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!

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.

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.

While new B2B sales trends have emerged over the past two years, it’s safe to say that we have now moved past “pivots” and temporary adaptations to what can only be described as a B2B sales revolution. An entirely new era of B2B sales has taken shape and is continuing to evolve, transforming everything from go-to-market strategies to strategic revenue planning at B2B organizations across the globe.

Buyers’ priorities and preferences have changed requiring that sales strategies adapt to keep pace. Understanding this, well-informed B2B companies are rethinking who they sell to, how they sell, and where they sell. The sales planning changes that have resulted both internally and externally are a clear indication that there is a new face to B2B sales these days. How will that fact shape what you do next?

Globalization has given B2B companies access to a seemingly endless list of suppliers and buyers, lowering prices and shortening delivery times. That is, until a disruption is introduced into the global network that ripples through the system.

Some disruptions have a more limited scope (only affecting certain industries or regions), while others have a more widespread effect. The pandemic has been the widest reaching business disruption of our time, and it is not going to be resolved anytime soon.

In fact, over the last few months “supply chain” has quickly become the new trending topic that everyone is talking about. However, most B2B companies have been dealing with supply chain woes for almost two years now. And with no end in sight, they are feeling the pressure to get even more strategic with how they approach supply chain disruptions.

So, how should you handle today’s ongoing supply chain disruptions… and tomorrow’s?

The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role has been a staple for almost two decades in high tech manufacturing environments. But does it also apply to traditional manufacturers? Short answer: yes. Slightly longer answer: it depends. Let’s find out why and if it makes sense for your manufacturing company.

Manufacturing, in particular, has a distinctly different approach to revenue than retail or professional services. The distinct lens that the CEO of a manufacturing company looks at revenue through shapes everything from the metrics they track to the operational initiatives they support.

“The ability to withstand unpredictable threat or change and then to emerge stronger.”

This is how the team at McKinsey & Company defines resilience in their recently published an article on what they call The Resilience Imperative. They elaborate further that resilience is going to be more important in the coming decade than ever before when they explain, “Catastrophic events will grow more frequent but less predictable. They will unfold faster but in more varied ways. Disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe.”

Resilience can be financial, operational, technological, organizational, or reputational in nature but the greatest resiliency comes when an organization can anticipate and respond to threats across all categories to dynamically adapt as needed. Obviously, this kind of resiliency does not just fall into place – it is the result of careful planning to develop a revenue resiliency toolkit.

The term “Revenue Operations” is soaring in popularity these days. In fact, Chief Revenue Officer, VP of Revenue Operations, and Director of Revenue Operations are among the fastest growing job titles right now on LinkedIn.

But what is Revenue Operations?

Does your business need it?

And, if you do, how do you establish a Revenue Operations framework?

Revenue Operations (or RevOps for short) is an approach that aims to align sales, marketing, and customer service teams to give them the tools and resources needed to drive predictable revenue. As Bhaskar Roy explains in an article on the rise of Revenue Operations, “RevOps treats revenue not as a fortunate outcome of a quality product, but like a mirror of the supply chain — a pipeline that needs to be powered by optimized business processes.”