Episode 26: The Market Research is in…The Top 5 Sales Challenges to Overcome in 2023

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. Okay, so today I'm really excited, I mean really excited, because we have the results in from our largest ever market research study that we've completed. And I will say that's not just the largest ever study that we've completed as a business the strongest sales teams, but it's also the largest study that I've been involved with myself. It has a big stack of primary and secondary resources and we know that the world is changing so rapidly this year, particularly I think this year and moving forward that it's really actually quite important to get a hold of what's going to be the key challenges that come out over the next 12 months and beyond. So that's exactly what this market research study was all about. Having a look specifically at sales leaders and what their greatest challenges are for the next 12 months. And for us there's a clear benefit. I want to understand exactly what we need to be doing to help sales leaders to overcome these challenges. But also for sales leaders, I think it's really beneficial in you understanding what these challenges are. So number one, you can realise you're not alone, right? There's something much more comforting in knowing we are not alone when we have challenges. But number two is you can actually be aware of it as well. So you can bring it to the front of your mind and really focus on what you need to do to improve it. So we're going to share the results of this study over the next 20 minutes or so. So buckle in. There'll be a few quotes in there and a few sources around where we got some of our data from. So if you want to look any deeper into it, you'll be able to jump into that too. So what are sales leaders biggest challenges for 2023 and beyond and what can we do to overcome them? Well, number one, I don't think this will surprise too many people, but 67% of respondents from our primary data, so from those people that we dealt with directly said that their number one, their number one challenge for the next 12 months is talent management. So if we look that down a little bit further, those 67% of people who said talent management was their number one challenge for the next 12 months, that is specifically the recruitment of staff, the productivity of existing staff. Right. That includes training, managing and motivating staff and team engagement. So we've got recruiting, staff, productivity of existing staff, managing and motivating staff, and team engagement. This came out as a clear number one challenge for the next 12 months. It was a fair way ahead of everything else. So as leaders, what can we do to be overcoming that challenge of talent management? For me, first and foremost, it's all about working on your EQ as well as your iq. So making sure that it's not just your technical and your data skills and your actual management skills that are improving, but also your emotional intelligence is something you're working on. I'm a big believer that it can be developed. I don't subscribe that emotional intelligence, you have what you have and you can't learn anymore because personally myself, I've seen it grown significantly over the last 10 years, absolutely night and day in terms of where my personal emotional intelligence is compared to a decade ago. So for me, a very specific task here is spending time with your team members to really understand what drives them. So you'll have your macro level processes and systems and way you go about things. But for that last 10% or 5 to 10% as I'll commonly refer, we actually need to have more of a micro focus and please don't confuse that with micromanagement. But we need to have a bit more of a detailed focus about what drives individuals within our team and how we can manage and lead them better. So that's number one. The second thing we can be doing around managing talent within our business is spend time yourself, focusing on how you lead your team, not just how you get the results. So this is all about your strategy and how you go about executing that strategy, which we call the TeamSTEPPS playbook. Side note, we do have a great resource out around building a team playbook. It's strongersalesteams.com playbook, but if you're going it out on your own, absolutely this is critical. It's critical that you not only have a strategy, but you have a playbook about how you're going to go and achieve that strategy so that everyone's clear on it. So, in terms of managing and leading your talent, and particularly around their engagement, when they know where you're heading, they're far more likely to subscribe. So have a think about that. There's also a podcast number nine for this year that you can jump in and have a listen to if you'd like to learn more about building out your team strategy and playbook. Okay, so the third part of this, and this is very similar to the second area around building out a strategy, is just make sure your team is well and truly involved in all of your target setting, your strategic planning, your workshopping. You're pivoting when things aren't going right, you're celebrating when things are going right. The more engaged your team is in, feeling like they have control of that journey, the more likely they are to engage. Fourth thing, how do we get talent managed really well in a business? This one's actually more about giving a bit of an indication as to how you're going to. And that's engagement surveys. So we often call them pulse surveys. Right. Culture Amp is a great resource for this. Cultureamp.com or if you want to keep costs down, something like SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey.com. right. These are great ways to actually measure the engagement of your team and allow you to then make some adjustments around it. I should also mention recruitment was regarded as a real challenge for people over the next 12 months. That wasn't just being able to get their hands on staff, but people being able to recruit the best staff. That's probably something that's very specific to each industry that you're in. So please contact me if you'd like a bit of help around that. Something we have plenty of experience in and more than happy to talk with you about. Okay, so what was number two? Number two was all about building trust with customers. So that's, as it sounds, pretty straightforward, building trust, but it's also around how they communicate value quickly to customers. Because we know we get less and less time with customers than we previously did. It talks about how do we influence customers when we aren't directly in front of the decision maker. And wow, how things have changed. Right. We are now six to seven decision makers is the norm in any commercial process. So whilst we may present to one or two or even three, there's six to seven making their decisions. As to how they're going to move forward. So in terms of building customer with customers, there was also around having a clear sales process to get decision maker buy in came up, having a customer first mentality to keep customers or to keep prospects engaged and hitting sales targets. So all of those six or seven things came around, how do we build more trust with our customers? And it was summed up pretty well by Gartner. 