Unfortunately, market competition is intensifying day by day. Sales organizations need to be updated and even continuously transformed to maintain the firm competitiveness and accomplish with the high demanding expectations of shareholders. Leading sales organizations use sales transformation methodologies to reinvent themselves and revamp sales.

What is a B2B sales transformation methodology?

It is a proven sales methodology that comes with a new insight to increase the number and the size of the winning deals at the same time that reduce the long selling cycle time of large complex sales.

What are the key B2B sales transformation methodologies?

We have summarized in a timeline infographic the sales methodologies that have transformed sales organizations. Although some of them like Dale Carnigie Relationship Selling Principles were created many decades ago, all those selling techniques are still to be valid nowadays. Most of the newest sales methodologies are adding new contributions to the sales knowledge rather than offering a new complete sales methodology. For this reason, it is advisable to know all these selling approaches.

Is your sales organization using the full potential of the available sales approaches?

In our experience many companies are using the potential of 20th century approaches as Solution Selling. Nevertheless, there are still many organizations that they have no updated their sales methodologies in order to incorporate new selling concepts as The Challenger Sale (see our post Analyzing B2B Sales Profiles: Who Are You?) or Inbound Sales.

What is the best B2B sales transformation methodology?

In our experience success sales reps at least must master one of this methodology. As many of them that are mastered in an integrated way will likely increase the selling success rate. However, it is important to simplify the selling approach in order to be able to training and implementing an easy and replicable selling process around the whole sales organization. Thus, our suggestion is taking one of those methodologies as a core sales process and complement that one with a few addons from the other methodologies.

We suggest using Inbound Sales methodology as a core sales process.

Why should we use inbound sales methodology as a core sales process?

1. This is probably the newest sales transformation methodology. So, it is integrating most of the previous sales approaches (product benefits, spin selling, solution selling, quantify value, building rapport and so on).
2. This methodology realizes that Internet as increase the amount of information flow and power of buyers. Therefore, the sales strategy is based on the buyer rather than the seller. Failing to understand how the buying behaviors have changed is one of the most important barriers to growth for many firms.
3. Inbound sales personalizes the sales experience to the buyer’s context rather than using standardized emails or presentations. That will support the differentiation process and the chance to win deals.
4. This approach is taking advantage of the pure interaction selling processes AND the sales support technology processes (CRM tools, etc.) in order to increase the sales team productivity and success rate.
5. It is based on smarketing (sales and marketing processes integration) to achieve around 20% higher revenue.

Although identifying Inbound Sales as a new powerful sales transformation methodology is a great step, that methodology must be adapted. That methodology mentions the integration with other sales approaches as building report but it does not develop how to do. So, we suggest to request support from specialized companies on Inbound Sales to overcome some of the handicaps of successfully implementing the new Inbound Sales methodology to materialize the full growth revenue potential of the organization. Moreover, we are showing the Key books but there are other books that we do not tag as transformational but they are important to be considered.