In her book The End of Competitive Advantage, Columbia Professor Rita McGrath states:

"Long term structural advantage is gone and being replaced by a series of short term transient advantages."

This means we need to do two things to survive:

• Constantly innovate.
• Get these innovations into the hands of our salespeople as soon as possible to leverage them as quickly as possible.

We’ve spoken with multiple leaders that tell us the following story:

1. We saw a competitive opportunity and developed a new product or service, acquired a new business, etc.
2. We announced our new and improved value proposition at sales kickoff.
3. Product and marketing produced playbooks and enablement took the team through rigorous sales methodology training.
4. Financial incentives were put in place.

By and large the sales team didn’t make the transition but kept selling the old value proposition and solution. 

Why is this, given the steps above taken by the organization? The #1 reason?? The confidence of the sales team. Salespeople do not want to take the risk of losing a deal or losing face having new conversations for the first time in front of a customer (even if we’re in front of them on a screen).

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B2B buyers are now mimicking B2C buyers. We are all aware that the role of retail salespeople is dwindling as buyers buy online. All the  information is out there in terms of what everybody else thinks of the product, its features and benefits, how users perceive it, how your service is rated, etc., so we no longer need that sales rep. 

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We win deals when we:

“Show customers how we meet their business needs at higher confidence and lower risk than alternatives.” (1)

Winning has become more difficult: close rates are at an all-time low (49.6%), and actually lower than the odds at a craps table! (2)

Why is this? One reason is the end of sustainable competitive advantage. Our value, competitors’ value, and customer needs are all changing real time. In order to win we need to map each transaction and prove how our value meets needs better than their alternatives. As salespeople we need access to real time content that helps us capitalize on a series of short term transient advantages.

We call this competing at the speed of change.

“79% of B2B buyers believe the content provided by sales reps is very influential in their vendor selection, yet 75% of sales content created by marketing is never used by sales.” (3)

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THE INVESTMENT

According to the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, American corporations spend $7.2 billion every year on sales process, account management skills, negotiation, and opportunity management training—an average of $347,000 per company. However, beyond proprietary (and perhaps biased) consultants’ reports and high-level academic papers on change, little information is available on whether those making investments are achieving a return that is at least equal to—if not better than—what they are spending.

We are inclined to think that ROI is highly unlikely given the CSO Insights report that stated: only a quarter of reps consistently use their company’s accepted methodology more than half the time, only 10% resolutely (greater than 90% of the time).

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Senior executives know that, beyond mergers and acquisitions, a company’s growth is driven one deal at a time by the way salespeople sell and negotiate. That’s why American companies spend $7.2 billion every year(1) on sales and negotiation methodologies. But beyond proprietary (and perhaps biased) consulting reports and high level-level academic papers on change, there’s little information available on whether those investing are actually achieving a return on their investment. 

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We recently conducted negotiation coaching for over $1b in revenue on over 100 renewal opportunities for a global client of ours. We weren’t training their new reps, but working with some of their most seasoned global account managers to help them be more strategic and successful. This consulting gave us the ability to confirm with a new level of conviction what we have been seeing in industries, cultures and companies for years.  It is this:

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Revenue goals are up, the win rate of the sales team is down, way down. These amongst other reasons have created a need and filling it is a relatively new function that is starting to gain momentum: Sales Enablement.

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