40x Success Journey

The revenue your company generates is the result of the interactions that your sellers have with buyers. The more valuable those conversations, the more contracts you sign, and the more money you make. The actual act of selling has not changed in 1,000 years – and as long as the process deals with people, the fundamentals will never change. The more you help someone, the more valuable you are to them. That is what sales is all about. It’s very simple.

As B2B companies work to adjust to a rapidly changing economic environment, different organizational functions are involved. Finance, Human Resources, Sales Leadership, Marketing, Business Units, Information Technology, etc. Each group has well-intended efforts – but lacking an overall coordination function, companies are falling victim to Productitis and creating additional complexity for their sellers at the point of sales. As a result, the burden to connect all of these dots for customers is pushed onto the backs of salespeople and creates more inefficiencies.

Why is that? Well, most of the motions that we design are based on the precept that sales is a linear process. Think about your marketing and sales funnel. Step one: do this. Step two: do that. In theory, it makes sense. But ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you: in reality it doesn’t work that way. Buyer enablement and navigating agreement networks is a non-linear process. You’re going to expect customers to go through a success journey but they can opt out of it at any point. They’re the ones that have the power, not you. So, working backwards from your customer, you need to build a system that accounts for this orchestration and adds value at each interaction.

In the new digital economy, pipelines are not the future flow of revenue into your company; contracts are. Envisioning success early on with senior executives is a key way to dramatically increase the size of a contract. By adopting a go-to-customer growth strategy and targeting the right wallet owners with the right message, the size of your contracts will increase. When executed well, it’s not uncommon to see contracts grow 40X larger or more.

Buyer enablement requires navigating a non-linear customer journey and targeting the right owners with the right message throughout the sales funnel.