The Big Sales Trends for 2023

Joe Ducarreaux: Hello, welcome to this essential B2B coffee time talk with me, Brand Awareness Manager for Lead Forensics, Joe Ducarreaux and Sales Enablement Influencer, Aaron Evans. How are you doing today, Aaron?

Aaron Evans: I'm very good, thank you, Joe. Thank you very much for having me. Very excited to have our conversation.

Joe Ducarreaux: Aaron, let's jump straight into it. So, you've posted some very interesting content recently and one post I'd like to start with is the skillset needed to thrive in the new year, in 2023. You highlighted your top three things as knowledge and expertise, stakeholder management and buyer indecision. As someone with over 10 years of sales experience, what would you say would be the areas of upskilling or even reskilling that sales leaders should focus on this year?

Aaron Evans: I picked those three specifically because the lens that I'm always looking through….. which is the lens that's always neglected in sales and actually across modern organisations, I find …… is actually the lens of the buyer. Over the last maybe 15 years or so, particularly in SaaS, we've ignored the buyer and what we're seeing at the moment is a bit of a buyer backlash taking place.
If you read any of the literature, any of the reports, any of the research that's going on at the moment, the buyer's just not happy with the experience they're getting from sales. LinkedIn did a really interesting report this year, the state of sales report, and there was one particular, quite innocuous graph that really jumped out to me and that was actually the skills and the attributes that buyers look for in sellers and the skills and the attributes that sales managers look for in sellers. They're a complete disconnect. So, you've got all this really interesting stuff, a mixture of soft skill, knowledge and basically sales behaviour, mixed with the manager side and they were completely different. The ones that really jumped out to me were basically years of experience, industry expertise was another one, active listening was another one. Again, the more you read about it, the more you realise that actually we're just not servicing buyers' needs. Another place where this is born out now is actually in the buyer journey. Not the sales process, ignore the sales process, because it's largely meaningless. Like we're always talking about the sales process, buyers don't care about sales processes, they care about buyer journeys. When you look at the buyer journey now compared to maybe 15, 20 years ago.

First of all, the salesperson is getting involved much later in that process and the role that they're playing in that process is much more diminished as well. Also, the length of time in which they're involved in the buyer process is diminished. So ultimately, the way the buyer perceives the seller now is basically right, I've made a decision. I'm picking your product. Can you just make this easy for me and just do what you need to do so I can purchase this? Whereas you go back 20 years ago, what the salesperson was doing was influencing right up to the awareness. Where the buyer didn't even know they had a problem and the salesperson was obviously educating them on the problem, educating them on the impact that problem can have. So this kind of distilled down into three really important skills. So that first one that we spoke about which is around industry expertise. I've been saying this a lot, is that buyers are really craving this from sellers at the moment. They want them to know what the problems are, what the challenges are, what the icebergs are in the distance, what their customers are doing to solve these problems, how they're going about overcoming these challenges.

That second one around stakeholder management. Post pandemic, we're seeing that the amount of buyers that are involved, a certain amount of decision makers that are involved in a buying process is just growing and growing. It's up to 12 at the moment, I think. So the ability to be able to manage a buyer group, influence a buyer group, align a buyer group and allow the buyer group to actually prioritise solving that particular problem is a non-negotiable now.

That last one is born out of research that's taken place over the last couple of years which was published in a book called The Jolt Effect by the brilliant Matt Dixon, who was the co-author, of the Challenger Sale way back in 2011. Now the kind of central theme to that book is that, between 40 and 60% of your pipeline is just never gonna come in and the reason is because of indecision. Now, this indecision isn't driven by status quo, so it's not the prospect saying actually what I'm doing at the moment is better, I won't buy your product. It's actually a fear of messing up. They're petrified about signing a contract and they're all going wrong. The adoption of the product not working or the implementation not working and it's their name on the contract and they're petrified of that fear of messing up. Those three skills there, I think are absolutely non-negotiable going into 2023 and in most cases it's not a upskilling, it's a complete…..you've got to give these salespeople these skills because they just simply don't have them at the moment. Particularly in SaaS. In SaaS, we've basically built salespeople who are product experts. If you grab five SaaS salespeople and say, talk to me about your product, the detail, the depth, the expertise, the technicality will be really high. If you grab the same five people and say, what are the three biggest things affecting your industry, they'll look at you quite bluntly, like I don't know, to be perfectly honest with you! People don't come to your product for product expertise. They come there for the sales experience of actually learning something, being challenged, their thoughts being changed, their perceptions and their perspectives being changed as well and we're just not giving that to them at the moment.

Joe Ducarreaux: So just moving on to something that's obviously gonna be at the front of everybody's mind going into this new year, the state of the global economy. Do you have any tips for our audience on how to balance long-term and short-term initiatives in these uncertain economic times at all?

Aaron Evans: Yeah, look, I think there's two things I'd say. Number one, obviously budgets are gonna be scrutinised a lot and this kind of goes back to what I was saying before, the ability to have higher level conversations with people who can make those decisions and actually create or influence budget is absolutely critical. But the second part of this is actually about how your product helps. We've got to start helping organisations connect the dots between what your product or service does and how it actually starts affecting the organisational goals and objectives as well.
Far too many people sell at an operational level, so that saves time, saves effort, saves resource. . People just aren't going to buy on that anymore. They're going to buy when they sit there and go, we've got tough market trading conditions at the moment. We need something that's actually gonna help us achieve these big scary goals that we've set during very tough, difficult times. The ability to not only position your product to do that, which most products should do but also get the right voices in the room to achieve that is really important.

