AOV’s had dropped, close rates declined, the sales team would work on anything as they struggle to generate new pipeline.

Sound familiar. Are you seeing a trend appear that causes for concern. Are you a new MarTech business leader and concerned at the thought of growing your business.

As you may have read in recent articles, I’ve spent more than three decades in sales, two decades in B2B MarTech sales, from the year 2000 to the present day, graduating as a high performing, self taught sales professional before moving into a leadership role in 2012, where my first two roles were leading the restructuring of an enterprise sales team and rebuilding to reset performance, and then building a mid-market function from scratch. Nothing like diving straight into the deep end!

Lucky I had a coach, valuable mentor and strong leadership team to support my transition. And even with that support it took me two years before I could find performance from my new team as I developed my leadership style.  

I would hope that some of my previous team members would tell you themselves how we fought for success together, how we took ownership of our actions to deliver, at times, unprecedented results, how they each stood up to be counted when it came to delivering on a number, often increased from the year before.  I’ve worked with 100’s of people, all with a passion for B2B sales and there’s a handful I feel proud to have worked with (you know who you are), where I’ve witnessed first hand how they continuously went above and beyond to achieve excellence. Doing things that challenged the status quo and successfully taught those around them, a new perspective, one that enabled sustained results.  

It’s this secret sauce within people that you cannot train for and one you need in your team to show the rest what success looks like, leading by example, and I include myself as a sales leader, always leading by example to help others see the art of the possible. Whether its working the weekend to re-write an RFP that wasn’t on par, prospecting to show others how it’s done, leading our enablement program and delivering content in customer meetings to demonstrate the application of what was taught - coaching, mentoring and being committed to helping others learn and grow.  

It was 2018, I had recently lost my position leading a $22M business of 40 people I had spent the last four years building from scratch. I’d had many set backs in my career but this had to be the most gut wrenching, for many reasons I won’t go into today. And like every set back, I treated it as a learning opportunity or as my 21 year old Son reminds me, “a bad day is a character building day”, I love that!  

I’ve always said to my family, I want us to look back in years to come without any regrets in our life, where we can say, "do you know what, we enjoyed living in Crawley East Sussex or Hugglescote in Leicestershire, Melbourne Australia, we enjoyed Dubai, do you remember that times when we…"

So moving back to the UK with my family after my recent character building experience, I worked hard to help turn a declining business around, I fought to win a job to lead our European MarTech business - the challenge was, for the enterprise segment the AOV had fallen to rock bottom, the sales team (majority of them) were product selling and lost sight of the commercial value we deliver, so as I assembled a leadership team, we put a plan in place to transform the way we did things, after all, that’s the only way we could impact results in the twelve month timeline we’d be given.

The approach needed to be so significant that it would change the mindsets of the sales teams. Change deep rooted behaviours that were not working in most cases, going back to basics, and in some cases, with senior, well paid sales reps, working on how to develop a conversation that leads to a positive outcome.

Broadly speaking, we focused on two areas aligned to our go-to-market strategy, that included a laser focused approach to position differentiating commercial value, that supported both the selling of our point solutions, for volume of sales, and our MarTech stack, for larger transformational deals.

Value Selling

• First starting with the enablement of the leadership team in order to scale the enablement program and coach sellers effectively.
• Teach sellers how to position differentiating commercial value, early in the buying cycle. 
• Teach sellers how to qualify the buyer type effectively, and position value with a view of defining buying criteria aligned to our strengths.
• Design and enable teams on our core value proposition - aimed at teaching sellers how to define and control an evaluation process that allowed us to show our strengths and build consensus effectively. 
• Design and enable a guided sales path that sellers could follow, in order to scale the right seller and buyer behaviours, that increased the probability of a positive outcome for us and the customer. 

A New Value Proposition

To support subsequent years growth and increase our chances of closing transformational deals int he current year, we developed a solution that solved a growing business problem - at the time, we were experiencing an inflection point where enterprises had slowly over committed on the number of MarTech applications they were using (in some cases managing 90+ apps) and losing track of the spend were realising (with our help) the cost of poor adoption of their MarTech investments.  We designed a differentiating value proposition and enabled a selection sellers to position it - starting with teaching sellers how to construct C-Level conversations that led toward differentiating commercial value, without a pitch, in an effort to disrupt and win fast.  

Fast forward twelve challenging months and we successfully quadrupled our AOV. We were seeding the foundation for future growth.

Today, I run a B2B Sales Consulting firm called Supero, working with a range of clients helping to / and enable teams to build new pipelines, across M&A, Talent, and New & Expansion revenue, with one thing in mind, growth! 

I have also tapped into my experience for building communities as a way to drive growth, which includes reviving my advanced use of digital channels, specifically Social Media. Almost 5 Billion consumers are online globally, 90% of which use social media, there are 800 million users on LinkedIn and 186 million daily active users on Twitter. If you are not deploying a Social Selling methodology as an individual, I don’t mean your company, then your company will not grow at the rate it needs to.  

The best way to scale the growth of your business is to enable your staff to tap into and curate their own networks to support talent acquisition, retention, new business sales and retention, ultimately grow your EBITDA. If you would like to learn more or simply grab 30 mins for a synergy chat, DM me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-loves-martech or Twitter: @Alex_Supero