Companies invest a lot of money in developing content that supports sales, but often see no return on their investment. The reason for this is that the sales organization does not use the developed content, or isn’t using it enough. So what’s going on?  

The impact of content usage and, by extension, sales enablement has been demonstrated many times before. According to figures from Miller Heiman Group in 2019, organizations without sales enablement achieve average win rates of 42.5%, while organizations with sales enablement achieve an average win rate of 49.0%, a huge 15.3% increase. 

Sales content is not marketing content  

Content plays a crucial role in different phases of the buying cycle. It can accelerate the sales process and significantly reduce sales costs. But what exactly do we mean by sales content?  

Typical sales funnel

Content for: 

  • onboarding when launching new products or services
  • important announcements with regard to the sales strategy
  • preparing for customer contact moments
  • during the contact moment
  • follow-up after the contact moment
  • training and coaching salespeople

Apparently, it turns out that salespeople don’t find enough of this kind of content in the materials produced by marketing departments. The reason for this comes from the purpose that marketing content serves, i.e. to influence the market based on its own strengths, and to lead as many interested parties as possible through the famous marketing funnel, with little variation in the message – ‘one-to-many communication’ – as quickly as possible, from awareness to buying intent.  

Content that is developed for this purpose has some specific characteristics:  

  • the customer searches for and discovers the content under their own initiative (inbound marketing) 
  • the content reaches the customer online or via an automated process (outbound marketing)
  • the effectiveness of the content is measured using KPIs such as clicks, reading time or number of shares
  • the ultimate goal of the content is to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

From funnel to unique journey  

Many organizations still believe the MQL simply needs handing over to the salesperson who then just has an easy tap-in to score the goal. The customer has already passed through the entire marketing funnel, so all sales has to do is cash in on the marketing effort.  

But this belief is – of course – misguided. The idea that a customer will dutifully go through a content funnel, and immediately be willing to buy at the end of that journey, is not the case in practice. Content is consumed for various reasons in this marketing funnel, and there are sure to be interested parties for your product, but people also download your ebook out of curiosity, or scroll through your website, to ultimately discover it’s not what they’re looking for. So who says your MQL has the required budget, or can make a decision or even influence it?  

The marketing funnel in no way helps to predict the customer’s buying intent or willingness to buy. And it tells us little about which phase in the buying journey the customer finds themselves. The buying journey is therefore anything but linear, and it’s unique for each customer. When the salesperson starts working with an MQL, they always intervene at a different moment in the buying journey. And that requires specific content.

Sales content that works  

It’s impossible for the marketing content mentioned above to satisfy the non-linear need. After all, marketing content is fundamentally different from sales content. The latter needs to support a salesperson before, during and after sales conversations. The customer does not consume it directly; they access it through personal interaction with the salesperson.  

To increase the use of content in sales and so improve sales productivity, make sure your sales content has these characteristics:  

  • Snackable: short and powerful, simple to use and easy to understand
  • Accessible and quickly findable, so salespeople can spend more time selling and less time searching for content
  • Adapted to the customer’s mental stage in the buying journey
  • Interactive: inviting participation and interaction
  • Just in time: supportive for the salesperson in every phase – from preparing for the customer conversation, to interactions with the customer, and in the follow-up process
  • Focused on action: usable, helpful and encouraging action.  

Are you ready to get to work on your sales content strategy? Let us know!


In our conversations with CEOs and sales and marketing directors, we keep hearing the same comment – that fewer and fewer salespeople are meeting their targets. And further investigation has made the reason for this very clear: salespeople have insufficient knowledge of their customers and the market, and are lacking some of the specific competencies required in today’s marketplace. 

Various research has shown that revenue and sales quotas are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. For example, one study by Sales Insights Lab in 2021 demonstrated that only 24.3% of salespeople were managing to exceed their sales quota. So is there a problem with salespeople’s productivity?  

Much depends on how we present sales productivity, because the concept is very often seen as a combination of efficiency and effectiveness.  

Sales Productivity

And this presentation is a good reflection of traditional sales training, where the main aim is to clone top salespeople’s behaviour into the DNA for other salespeople. According to figures from the Association for Talent Development, the US alone spends $24 billion per year on this.  

But this approach has a disappointing outcome. Fewer and fewer salespeople are achieving their quotas, and fewer and fewer companies are achieving their revenue targets. So the main challenge is no longer effectiveness, but a lack of knowledge about the customer and an inability to link any available knowledge to products and services.  

What has changed? 

