B2B Sales With Bill Morrison

‘Sell yourself, sell your company, then sell your product’. That is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard and curiously one of the hardest to follow. We rush to deliver value to the people we talk to; we want them to understand how we can help them and how good our ideas and products are so, far too often we trip over ourselves in our rush to give the classic ‘features, advantages and benefits’ sales pitch. 

People buy...

Sales is one of the very few professions that has a high degree of rejection built into it. Even the best B2B teams in the world are going to meet failure in a significant proportion of the opportunities in their pipelines.  

How do we as individuals cope with this? How do we respond when the other side says, ‘no thanks we’re going with the other people’. A reasonable start might be to follow the old adage of, ‘Plan for the best pr...

We’re going to lose sometimes, in fact, there will be times when we lose a lot and the path out of stormy weather seems hard to find. Dealing with adversity is a central part of the life of anyone who has chosen to make their career in the world of B2B sales. 

In this podcast, we look at some of the simple tools we can adopt that might help us, and those people we lead come through the tough times and emerge better than before. 

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Nobody ever said, “Congratulations, you’ve had a great year. Looks like in the past 12 months you have answered nearly 200,000 emails and you spend an average of four hours per day on Outlook.” Email is a key part of the lifeblood of B2B sales, but it is also one of the biggest sources of workplace stress and drains huge amounts of energy from sales teams globally. 

Are you and your teams suffering from email burnout? Are you looki...

You can’t build a great team without making great hiring decisions, but it is one of the toughest challenges any organization faces and one that most struggle to get right. 

All three parts of the process are essential to get this whole thing right: 

• Define the role specification 
• Run an effective interview process 
• Make the decision 

With the cost of a bad hiring decision constantly increasing, we need to get the basics ...

Business consists of making things and selling things. Your company might deliver a product or a service, but somebody has to make it and somebody has to sell it. We make promises through sales and keep promises through production and operations.  

Classic situation is a salesperson and an engineer meeting a customer to sell a solution to a problem. 

So, what about marketing?  

In many years of sales and consulting I have never onc...

Unless you and your team are already perfect then you’ll probably be thinking about how to make some improvements in your professional performance. 

Most of the time we probably improve our performance by changing how we work unconsciously and in incremental steps, there is no ‘grand plan’ in most cases.  But sometimes we can take a bit more control and set ourselves some goals and try to make changes on purpose. This works when th...

No matter how complex your market is, all business is ‘people business’. In our podcasts, we love to quote great sources for our statements, but this one comes entirely from my own experience: “The more successful we are in adjusting our communication style to the people we are talking to, the more likely we are to be successful in complex sales.”  

People come in all shapes and sizes specifically in how they absorb information and...

One thing about selling in complex B2B markets is that you never need to go looking for trouble, wait long enough and it will find you. 

A huge part of being successful in this profession is not based on our amazing influencing skills or negotiating genius, but on how well we act like Project Managers. Getting one complex, confusing, and slow organization to do something is tough enough, our job is to make two of them coordinate we...

Everyone says that you need to speculate to accumulate and that the idea that ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ is true. Business is all about risk. 

But risk means that we are going to sometimes encounter failure. Failure is painful and to much failure gets you sacked. So how do we manage risk in the work of B2B selling? How do make sure that we are running the right risks and that we are doing so the right way? 

Of all the skill...

It’s all about growing the business; whether we’re in the business of acquiring new clients or expanding existing ones, our constant focus needs to be on ‘where is the growth coming from’? 

The simplest questions are rarely the easy ones. Typically, when we ask our clients that question we get an avalanche of market potential reports, SWOT analyses and multi-colored spreadsheets mapping competitors and product development roadmaps....

Think it’s tough in sales? Try being a customer! 

One of the best rules in B2B sales is “Anyone who understands the problem doesn’t have the money to fix it.” That means that they have to find it within their organization. 

All buying decisions are based on ‘Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action’, but that doesn't mean that this simple process is necessarily easy. In fact, those clever people at Gartner tell us that 77% of buyers rep...

Why do so many business and sales initiatives fail to deliver the results we hope for? Why do great sales opportunities stall? 

In this episode, we delve into the crucial realm of sales accountability, dissecting its impact on organizational success. We take a good look at the importance of clear goals, emphasizing that accountability begins with a well-defined sales strategy. We explore the role of effective communication and coll...

We learn a lot more from failure than success. Any idiot can fail, but smart people learn from it. 

These two simple rules show us that we really need to focus on learning from our failures. With this in mind, we take a look in this podcast at a deal that I personally lost. It was my fault. We could have won it, we wanted to win it, but we crashed.  I might not have been able to win it but I was certainly responsible for losing it....

The job of sales is pain discovery. 

‘No pain, no sale’ is one of the simplest rules in B2B sales but one of the toughest to apply. 

How much sales activity is dedicated to really understanding the motivation of the other side in a sales conversation and how much time, effort and passion do we pour into presentations where the focus is our product, our company, and ourselves? 

It’s easy and comforting to focus on the technical aspe...

Selling means solving peoples’ problems profitably. That ‘profitability’ can be the tricky part, because it means talking about money, and virtually nobody enjoys doing that. 

When it comes to the complex sale, we really need to dig down into the technical aspects of their problems and our excellent solutions. If we do it right we build meaningful relationships with the other side as we focus on creating the two critical elements o...

Deals take place because the customer finds a reason to buy and that is not always the same as our reasons to sell. It is entirely possible to sell the wrong thing. 

As salespeople, we love to be able to communicate our key competitive advantages and marketing teams invest huge resources into defining their Value Propositions. Both these things are valuable, and even essential to creating a winning sales story, but remember that ou...

The most common problem with planning for negotiations is not that it is done badly, but that it is not done at all. Far too often we see that the most common strategy for negotiating is to turn up and hope. As it turns out, hope is a pretty terrible strategy. 

One of the few steps we see in preparation is to work out our worst acceptable case and once we have our ‘walk-away’ then pretty much any result that is better than that is ...