10 Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know For 2014

We hope you’ll read and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. Across 2013, the CEB Sales Leadership Council had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and summits, and analyzed hundreds of thousands of data points.

As the world’s preeminent sales excellence research organization, we’d love to give our readers a sense of what we’re exploring and thinking about based on our interactions from 2013. This blog post contains the first of ten trends.

Please note, this is NOT a list of definitive research findings. But it is a series of informed thoughts and hypotheses, often based on some initial data trends we are seeing.

Trend #1: A Dismantling of the Sales Machine

Until recently, customers had to ask suppliers for guidance early in the purchase, because the information they needed wasn’t available anywhere else. But today’s customers are better informed than ever before. By the time they approach suppliers, they generally have a clear idea of the problem they need to solve, the solutions that are available, and the price they’re willing to pay. The reality is that most sales organizations have been caught off-guard by this dramatic shift in customers’ buying behavior.  In response, most leadership teams are doubling down on the sales processes that had served so well – creating a climate that can only be described as “compliance-oriented” – only to see sales performance become increasingly erratic. The irony here is that the most successful sales organizations are creating a sales climate that is the exact opposite. Instead these organizations are promoting a “judgment-oriented” climate. This is NOT to say that sales process is dead by any means, but how that process is managed, the permission sellers are granted, how FLSMs work their teams, all need to change dramatically.

[Note: We detailed this first trend in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review if you’re interested in learning more.]

Trend #2: Ease of Doing Business Becomes a Priority for Differentiation

Earlier this year, Matt Dixon, Rick DeLisi, and I wrote a book on the keys to driving customer loyalty in the customer service and support channel called The Effortless Experience (Penguin/Portfolio). The punch line of nearly 8 years of research in that space: delighting customers in service interactions doesn’t pay, but making it easy to get resolution does. We’ve long obsessed with the idea of making things simpler and easier for customers. Companies such as Google and Apple come to mind – at the heart of their products is a relentless focus on intuitive and simple usage. Getting ‘simple’ right is really difficult and many companies struggle mightily in this area.

Our data on general customer loyalty tells us very clearly that in B2B sales (and we strongly believe beyond the purchase experience) that ease of doing business is a critical differentiator. Naturally there are many implications here: channel alignment, customer segmentation, e-commerce platforms, various processes and policies, needs sensing, etc.  Few companies understand how customers make purchases – what really happens inside their deliberation, how is consensus really formed, what information helps and harms this process – and what role the sales channel should play in supporting and productively driving those efforts.

Trend #3: Discussing “Personal” and “Emotional” Value Drivers Becomes Encouraged in B2B

Over the past year, our sister program, the CEB Marketing Leadership Council, carefully studied the dynamics occurring within a consensus-driven purchase. The key insight from their work is that all the emphasis suppliers place on demonstrating business value (i.e., ROI, functional benefits, impact on business outcomes for the customer, etc.) does little to actually drive a purchase decision. Appeals to business value drive an individual’s willingness to buy, but fail to drive their willingness to advocate for a purchase. That matters tremendously, as the average B2B purchase involves over 5 stakeholders. Advocacy for a purchase is driven far more extensively by personal and emotional value (i.e., professional benefits unique to each individual, social benefits in the workplace, even self-image benefits). In fact, their data shows that appealing to personal value is more than 2x more likely to drive advocacy for a purchase than appeals to business value.

This finding alone has created a wormhole of sorts into the social psychology of how purchases are really made. Understanding what motivates a single stakeholder to advocate for a purchase, what gets a group to socialize a new idea, how buying groups tend to deliberate and arrive at a decision have tremendous impact to shape how we appeal to customers and more effectively close business.

Trend #4: Increasing Skepticism of Customer Centricity

If you’re customer is truly right, then we’re in trouble. This statement stems from our finding that the average B2B purchase is 57% complete by the time a customer engages a supplier. If the customer is dictating the purchase criteria, commoditization has already occurred. Ironically, the suppliers providing the most value to their customers are casting the traditional “customer-in” view aside and showing customers better ways to both manage their business (this rests at the heart of Challenger Selling), but also how to buy in the first place.

Many customers struggle with making new purchases and the deliberation and debate that ensues. Reflecting on the trend we highlighted earlier – making it easier for customers to do business with us – the very best sellers are teaching customers how to purchase, what to consider, what to evaluate, how to productively debate a purchase, what the hidden risks are, etc. This provides an entirely new window into a supplier’s capabilities that fall outside the traditional value prop.

This isn’t to say that customers are wrong, but often customers have no idea they can work with suppliers in certain ways. Allowing the customer to dictate the nature and terms of the relationship leads to not only commoditization, but often increased friction in the relationship.

Trend #5: Hiring Sellers without Previous Industry or Sales Experience

Given our acquisition of SHL this past year, CEB is now sitting upon a massive database allowing all sorts of interesting research into human capital management. Given the concerns that many of our members share about the impending wave of retirement they’re facing among sellers, as well as significant hiring to meet growth mandates, we closely looked at the state of sales hiring.

Our first finding is that the current sales force excels at competencies related to influence and emotional intelligence. While this is good news, the bad news is that most sales organizations have deprioritized competencies related to critical thinking at their expense. We found 1 in 6 sellers spike in both influencing and critical thinking. The problem is that those folks aren’t exactly readily available talent because they’re your competition’s top salespeople – and are paid, treated, and engaged as such. However, we also found that 1 in 8 OUTSIDE of sales contain these necessary sales competencies. Not only is that labor pool substantially larger, it’s far more available, and your competition is not focused on recruiting in this pool.

Now, in case you’re wondering if this non-sales talent can or even would sell, we had the same concern. So we tested a variety of different aspects here. Members, feel free to see what we found. For those who aren’t members, let us say, there are huge surprises here. And you’ll definitely want to consider NOT throwing out resumes that don’t show 5 years sales and industry experience.

Check back next week for the remaining five trends…

What other trends would you add to this list?

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