Almost everyone agrees that customers are much better informed nowadays. And one consequence of this is that customers prefer it when we are less active in trying to sell. They don’t want us to try to convince them, and instead like to make their own minds up. So traditional methods of talking about the company, products and services simply don’t work anymore because customers can find all the information they need on the internet. They used to accept the information we gave them and were happy with that because there was no alternative, but now they can find all the information they need about products and services without any help or intervention from salespeople. 

The fact that customers can now serve themselves with this information also has a significant downside, however. How do they deal with conflicting information and advice? How do they know what is correct or relevant?  

And this is where the opportunity now lies for customer-facing professionals: providing added value, offering useful content, and having meaningful conversations. These are now the most important reasons for customers wanting to engage in dialogue with a salesperson. They expect the salesperson to know their environment and responsibilities, and don’t want to have to bring them up to speed themselves. But they do expect the salesperson to engage in dialogue, share their experiences from other companies, and enhance the buyer’s perspective.  

What has not changed? 

All of this has led to a steep rise in content production over recent years because we want to ensure customers can inform themselves. Some suppliers and analysts even claim that content marketing is taking over from sales. Unfortunately, however, it’s not quite that simple.  

Customers may well be informing themselves more, but content marketing has not solved the problem of declining sales quotas and salespeople productivity. In B2B, digital interactions are just as necessary as personal interactions with sales – as a recent study by Forrester confirms (Sales Enablement: Planning Assumptions 2022, Forrester Research Inc., September 2021). Interactions with customers have only increased recently, e.g. from 16 to 17 between 2017 and 2019, and from 17 to 27 during the pandemic. Customers are seeking out information for themselves, but they still need answers. And this is where the salesperson comes in – because they are still seen as a partner here.

Furthermore: the type of interaction (digital versus personal with the salesperson) is independent of the phase in the buying process. It’s not the case that a salesperson is only forced to join in at the end of the buying cycle. So we need to make sure we interpret the almost mythical figure – that 57% of the buying cycle is completed before a salesperson is involved – from research firm CEB (now Gartner), correctly. As mentioned above, the customer is better informed these days. So their decision criteria have typically already become more influenced.  

A salesperson with the right knowledge can therefore engage in dialogue with the customer and avoid this pitfall. It’s all about having meaningful conversations. And it’s not relevant whether these conversations take place through personal interaction or indirect communications – as long as the buyer finds answers in every phase of the buying cycle. Again: content marketing is essential, just like sales. And one cannot do without the other in complex B2B environments. 

And what about training?  

Traditional sales training has become outdated, just like the focus on quotas based on efficiency and effectiveness. What we need today, more than ever before, is more focus on sharing knowledge and experiences (see graph). 

Our advice to sales managers is therefore to enable salespeople to share useful information with customers during sales conversations, and to introduce a common language in your training that encourages team selling and experience sharing. Customer-facing professionals want to be able to have meaningful conversations that are relevant to the context and the customer’s phase in the buying cycle. ‘Just in time’ is the key phrase here. We are therefore seeing increased benefits in training that teaches competencies which allow salespeople to introduce contextually relevant cases, from themselves or at least from their environment. 

Increasing sales productivity again 

Our analyses consistently show that salespeople who possess the right knowledge, skills and tools are more likely to meet their quotas. This clearly falls under the realm of sales enablement, a continuous process of giving your customer-facing employees the knowledge, skills and tools they need. 

Figures from Miller Heiman Group from 2019 support this claim (see graph below), and they show the impact of sales enablement in their 5th Annual Sales Enablement Study. Organizations without sales enablement achieve a win rate of 42.5%, 3.9% lower than the average (46.4%). Organizations with sales enablement achieve an average win rate of 49.0%, a huge 15.3% increase. 

Win Rates for Forecast Deals

Win Rates for Forecast Deals

Creating an environment like this in your organization can therefore significantly improve your sales results. But how do you do that? First and foremost, you need a company culture that encourages continuous learning and improvement. Additionally, it’s also best to make relevant content available in bite-sized pieces, easily accessible, and with clear instructions on when and with whom to use it.  

In other words, the solution lies in continuously sharing knowledge and experiences to improve the productivity of salespeople and the entire sales team.  

To find out more, get in touch with one of our experts who will be happy to provide you with specifically tailored and actionable input. Book your appointment today. 

Want to learn more? Download our eBook:


In times of uncertainty or economic recession, winning new customers is even more important than usual. As existing customers reduce or cancel their orders, there is a sudden need for new orders. This is not easy in times when everyone is concerned. Buying from a new supplier implies unknown factors and increases possible uncertainties, making it even more difficult for suppliers to win new customers. Moreover, this is not part of the sales and marketing routine.  

