation 4. Free trialer conversion 5. Retention!

Note: You can also add to this list a (highly qualitative) measurement of whether a salesperson is able to build trust.

Chapter 6: Sales Measurement

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1. Real-time engagement: This is measured through response time. It’s easy to measure via live chat software. It’s widely known that you have just under a minute to respond to a live chat from a prospect before they leave, so set your sales rep goals accordingly.

2. Social engagement: If you can assess a company’s social brand, you can also assess an individual’s social presence. Klout is a widely known measurement tool for social brands, but if that doesn’t work for you, check out any of these free tools.

3) Free trialer activation: Lincoln Murphy, of SixteenVentures, writes extensively on freemium models, and conversion rates. He points out activation is a vanity metric if you’re only looking at log-ins, and each organization needs to establish what meaningful activation is - whether it’s usage of 5 or more features, submitting a support ticket, or something else. And then you have to monitor transitions between active and inactive usage patterns which affect potential conversion. 4) Free trialer conversion: Rather than purely showcasing if a number is hit or not, sales teams with freemium models now have a freemium conversion goal based on the number of trialers who transition to paying customers. While the conversion target freemium to paid is a heated debate, most organizations expect at least 5% to convert, and some get towards 10%, there’s an active debate on why a conversion rate this low should be the norm.

5) Retention: There used to be a divide between account executives (new business), and account management (customer renewals). The AE’s job was to land the customer at the highest

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price possible, the account manager’s job was to make sure the organization delivered and the product/service was used.

This still exists at many organizations. But the lines are now blurring. It is not uncommon today to see roles where an individual’s success is also tied to the retention rate of those customers he or she originally sold.

With a slant towards service instead of sales, the customer success role has emerged which is one part service, one part upsell/cross sell sales. This new role reduces (and maybe even requires) the sales reps’ need to land one big upfront deal in favor of landing many small deals that can be safely delivered upon, and the relationship grown over time.

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In Closing

It’s a whole new world for a salesperson today operating at an internet business. Hard tactics, Rolodexes, and extensive experience with enterprise sales cycles are no longer valued. Those who bring tech savvy, emotional intelligence, and a genuine desire to help people will be handsomely rewarded.

Thanks for reading. Click here to learn more about Drift.