Shaping the future of sales strategy

If you’re start­ing to feel that, some­how, you’re not get­ting through to your sales prospects as well as you used to, you’d be right. The buy­er-sell­er divide is wider now than ever before. Some lay it at the door of the trend towards work­ing remote­ly, oth­ers, a grow­ing cyn­i­cism from buy­ers because they feel relent­less­ly ‘sold to,’ buy­ers are hard­er to reach than ever. Faced with the clam­our from the sheer num­ber of pitch­es that swarm inbox­es day in, day out, is it any sur­prise buy­ers tune out?

The prob­lem isn’t that they’re switch­ing off alto­geth­er, it’s just that they’ve run out of patience. In a dig­i­tal-first world, the bal­ance of pow­er has shift­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the buy­er. First of all, cold-call­ing is all but dead. Accord­ing to LinkedIn’s ‘State of Sales, 2022’ research report, only 14% of buy­ers wel­com­ing a phone call from a sales­per­son they don’t know; wor­ry­ing­ly, a third of sales­peo­ple per­sist regard­less.

Instead, for the major­i­ty (61%) email is the pre­ferred method of out­reach, mean­ing they get to start the process on their own terms. How­ev­er, this is not carte blanche to spam the buyer’s inbox.

“‘Spray and pray’ is still all too com­mon in B2B sell­ing,” says LinkedIn’s senior direc­tor, head of enter­prise sales EMEA & Latin Amer­i­ca, Paul Ter­ry. “It’s based on the mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that the laws of prob­a­bil­i­ty will kick in, from thou­sands of tem­plat­ed emails and cold-calls, one or two inter­est­ed prospects is all you need. That’s why some chief rev­enue offi­cers believe it’s still a suc­cess­ful plan – after all, what does it mat­ter if, ulti­mate­ly, a sale is made?”

It’s clear this strat­e­gy will rapid­ly run out of road. Not only does it cre­ate a poor impres­sion of your com­pa­ny (if you get noticed at all), even­tu­al­ly those lists will run dry, tar­gets get fed up and tal­ent­ed sales­peo­ple dispir­it­ed, hung up on for the nth time that week. That’s if they hit the right tar­get at all – Hub­spot recent­ly esti­mat­ed that near­ly a third of sales data­bas­es ‘go bad’ every year.

Sales needs to change

Ter­ry says: “[This] means turn­ing cold calls into warm con­tacts, using data and insight to inform out­comes, to gain rich learn­ings around a honed tar­get list that builds sup­pli­er brand and buy­er trust, all in the same action.” Tech­nol­o­gy still has a cen­tral role to play in deep sales, with top per­form­ers 16% more like­ly than stan­dard sales­peo­ple to use sales tech­nol­o­gy at least once a day. How­ev­er, Ter­ry adds: “Just not the same type of tech­nol­o­gy that got B2B sales­peo­ple into this mess in the first place.”

How today’s buy­ers buy

Spam email aside, sales tech­nol­o­gy has trans­formed how buy­ers and sales­peo­ple inter­act. Con­tact by email, for exam­ple, means the buy­er can begin the process on their own terms and has the chance to do their due dili­gence. They’ve got a wealth of tools at their dis­pos­al. First, buy­ers check the com­pa­ny web­site or use Google Search. The next port of call is LinkedIn, with 40% of buy­ers check­ing the com­pa­ny page, 39% view­ing the salesperson’s pro­file, 31% look­ing for com­pa­ny con­nec­tions and 29% review­ing the salesperson’s con­tent his­to­ry.

“Great sales pro­fes­sion­als are present where their clients gath­er. That used to be at con­fer­ences, trade shows or offices. Now, they’re con­gre­gat­ing online, often on LinkedIn. Cer­tain­ly, there are oth­er, sec­tor-spe­cif­ic plat­forms – Pin­ter­est for inte­ri­or design, for exam­ple – but with 850 mil­lion mem­bers and 57 mil­lion com­pa­nies, LinkedIn is where the deci­sion mak­ers are,” Ter­ry says.

Sales organ­i­sa­tions also use their tech stack to find prospects and bridge the buy­er-sell­er gap. All too often, rely­ing on more tech­nol­o­gy has had the unin­tend­ed effect of caus­ing more prob­lems for sell­ers and sales organ­i­sa­tions. Only 53% of sell­ers say the sales tech stack helps boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and affects results pos­i­tive­ly, accord­ing to For­rester.