In the article and the webinar “value creation in times of considerable uncertainty”, we will discuss the required knowledge and skills and the pitfalls relating to this topic. The basis to win new customers is customer confidence. And the fastest way to win new customers is to know what the challenges and aspirations of the potential customer are before the first contact. However, there is no approach that works for every situation, as it depends on the experiences of the customer, the impact and therefore the importance of the purchase and the complexity of the solution, as represented in the figure below.  

Criteria influencing sequence design

An adequate sales sequence is necessary, in line with the foregoing. For that purpose you need to know the number of touchpoints, the media, the duration, the spacing of the touchpoints and the message you will use.  The figure below illustrates the components on the basis of which the sequence must be developed.  

Customer acquisition sales sequence design

Finally we will provide you with some must-do’s for the development of your sales sequence:  

  • Mix the media you use (minimally 3) 
  • Telephone calls are still an essential element 
  • A minimum of 6 contact attempts spread over time are necessary for a satisfying result  
  • For complex sales to large enterprises, you may even need 14 to 16 contact attempts spread over 22 days  
  • The follow-up of requests or reactions must take place on the same day; if not, the chance of a breakthrough decreases dramatically and the cost of sale will become much too high.  
  • The messages used must be adjusted to the industry or sector. Research has shown that capitalising on the role of the individual or enterprise results in a lower conversion  
  • During the first contacts, you enter an unknown phase of the customer’s buying cycle. Determining this phase as quickly as possible and adjusting your messages is of crucial importance in the digital era. Your LinkedIn profile must be attractive and must clearly reflect your potential contribution.  
  • Focus on building a relationship and trust by giving away “free” knowledge and experience. Selling the “arrangement”, which was the essential element for a long time when prospecting, has lost a lot of its success, is absolutely “not done” in times of uncertainty and will lead to procrastination. For example: “Call me back in autumn” 

During periods characterised by insecurity the general attitude towards salespeople changes. In addition, customers’ focus shifts to short-term solutions and the reduction of risk. Both constitute an opportunity for enterprises and salespeople who manage to adapt to this situation quickly. Adding value while responding to this situation and at the same time focussing on enhancing customer confidence.  

There are four elements that play a role in creating value for the customer:  

  • How can we improve our insight into the customer’s situation?  
  • What are the techniques we can use?  
  • How can we keep all conversations relevant?  
  • How can we ensure that customers are prepared to pay for it?  

In this respect it’s important to have a good insight into the customers’ “Buyer Journey”.  

Waarde creëren in tijden van grote onzekerheid

A few important things to take into account:  

  • A late entry in the buying cycle does not provide much room for value creation, as the customer already knows what he wants and has a preferred supplier with whom he compares other suppliers 
  • If you enter the cycle before the trigger moment, your chances of success are much better.  Nevertheless, your focus should be on messages that increase the willingness to change, i.e. messages that break through the status quo and the “loyalty loop”.  
  • As a salesperson, you must be able to guide the customer through his buying cycle by aligning the activities and messages to what is important to him.  

When you have contact with a customer, you can find out where he is in the buying cycle by asking a few questions. It’s not possible to reverse the cycle. If the customer is already at the end of the cycle, you need very strong conversation techniques to create an opening. Unfortunately, the consequence is that the price is a very important factor, unless you are lucky enough that others before you have made a significant mistake.  

The value wedge combined with the phase in the buying cycle indicate how the added value can be created.  

value wedge

First let’s discuss the typical pitfalls and mistakes that are made on the basis of the value wedge.  The salesperson:  

  1. doesn’t distinguish himself from the competition, just tells the same story 
  1. tries to convince the customer with strong points of the competition that are not at all strong points of his own offer, as it is clear how important they are to the customer.  
  1. is too focused on outdoing the competition by focusing on strong points they both have but that are not relevant for the customer 
  1. fails completely by presenting entirely irrelevant advantages and messages on the basis of his own convictions or non-identical situations, causing irreparable damage to customer confidence.  

If the right conversations take place in line with the specific phase in the buying cycle, the essential confidence will be built quickly, and the critical insights will be acquired that enable the salesperson to focus on the messages that are important to the customer and that the competition overlooked.  

