Thank you for joining us for this informative Q&A. Today we are discussing how B2B sales has changed over the years, and how it hasn’t!

In this interview Elizabeth Harris, a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) with more than 20 years of B2B leadership experience, will share with us how the industry is shifting as well as what has remained foundationally the same in B2B sales and marketing. Her insights will help you to understand what that means for the future as well as your revenue strategy today. Let’s get started!

Turmoil and uncertainty aren’t going away anytime soon. So, as business leaders, we are left with two choices – bemoan this fact or do something about it!

Complaining about reduced budgets, labor constraints, accelerated timeframes on go-to-market strategies, added competition, increased channel options, and the like are futile efforts. There will always be challenges, but there are also tools, processes, and people that can help you overcome these challenges!

Winning companies understand this fact. Their success is built on the ability to analyze where they are today and use that knowledge to find the resources that are going to get them where they want to go tomorrow.

How exactly do they do that?

Some sales teams have it. And some don’t. What makes some B2B sales teams great? In working with B2B sales teams for 25 years, I have discovered that there are three key qualities that set high-performing sales teams apart – the right goals structure, authentic camaraderie, and a foundation of trust.

Whether your sales team is consistently exceeding expectations, plateauing at meeting but not exceeding goals, or underperforming relative to their targets, there is always room for improvement. Of course, like anything else in business, increasing B2B sales performance requires both managerial support and individual initiative. Let’s talk about how sales managers can get more out of their team and retain their best salespeople as well as how B2B salespeople can sell better.

With all the buzz right now around integrating AI and automation solutions into organizational strategy, it is worth taking the time to understand what kind of benefits marketing automation can offer and how to best utilize it to drive organizational success.

Let’s look at which kinds of activities are included in marketing automation, where it is best utilized to drive value, what its limitations are, the ethical considerations to keep in mind along the way, and what is coming next.

Undoubtedly, you have heard the famous phrase, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” And yet, inherent in this quote is the misconception that the reverse is true as well – that if you measure it, you will also be able to improve it. This errant belief can cause leadership to overemphasize measuring a wide array of disparate metrics. The result is “measurement paralysis”, where true KPIs (key performance indicators) get drowned out by a cacophony of tracking and analysis.

So, how can you determine which numbers are the best metrics to track? We have put together a guide to B2B KPIs to help you better understand what to look at and how to identify KPI gaps.

For the last 15 years I have worked as a content creator and copywriter, first for (what was then) the world’s leading ecommerce software provider and later for myself as a business owner. And today, I considered walking away from that to work for minimum wage at McDonald’s. Let me explain what happened...

Business alignment is everyone rowing in the same direction at the same time to get where they want to go together. When departments and divisions across the whole company are aligned around a singular objective, they will accomplish what they set out to do. Therefore, alignment is how businesses achieve their goals.

However, alignment is far more elusive than many business leaders realize. A Harvard Business Review analysis of strategic alignment made the following discovery:

“We asked more than 500 frontline employees, middle managers, and senior executives across 12 different organizations to indicate how aligned they thought their companies were with respect to corporate strategy. And we found that the participants were largely optimistic, on average reporting that they felt strategic agreement within their companies was 82%. But when we analyzed detailed written explanations from those same employees around what their company’s strategies were, we found that actual alignment (as measured by the linguistic overlap in the concepts and words they listed) was, on average, just 23% — two to three times lower than perceived alignment.”

Of course, that begs the question, would you even know if your organization was misaligned?

An article in the March-April 2023 edition of the Harvard Business Review titled Beware a Culture of Busyness had a very strong message to share with readers: “Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement.” It explains why busyness has become so valued in organizations these days as well as the significant damage that results from prioritizing and rewarding busyness. If you get a chance to read/listen to the article and want to share your thoughts with us, feel free to do so.

We would like to add our own thoughts based on what we have seen from helping B2B companies achieve strategic revenue growth for almost two decades. In our efforts to help move organizations away from a busyness culture we’re discussing the dangers of being busy, who is to blame for today’s busyness culture, and how to evolve to increase profitable revenue.