Mindracer's B2B Sales Consulting Helps Your Businesses Grow
Sales consulting experts are sales professionals who have a deep understanding of the world of B2B sales. They dedicate themselves to sharing their knowledge, experience, and systems with others to help them succeed in growing their businesses.
Also called Fractional VPs of sales, sales consultants work with companies on a contract basis to establish teams and solve problems, often while training the team to become more self-sufficient. The goal is to create a team that continues to thrive long after the consultant has left.
Sales consultants help business leaders understand the complexity of the B2B sales world and manage the challenges that arise during the sales cycle
What are the challenges of B2B sales?
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to B2B sales is generating quality leads. The more time you spend qualifying your leads before you speak to them, the more likely you are to engage with potential customers when they’re ready to buy.
When you focus your time and energy on finding the right, high-quality leads, you avoid some of the pitfalls that can emerge from cold calling companies that would never want to use your services, and can instead focus on developing a repeatable lead generating system.
Warming leads up by producing authoritative content for blogs and offering ebooks and whitepapers can allow you to capture the interest of potential customers. Once you have an inquiry, you can warm them up with email sequences that further showcase the value of your products or services and how this can solve problems for them. A sales consultant can help you to review and refine your ideal customer profile so that all your efforts are focused on selling to the right people.
It can also be a challenge getting to the actual decision-makers when you’re talking to people at a company. Often, what happens is that the people who have been tasked to look for a solution aren’t the ones who have the final say in whether they go with your company. It can take a lot of time to get in front of the actual decision maker. Again, one of the ways you can speed this up is by having the right kind of content for your sales team, and making sure your team is trained to handle this issue. A sales consultant can help you overcome this problem.
Sales collateral, like data-rich infographics or datasheets, can help your sales rep ensure that decision-makers have the information they need to close the deal.
What are B2B sales consulting services like?
The service that you get from a B2B sales consultant depends on what your needs are. Sales consultants, such as a fractional VP of sales, can help your business solve the specific challenges that your business is facing. They understand the often complex nature of the B2B sales cycles and have created processes that help companies navigate these problems.
Sales consultants can come in and evaluate how your sales team is operating and identify areas where there is room for improvement. this includes things like a lack of a solid sales process which is holding back growth, or that your team needs to grow and there is a need to plan the next moves in terms of whom to hire, when, and how. Consultants work closely with you to implement structures and systems that they’ve come up with over the course of their career.
Sales Consultant Framework at Mindracer
The framework that a Mindracer fractional VP of sales follows looks like this:
Review - In this stage, the consultant watches and reviews everything that is happening with regard to sales. They listen in on calls, review notes from notes meetings, take note of the kinds of sales techniques that are being used, and they look at the data from your CRM. The more information that is available to consultants at this stage, the better.
Refine - Once they understand what’s happening, the consultant will look for all the areas where things can be improved. This typically results in slight changes to processes and tactics, as well as the introduction of new processes that are designed to remove the blocks from the sales process.
Rollout - Once the consultant has come up with a plan to help get sales moving, they introduce it to the sales team and work closely with them to make sure it’s properly implemented. There will often be some fine-tuning that is required here.
The refine and rollout stages are iterative and can be repeated to keep improving results.
Replace - The final stage is for the consultant to train their replacement. Again, the consultant works closely with the sales team to make sure that they have the continued guidance they need once the consulting phase has ended.
What does your ultimate B2B sales strategy look like?
The best strategy when it comes to B2B sales is to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. To do this, you need to dedicate serious effort to getting to know the buyer, so you can understand how and why they make decisions when they’re buying.
This means taking the time to talk to your customers. The more effort you put into really getting to know your customers, the better you’ll understand the things they need to see as they make their way through the buyer’s journey. People often ignore this aspect of the sales process in B2B buying because they’re still trying to solve the problem with an outdated mode of thinking - the belief that you’re marketing to a business, rather than a person.
It’s not something that you can skip, though, because, at the end of the day, there are people involved at every stage of the sales process. And if you’re not meeting their expectations, selling to them will be a struggle.
What is the average length of the B2B sales cycle?
The answer here is that it depends.. The factors that influence how long a sale can take varies, with things like the size of the deal, how warm the lead is, the industry you operate in, and what you’re selling.
Smaller or less complex deals are typically three months or less, while larger deals can take upwards of a year to close.
The trick is to not try to rush the deal. You need to allow businesses to go through their process without putting too much pressure on them to make a decision quickly. The more pressure you put on leads, the less likely you will be to close the deal.