A few “must-do’s” during conversations:  

  • Tell a clear story about similar situations and thus quickly build confidence for the next steps.  
  • Use the right interview and conversation techniques to not only have full knowledge of the situation but also to quantify. This will have a major impact on the price the customer is willing to pay.  
  • Once preparations are complete, your first contact in the active sales cycle is preferably the person who is exposed to the most disadvantages and at the same time has the highest decision-making power. This way you structurally increase your chances of quickly breaking through the status quo.  
  • Ask closed questions to validate your assumptions and monitor your rapport with the person concerned.  
  • Provide a solid underpinning for a possible change, so as to make it easier to minimise discounts and therefore to sell at a higher price than the competition. 

Do you want to know more about these essential elements? Contact us


BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) has been used by salespeople to qualify opportunities for several decades. I still come across it to this day, even as part of the lead management process between sales and marketing. But the tool is no longer as relevant as it once was, especially for complex buying processes. Now, why is that? And is there an alternative that works today?

Budget

We know that buyers use the internet to find information. This means they only tend to involve salespeople later in the process. By that time, they’ll have already formed a clear opinion, and are just seeking confirmation before actually making a buying decision. But there’s a lot of information available, and much of it can be conflicting. The role of the salesperson has therefore shifted to influencing the customer in a way that validates their information.

This requires commercial insights into the customer situation. Business acumen will help the salesperson find solutions for possibly latent requirements, for which the budget (Bant) mostly isn’t known or allocated yet. In short: taking budget allocation into account means your salespeople are joining the buying process too late. And that results in a lower hit rate and tighter margins.

Authority

Validation based on the authority (bAnt) to make a decision was intended to ‘not waste any time’. It would help sales to not sell to people who couldn’t make a purchase. Unfortunately, most B2B decisions aren’t taken by one person these days. Buying decisions have evolved into being a consensus which also takes users’ opinions into account. I can give examples of customer situations where there are more than ten people in a meeting. Each one can veto a decision, but also not be prepared to advocate a supplier until a consensus is reached.

Need

Focusing on people who already have a problem (the need in baNt) sounds logical. Like a great way to increase a salesperson’s productivity. But the reality is quite different. Research shows that up to 60% of opportunities ultimately disappear without the customer buying anything or changing supplier. We see this on a daily basis with our customers. And it was also the outcome of a survey we took together with Vlerick Business School.

Salespeople need to increase the customer’s willingness to change more now than ever. They need to convince the buyer to change, rather than convincing them to choose us. Because a customer isn’t open to hearing this message if they’re not planning to change. This is why traditional prospection methods are becoming less effective. The message and how it’s conveyed no longer correspond with the customer’s expectation.

Time

In light of the above, qualification based on when the decision is made (the time in banT) has become irrelevant. These days it comes down to marketing and sales doing the right thing at the right time with the right message, to facilitate the customer’s buying process. So the question’s no longer about when the customer’s going to make a decision, but about how willing they are to change. Sales needs to combine the answer to this question with the potential, to decide when to engage with what message. It’s also their task to keep marketing informed. Because marketing can help influence the customer with digital interactions, increasing the probability of a sale for the lowest possible cost.

Conclusion: from BANT to JIT

BANT doesn’t work anymore.
The concept of just-in-time has been around for quite a while in logistics and now we also need to have just-in-time commercial approach. By qualifying the potential and the role of people involved, sales can make sure that all commercial efforts, including marketing, are resulting in doing the right thing at the right time with the right message.

Thanks to the digital revolution, marketing also has a major role to play. Depending on the size, complexity and importance of our products and services in the perception of the customer, we need to find the right balance between digital touchpoints and human interactions.

Download our eBook to find out what process your salespeople need to follow to keep improving results.


On a recent lead generation training course, I was very surprised to find a large majority of salespeople among the participants. It turned out that these sales reps were attending because their marketing wasn’t delivering leads that made sense from a sales perspective. Some of them had KPIs for cold calling, and results were reportedly getting worse and worse.

This situation again illustrates that the majority of businesses in Europe haven’t yet realised we’ve arrived in the ‘age of the customer’. Not that the customer has changed, but thanks to the internet, social media and new mobile possibilities, buyers have changed the way they interact with us. Organisations that want to secure or grow their business shouldn’t wait any longer to start looking at ways of meeting the empowered customer’s needs.

A well-oiled sales and marketing machine is essential

Buyers today can find loads of information about your products, and your competitors’, in just a few clicks. If you want to do business with leads who are looking for a solution like yours, it’s the marketing department’s job to provide the right information in the right form, at the right time in your lead’s buying cycle.