70% of sales leaders found that they had significant roadblocks in how they could connect with their customers virtually. Now we know that virtual connections are far more prevalent than they were a few years ago. So as leaders, we need to be able to overcome these obstacles to to build trust with customers. Okay, so how do we look at those six or seven things that have come up and about? How do we move the lever on those or move the dial on those as leaders to be more impactful? So number one, and I speak about this a lot, is we have to have a sales process that's simple and easy for our team to follow. If you don't have a process that they buy into, you will have every team member doing slightly different things. That means more time for you to lead them, but it also means a less consistent experience for your customer and and a hell of a lot more trouble in trying to make sure that that delivery is enjoyable. So build out a sales process that's simple, that the team are involved with and they'll follow. I've mentioned this before. StrongerSalesteam.com sales process. That's where you can download it or jump back to podcast number one for the year and you'll be able to hear more about it. Number two is work on the prospecting skills of your team. So we're talking about building trust with customers. There's no better way to build trust with them than from the start. Okay, so to do that, we need to be creating value for our customers from our first engagement with them. If we can't create value, we generally won't go any further. So how do we do that? Well, for me, we start conversations around problems to solve or opportunities to capitalize on. This requires definitely research before we connect with customers, but also just a little bit of mindfulness. When we meet with someone and we talk to them, we say, hey, what are the opportunities in your business? What are the problems that you're experiencing at the moment? Can you share with me something that's not going really well? Can you share with me something that you'd really like to see happen? If you had Your wish in the next three months, what's something you'd like to see change in your business? If in three months time something didn't change in your business, what would be the number one thing that you'd want to try and fix? So lots of different ways we can ask those questions. We need to make sure that we're working out exactly what the problems or the opportunities are so that we can then engage with our customers about how we can fix them. Second part around this is using videos as icebreakers. I love this as a prospecting skill because it automatically starts to build a relationship. People get a hell of a lot more emails than they do videos. So where you can put something different, particularly embedded into an email, where you can do something a little bit different in how you're approaching your customers, you're more likely to stand out and build that value straight away, particularly if the video is personalized. I've created lots of videos and please get in touch if you'd like some advice on how to do them. All right, in terms of this one, how else can we go about building trust with customers? One that for me that's really important and I mentioned it a little bit earlier in Top line level. But if we can be building engagement across multiple decision makers in an organization, right. Then we're more likely to succeed. So the wider our teams network, the quicker trust will flow across an organization. When you're having your multiple decision makers being involved. Right. So how do we do that? We can do that via LinkedIn and seed across organizations. We can do that via videos and train the trainer. We can do that by asking to be involved with other people. We can do that by networking more heavily through an organization. There's lots and lots of ways we can do it. But the more you are a known quality, the more your teams are a known quantity within an organization, the more likely they are to have that trust built up. Okay, so we've spoken about, number one was absolutely around talent management, number two about building trust. Number three came out as customer attention or key account management. So how we're actually having customers come back to our business again and again and again. For me, keeping customers is as hard as it's ever been. I don't think it's ever been more difficult now because there is just so much competition out there and in fact because there's also so many people involved in the decision making process. I mentioned six or seven previously. If we look at someone's research like Forrester. So Forrester revealed that 63% of purchases from their research had four or more people. Right. Each with varying levels of authority and influence. So that statistically certainly backs up that there are multiple people involved in decision making. So being able to engage with these stakeholders, like gatekeepers, like influencers or blockers, champions, users. Right. And decision makers. There's lots of different ways we can look at this. It's absolutely vital for us to be able to succeed. So as leaders for customer retention and key account management to be successful, we need to make sure that we're building relationships not just at one level, but we're mining through the organization. So we not only have the trust that we need to build from your previous challenge, but we also have some succession plannings to be able to retain our business. So how do we do that? Okay, quite a few ways we can do that, but let's focus on three or four that are really chunky. So number one for me by far is that once we have a customer join our business