The bot­tom line seems to be that more tools may not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean bet­ter data. Despite larg­er tech stacks, the same data prob­lems per­sist. There’s too much reliance on stale data, on impre­cise buy­er intent sig­nals, and on data that falls far short of cov­er­ing the uni­verse of poten­tial prospects.

How sales organ­i­sa­tions can thrive with deep sales

The most effec­tive sell­ers use tech­nol­o­gy in intel­li­gent ways. Coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly, LinkedIn data indi­cates that top-per­form­ing sell­ers spend 10% less time sell­ing than the aver­age sell­er. Instead, top per­form­ers spend their time research­ing prospects. This prepa­ra­tion helps top per­form­ers map the buy­ing com­mit­tee and under­stand the right moments for deliv­er­ing out­reach that is cus­tomised and per­son­alised.

Ter­ry says that these behav­iours needn’t be the pre­serve of the elite. “It’s pos­si­ble for any sales organ­i­sa­tion to build pro­grammes that help repli­cate habits of top per­form­ers in aver­age sell­ers.” He adds that, to arm their sales teams with the means to stream­line effec­tive research, sales organ­i­sa­tions must give their sell­ers access to accu­rate data and real-time insights derived from pre­dic­tive sig­nals. Equipped with this valu­able infor­ma­tion, sell­ers can focus on the accounts and the leads most like­ly to become cus­tomers.

LinkedIn has termed this approach ‘deep sales,’ with the new approach bridg­ing the buy­er-sell­er gap. Deep sales helps sell­ers focus on high prob­a­bil­i­ty accounts. “Deep sales helps sell­ers reach out to buy­ers with infor­ma­tion that is rel­e­vant – and wel­come. It helps sell­ers close deals and dri­ve bet­ter out­comes,” he sug­gests.

Deep sales: chang­ing the game

Sales organ­i­sa­tion that main­tain results by expand­ing their tech stacks or increas­ing the vol­ume of their out­reach are like­ly unsus­tain­able. From Gart­ner to For­rester to McK­in­sey, thought lead­ers are ask­ing sales man­age­ment to rethink the sta­tus quo.

The data pro­vid­ed to most sell­ers is not pro­vid­ing them with a com­plete pic­ture of their tar­get accounts and their prospects. They may know cer­tain aspects of their accounts of their prospects, such as the ‘who’ and the ‘what.’ But do they know the ‘when,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how’ as they con­duct out­reach to prospects? Answer­ing these ques­tions is what a deep sales plat­form does, and it is how deep sales rep­re­sents a pos­i­tive change for B2B sales teams.

A deep sales plat­form process­es data and learns from it, ulti­mate­ly mak­ing pre­dic­tions and rec­om­men­da­tions to sell­ers on a scale and with a speed that is impos­si­ble for humans to repli­cate. LinkedIn refers to deep sales as noth­ing less than “a super­pow­er.”

Deep sales has the pow­er to turn every sell­er into a top per­former. It auto­mates some of the key behav­iours that sep­a­rate top per­form­ers from the pack, uncov­er­ing action­able insights in a seller’s book of busi­ness in three essen­tial areas:

• Account insights — Locat­ing accounts with the high­est like­li­hood of suc­cess

• Rela­tion­ship intel­li­gence — Tar­get­ing deci­sion mak­ers and find­ing the most effec­tive path­ways for out­reach

• Buy­er intent — Iden­ti­fy­ing the most oppor­tune moments for out­reach based on data sig­nals, such as organ­i­sa­tion­al growth and prospect role changes

Ter­ry is unequiv­o­cal in his belief that deep sales is the way for­ward: “Deep sales rep­re­sents a mas­sive shift in B2B sell­ing. Using data, deep sales will help sales organ­i­sa­tions uncov­er growth oppor­tu­ni­ties. Already, deep sales plat­forms are deliv­er­ing faster deal cycles, high win rates, and rev­enue growth to the sales organ­i­sa­tions using this tech­nol­o­gy that is trans­form­ing the world of sales.”

He adds: “Sales has reached a water­shed moment. There’s no time like the present to get start­ed on build­ing a deep sales strat­e­gy that, in the end, enables sell­ers to help buy­ers buy the way they want to buy.”

Learn more about LinkedIn sales solu­tions at business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/deep-sales

Pro­mot­ed by LinkedIn