Cost efficiency and volume are key: marketing generates leads in a one-to-many digital approach. Only leads that meet specific marketing criteria (MQL) are being handed over to sales, who then take over from there. Sales qualifies both the contact and the buyer readiness (SQL), and leads rejected by sales are recycled by marketing into campaigns that can be made very specific thanks to the new insights gained by sales.

One marketing activity that is often forgotten is demand generation: besides capturing ready-to-buy leads, marketing can also create demand through inbound marketing. Leads from these campaigns can be nurtured to hopefully become sales-ready one day. Without demand generation, sales will keep on complaining about the quantity and quality of leads provided by marketing.

So has your machine been oiled to meet new customer demands?

How to get the machine running

If your machine’s a bit sluggish, it’s probably time to stop the ongoing battle between sales and marketing. Take a new look at activities and responsibilities, and create a value chain that helps your customers buy from you.

Here are a few tips to get sales and marketing collaboration on track.

  • Share common goals
    Across departments, increase awareness that we’re all trying hard to achieve the same company targets. Collaboration is key!
  • Share a common vocabulary
    In the age of the customer, replace your sales process with a buying process, and make sure both sales and marketing are speaking the same language. Introduce a clear demand-generation process with milestones based on commonly agreed definitions to make it work
  • Co-development and best practice
    Work together as one team. Both sales and marketing can add lots of value, insights and messaging to improve traction, conversion and ROI on marketing activities. Sales meetings are an ideal platform to keep marketing up-to-date with what’s happening in the market; marketing can take the stage to inform sales about ongoing results and planned activities in line with the sales organisation’s needs, again reinforcing the importance of common goals
  • Marketing: messaging should allows the building of customised content
    Research has shown that that up to 90% of content created by marketing goes unused by sales. Implement a content strategy that enables the building, sharing, measurement and improvement of messaging quality. Messaging should allow the building of content that is customised for different roles, their individual buyer readiness, and context
  • Marketing: ‘why change’ content
    The majority of content aims to convince us why we should choose company X or product Y. But research shows that 60% of opportunities are neither won nor lost; they simply disappear without a sale. The content that explains why customers should change is therefore crucial for creating demand and increasing conversion

Want to find out more and see the whole picture? Watch the webinar ‘How to Align Sales and Marketing’ with guest speaker Pascal Persyn, CEO at Perpetos, and moderator Deva Rangarajan, Associate Professor at Vlerick.

Perpetos WebinarHow to Move Stalled Sales Opportunities?

[ON-DEMAND WEBINAR]
How to Move Stalled Sales Opportunities?

  Procrastination comes in different guises. 3 steps to avoid procrastination
  Dealing with Late Cycle Concerns


Today’s buyer wants services from suppliers that are as low risk as possible with proven profitability. In most cases they’ve already worked out and documented in detail what they think they need beforehand. This doesn’t just mean that selling has become more expensive; it also means you have less influence over your client.

To start with, your marketing communication has to be appealing and flawless. Buyers want to inform themselves, so they need to be able to find background information about you quickly via all possible channels. They’ll probably look for your reference clients, comparative product information, confirmation of their decision-making criteria or a better understanding of the impact your solution will have.

B2B companies are meeting this demand with content marketing and producing more and more resources to help them answer each of these specific questions. These answers are then distributed through traditional channels and online, e.g. videos, webinars, blogs and social media.

Salesperson as guide

You also need a well-trained sales team. Kris Verheye from Belgacom, one of the speakers at our Corporate Performance event and boss to 200 account managers, said about these tasks:

“A salesperson is a guide who together with the customer seeks to provide maximum value from the purchase, justification of the budget, and the most suitable project supervision. He also leads a virtual team that has to ensure the right resources are used at the right times internally.”

This salesperson profile is miles away from the archetypal salespeople and the promisers (“you’ll see, that’ll be fine, you don’t need to worry, because we are the biggest, we have the most experience”) still employed by many companies. The new salesperson profile also costs more. That’s fine, modern B2B salespeople know they have to be versatile and that comes at a price.

Selling more expensive

You can recuperate this greater marketing and sales cost by increasing your prices and your chances of success.

“We win more tenders than before by being more selective and by increasing the entire organization’s view of existing deals. We document potential deals better and share this information with more people so that we have more ideas for adding value and differentiation to our approach.”

Kris Verheye

One method

Another important aspect is that everyone who collaborates on preparing the deals also speaks the same language. This is only possible if all departments use a shared method which is also supported in the reporting.

“It allows us to harmonize each individual’s internal activities with the buyer readiness of the customer. This has an important effect on our internal operation so we work much more efficiently on the right things,” adds Kris Verheye.