Now, I've also got a theory about this. I think what sales do is, they actually become more logical. in tough times. So what they'll do is they'll start building more ROI calculators and prospects and customers don't want that. They don't want an ROI justification, which seems counterintuitive when you think about tough trading conditions. What they actually want is more of an emotional experience….. so, the thing that I'm purchasing, I feel confident in what I'm buying, I feel confident it's going to help me achieve what I need to achieve and obviously, I feel confident in my ability to make a decision as a buyer as well. If you read Professor Robert Zaltman, he explains that 75%, or sorry, 95% of purchasing is actually emotional. We've stripped that out of selling over the last maybe five or six years and we focus purely on the rational and the logical part of selling. That's why we see all these like built in ROI calculators and these ridiculous numbers that salespeople come up with, which the buyer doesn't believe, to be perfectly honest with you. They're always sceptical about these numbers anyway. We need now to appeal much more to the emotional part of our buyers and more importantly, give them confidence in themselves in the decisions that they're making. Because if you thought it was bad before we enter a tough trading time, it's only gonna get harder. So it's all about the emotional side of it and the confidence that we're giving those buyers as well. If a buyer is asking for an ROI calculation, of course, give it to them. But our first port of call shouldn't be…. excuse me, can I sit down with you for half an hour and walk you through this detailed spreadsheet that I've built that's gonna spit out a number that both of us don't really believe in? It's like they don't care about that. I'm just being really honest with you, but the salesperson cares about that. Now the kind of theme that you're probably picking up on as we speak about this is that there's a lot of shit that sales are doing that the buyer doesn't care about, but sales really cares about it. We've got to stop doing things buyers don't care about. Again, when you read the statistics, most of the things that sales are doing at the moment is putting the buyer off.

Let's talk about this rationally. So number one, contacting the buyer - sending them emails. So email went up 70% during the pandemic, response rates dipped by 30%. That's the buyer telling you, I don't like the way that you are contacting me. Then we put them into our funnel, as we call it. Then we start getting four or five different stakeholders interacting with them during the purchasing process. You've got the SDR, you've got the AE, you've got the value engineer. Then I'll turn around and go, I can't even build a relationship with you before you've purchased the product, let alone when I purchased the product. Then we get all the way to the end of it, which is the buyer indecision. 60% of opportunities are ending in no decision. The buyer is telling us, I don't feel confident making a decision with you.

So the easiest thing to do in sales in 2023 is do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. It's never been easier to be a quality salesperson in my experience.

Joe Ducarreaux: So just building on that slightly then, you mentioned what the buyers need to see is making decisions on the emotions, feeling confident in the solution that is being offered to them. What methods do you use to help build that value? When you are, say, with the prospect on the discovery call, what things do you put in place to fully put across that I'm understanding your needs rather than, what we were saying before?

Aaron Evans: That's a really good question. But you've got to remember that value is highly subjective. Most of the things we buy, we don't buy for the reasons that you think we buy. If you read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, which is in my opinion a masterpiece that every salesperson should read, because what it fundamentally tells you is that value can sit in different places. I'm a big believer, and I think the buyer is saying this as well, that the value they want is the buying experience. So what do I mean by that? There's so much content and so much marketing and so much content marketing out there at the moment. Knowledge isn't the buyer's problem from that perspective. They've got a lot of information, too much information. Brent Adamson sums it up perfectly, which is they're looking for a needle in a needle stack at the moment when it comes to making a decision. So not only is there too much content, but the quality of that content is really high as well. They don't know how to discern the signals. This is the perfect opportunity for a salesperson when the buyer comes to them, to sit down with them and help them understand this information, help them make sense of what's going on, help them understand what the challenges and the problems are at the moment. Walk hand in hand with them and say, whether you purchase my product or not, I'm going to help you make the right decision. I'm going to help you buy something that's going to be additive to your organisation. That's the value the buyers want at the moment and if it happens to be your product that can service that, they'll buy it.

Now, by virtue of taking them through that journey, they're likely to buy your product for that reason. Now, what we're talking about here is a very different set of skill sets though; which is knowledge, which is expertise, which is buyer centricity, all the stuff that the buyer is looking for at the moment.
So by virtue of going through that journey, you're actually creating value in the buyer's eyes, if that makes sense. Now, having a deep, intimate understanding of their challenge and their problem is really important. But actually, I'd add this……. telling them what the problems are that they don't know about is far more important.

So here's an analogy for you and hopefully this lands with you, Joe. I don’t know if you're a homeowner or not, but I was in a position not that long ago, where I was getting my bathroom done and I got a plumber in, he was brilliant, he was a really good plumber. There was one point where I was sitting in my kitchen having a coffee and he came downstairs and said, look, I just wanna let you know about something. You've actually got a crack in your immersion tank and what's going to happen is, water is going to leak down and it's going to get into your bathroom, but more importantly, it's going to get behind the tiles that you've just put up there. I'm going to have to come back and remove all the tiles, re-plaster the wall and put the tiles back on again. It's going to be a nightmare. Don't worry. I've got one of my guys up there now working on the immersion. I’ll pop it on the bill, no problem at all and I turned around to him and said, mate, thank you so much, I really appreciate that.

Now, what he'd inadvertently done is he'd behaved like a modern salesperson should be behaving. He'd alerted me of a problem that I didn't know about. There was a deficit of knowledge, he knew more than I did, I didn't even know what the immersion tank was. He had a domain expertise that I didn't have. He then assured me the decision that was being made was the right decision and he told me the impact if I didn't solve the problem. I didn't even look at the bill. I didn't even question how much he was going to charge because he'd done the right thing. He was buyer centric. Now, the reason he was such a good salesperson is because he's not a salesperson. He's just someone trying to help the end customer. Now that is such a valuable experience. We are not doing that with buyers at the moment. We're not, and the buyers are telling us this, and we've got to stop pretending that sales is important. The buyer is important. We're here to service and help the buyer. That's the simple part of it.

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