Strategies to Enhance B2B Sales Performance Amidst Modern Challenges

Every sales leader and sales manager wants their teams to hit their goals and reach their targets. But selling has never been particularly easy, and in the current state of B2B sales, it’s even harder. Much of how we sell today makes it more difficult for salespeople to sell effectively. The following list outlines changes that can harm sales results and goal attainment or support them, depending on an organization’s approach:

1. Optimizing Sales Technology for Consistent Target Achievement: Sales organizations leverage advanced sales technologies to empower reps, enhance efficiency, and boost target attainment. If technology were able to consistently help salespeople hit their targets, every sales organization with a giant tech stack would already be reaching their goals. Leaders that have put their faith in technology now look to AI to improve their results.
2. Strategic Pipeline Management over the Volume Approach: Effective sales teams shift their focus to quality over quantity in lead generation, ensuring higher conversion rates and improved outcomes. At least one generation of sales professionals has been taught that success comes from having more opportunities than they need to reach their targets. This approach emphasizes creating opportunities when the focus should be on winning the deals they create.
3. Enhancing Salesperson Collaboration and Engagement: Sales organizations can leverage territorial arrangements to foster team interaction, reducing isolation, and boosting collective productivity. To make it easier for the salesperson to visit their clients and prospects, sales organizations hire people or move salespeople into distinct territories. The upside is access to clients prospects, but the downside is that salespeople spend most of their time alone and have too little access to their peers.
4. Reviving the Sales Floor Environment for Enhanced Learning: Companies reestablish communal sales environments to facilitate knowledge-sharing and skill development among sales professionals. One way salespeople learn to sell is through proximity to other salespeople, and the sales floor was perhaps the greatest development strategy for salespeople to increase their effectiveness. Sadly, there are fewer of these environments.
5. Cultivating Effective Sales Behaviors for Sustainable Growth: When organizations nurture proactive and strategic sales approaches, they eliminate inefficiencies and maximize success rates. Poor sales behaviors and outdated sales approaches, like working on deals that have little chance of being won, or doing less work than they would need to succeed in B2B sales.

Being strategic about the list above requires sales leaders to find a way to reach their goals despite constraints. There is only one thing you can do to improve your sales results: changing the behavior of your team and every individual on your team. Without the changes to the salesperson’s behaviors, you are likely to repeat your last year, including failing to hit your targets.

Key Behavioral Adjustments for Sales Success in 2024

This list will help you recognize the behavioral changes that will allow your team and individual salespeople to improve their results. You may find some need more changes than others, and you may have a couple of extraordinary individuals who need little or no changes to improve their effectiveness.

1. Strategic Targeting for Resource Optimization: Sales teams refine prospecting efforts toward high-potential clients, ensuring resource allocation aligns with business objectives. Some salespeople believe every company is a prospective client. Not only is this a waste of time, but including companies that are not what you need to succeed also degrades your pipeline.
2. Developing Business Acumen for Client-Centric Engagement: When sales reps prioritize understanding client needs and industry dynamics, they enhance their own credibility and rapport in enterprise-level negotiations. Imagine a businessperson with a high level of business acumen sitting across from a sales rep who has little or no business acumen. How can this sales rep provide advice? They can’t, especially in enterprise-level deals.
3. Research-Driven Sales Preparation for Impactful Interactions: Sales professionals conduct thorough client research to personalize engagements, elevating relevance and responsiveness in sales interactions. The uninquiring salesperson reads nothing and fails to research their client's company and stakeholders, as well as their industry. This causes buyers to move on in search of a salesperson who is disciplined to do their homework.
4. Effective Prospecting Tactics for Initial Engagement: Sales teams implement tailored outreach strategies to secure meaningful interactions, maximizing opportunities with key decision-makers. Some salespeople believe they can book meetings by emailing busy executives, the kind that don’t allow anyone to waste their time. This strategy is ineffective. Despite this, you may have people on your team who don’t block time to book first meetings. They are doing too little work to acquire the opportunities with the strategic targets you need.
5. Alignment with Proven Sales Methodologies for Consistency: Organizations standardize sales approaches to ensure adherence to established best practices, enhancing consistency and predictability in outcomes. Some of your team might believe they have their own “style,” a strong hint the salesperson is not selling the way you require them to sell. If someone isn’t using the sales methodology you use, they will need a new “style.” This may be the area where you have the least compliance from some members of your team.
6. Empowering Conversations Through Open-Ended Questions: Sales professionals emphasize inquiry-based dialogue to uncover client needs and preferences, fostering deeper engagement and rapport. Right now, there seems to be a trend that has sales reps asking few or no open-ended questions that invite their contacts to talk about some of the important things you need to know to understand how to win the client’s business.
7. Comprehensive Discovery for Informed Solution Positioning: Sales reps conduct thorough needs assessments to tailor solutions effectively, positioning offerings as value-driven solutions to client challenges. When discovery amounts to two questions—1) What’s your problem? and 2) What is your pain point?—your results will be poor. If the only reason you ask about a problem is so you can introduce your solution, this doesn’t rise to the level that one might call discovery.
8. Establishing Expertise and Authority for Trust-Building: Sales professionals demonstrate subject matter expertise and authority to instill confidence in clients, positioning as trusted advisors in the decision-making process. Your strategic target’s contact doesn’t need a salesperson. They need someone who can help them pursue their change initiative and improve their results. A lack of expertise and authority can undermine the confidence and certainty needed to close deals.

The only way you will improve your sales results is to make the behavioral changes that would enable your team to sell better. As a sales leader or sales manager, improving your results will require you to insist your team makes the necessary changes.

In a recent conversation with a group of sales managers, some chafed at the idea that they could cause their teams to make the changes they had just shared with each other. As the leader, you are allowed to demand the changes that would help you reach your goals. And requiring your salespeople to change can improve their work and their lives at home.

Leaving this article, make your own list of the behavioral changes your team needs to do better work in 2024 than the work they did in 2023. Do good work, and help your team succeed.