Instead, give them the room to assess your products or service, provide as much information as you can, answer all the questions they ask, and check in regularly to see if there’s anything that you can do to help them. It’s not unusual for businesses at the enterprise level to have
What will the B2B sales process look like in 20 years?
Looking to the future of B2B can be a challenging thing because there are so many factors that influence businesses and how they spend their money. 2020 was a perfect example of that, as no one could have predicted the sudden need to shift the workforce into a work from home situation, which caused a spike in demand for products and services that enabled work from home, and caused businesses around the world to spend their money a little differently.
But what can be predicted is that technology is going to play an increasingly important role in the process. We’re already in a position to use tools to help track the behavior of potential customers and learn when the best time to approach them is, and platforms that signal buying intent as a hint as to when to reach out to them - this is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we will see over the coming years. As technology improves and becomes more integrated into the lives of our customers, the more insight we’ll have into their motivations, and the more software platforms will be produced to enable sales.
This is going to lead to sales teams increasing their accuracy and timing. Being able to make highly relevant connections to people who are not only looking to buy, but are ready to spend money is the holy grail of sales, and we see technology enabling this consistently. Don’t get left behind as your competitors invest in these technologies.
How to gain B2B sales capabilities?
Getting the skills you need within your sales team to close deals and find great leads is a mix of a couple of factors. The first is putting together a solid sales team.
Hiring people who understand not only how B2B sales work, but who also have their own tips and tricks can really help you when you’re first getting started with B2B sales. One good salesperson on your team can be the thing that saves your business in those first couple of years. The key things you’re looking for are someone who has the right motivation to keep pushing for progress, as well as experience with selling, and who understands what the modern B2B sales landscape is like.
The other thing that can help you get the same things you need is by bringing in a sales consultant who can take charge of things and help you establish a solid sales program that meets your strategic business goals and KPIs. They can provide training for your team, establish systems for closing deals, and make sure that you have the tools you need to succeed.
Consultants can help you build the team you need by observing the skills you have in-house and finding people who fill in the gaps.
How to become successful in B2B sales?
Beyond working with a sales consultant, one of the most beneficial things you can do is regular evaluations of your sales team to identify areas where you can help them get better at their jobs, and identify sticking points generally with selling for your company.
These evaluations give you insight into how your team is doing. You watch the team, listen in on calls, pay attention to their close rates, how often they follow up, and what techniques they’re using on customers.
Evaluations aren’t meant to highlight what’s being done wrong, so much as it is to focus on areas where things could be improved. If you take the wrong approach, your sales team will feel attacked, but, with the right touch, they walk away from evaluations feeling more empowered to do their jobs.
The tone of sales management today is that of a servant leader - focused on helping the team unblock deals and achieve their personal best. Sales consultants such as a fractional VP sales can provide this team leadership as a service to businesses.
Why should a startup hire a sales consultant?
There are a few key stages in your business when you should bring in a sales consultant or fractional VP of sales.
Critical stages when you should bring in a consultant
These moments happen at various stages of your growth and look something like this:
There’s no growth - In this stage, sales have flatlined. You’re doing alright as a company, things are happening, but nothing is growing the way you’d expect it to. This tends to happen when you’ve been in a business for a while and you’ve been relying on the same tactics and approaches to sales the whole time.
You’ve reached a do or die moment - This typically follows the no growth stage. If your no growth period lasts for too long, things can start trending downward and if they don’t get better soon, your business is going to go under.
You’re doing a big push for growth - This stage can happen any time you set a lofty growth goal for your business. This could be the result of a new product or service being released, or maybe you just closed a good round of funding and you want to put your money into growth. Whatever the reason, hitting those goals is critical.
You want some help running your sales team - running a fast-growing business requires a lot from founders, and it is now possible to have a fractional VP sales come into your business and take on the days to day management and leadership of your internal sales team, or even help you build that team to the point where your business is ready for the investment of a full-time sales leader.
By bringing in a sales consultant at points like this, you set yourself up for success. You have someone on your team who deeply understands what needs to happen to reach your goals and drive sales forward.
Need help with sales?
If the above article talked about problems you’re facing, and you would like to have a professional sales leader to help you out with growing to the next stage, contact us, we can help.
At Mindracer, we’re on a mission to help companies reach their ambitious sales goals by helping them build a sales machine. Want to find out more? Book a call today.