or join our family, as we like to call it, we need to make sure that our salespeople don't just take the deal and move on to the next right. Or churn and burn, as we'll often hear it called in the sales industry. What we want to make sure is that our salesperson is involved with the customer's journey. Of course, we need to be very mindful around the time that our salespeople are committing. But there are certainly lots of ways that we can systemise how they're involved with the customer and that they appear at the right times during a delivery phase to have maximum impact. Next one, check in with the customer. Right. Just after you finish that project. So we've spoken about staying engaged during the project. Our salespeople should be checking in with the customer shortly after the project is completed. Right. What's working well? What's not working so well? Number one, have we achieved our goal? Right. And if we haven't, what, what can we do to improve it? You'll know your industry better than me. For some industries, checking in is the next day. For other industries, it's a month or two months or even three months down the track. Right. But super important that if we want to be having customers coming back to our business, we are checking in with them once our first engagement with them is done. By the way, it's also a great time to ask for a referral. Next one here. In terms of influencing or moving the dial around, T account management is we need to make sure that we have a framework for our team. So we'll call it a key account management framework, but that's a defined process as to how we'll manage our customers. So key account management frameworks, they're often bespoke to an organization, so it's probably one where you get in touch if you need some support. But certainly the most important piece that I can communicate here is that if we have a defined key account process and we can trust that our teams are all following a similar path, it's far easier to manage and then lead for improvements than if it's not. Right. So really important that we're not only checking in with our customer during the process, at the end of the process, but we also have a key account management framework for what happens after that. Last but not least on this one is those leaders that want to overcome that challenge of key account management, but aren't sure how. Right. If you can embed some of these customer attention techniques into your training, then you're going to have far more success. Okay, so we have a training resource that's out. I've mentioned that previously. Again, contact us if you need to. But if you're building a training program out, please make sure it has some information around key account management in there. And if you don't know how to do that, then you'll need to upskill yourself around what some of those techniques are. Okay, so number one was talent management. Number two was building trust. Number three was all about customer retention. And key account management. Number four, this one surprised me a little bit. This was social selling. So a big challenge identified was actually getting our teams to be socially selling. So that doesn't mean that they're great people to be around and they have a bit of fun when they're selling. This is actually using social media, Right? So this is actually using LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or Threads or whatever it might be, or podcasting. Right. Or blogging. Whatever's really important to your sales team and really impactful in your industry is embracing that so that they can actually be exposed to more customers, build trust with more customers, and then in the end retain more customers. Right. So an impactful statistic, which will be a little bit subjective, but I think it's on the right track from LinkedIn is that 78% of social sellers outperform their peers who do not use social media. 78%. So 8 out of 10 people, 8 out of 10 salespeople that embrace social media perform better than those that don't. Pretty compelling statistic. Right. One, I think as leaders we probably need to make sure we're listening to and actioning. I've previously, and I've said this quite a few times, I've always worked on your network is your net worth. For me, what's becoming really clear is that creating content is actually how you build your network. So content build your network, which build your net worth, right? So for the next few years you're probably going to hear me say more and more, putting content out is really important to build your network. We certainly don't network like we used to, but content has become a way that we can continue to do so. So that means publishing content as an individual salesperson is more important than ever. So what can we do about it as a sales leader? Number one, at an absolute minimum, we have to make sure that our salespeople are creating content for customers, right? We have to know what that preferred social media channel is. So for me in my business, LinkedIn is number one. So LinkedIn is where we focus on the majority of our content creation and we make sure that we're very, very active. We know the standard on LinkedIn, it's no longer once a week, it's multiple times per week. So we're embracing that in terms of our content creation. Practically we'll find that for most industries it's either going to be LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. Those three come up generally as the majority of the social media platforms where people will succeed on. But, but certainly Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, there's lots of others there that can be quite impactful. Next one, make sure you're engaging your marketing team to help create content. Your marketing teams can do the hard work for your salespeople for certainly a part of their content creation and then they just need to republish it, right. Or reuse it out in their markets and tailor it to them as they need to. So marketing teams can play a really great role in the cross purposing of content for your sales team. Next one, Making a content calendar can be really impactful because what it does is it schedules for your teams, what they need to be doing and what gets measured definitely is more likely to get done. So if we can make a content calendar part of our team's individual one to one plans, right? So we talk about it in our meetings that we have, we talk about it in our group meetings, but also in our individual meetings, then we're more likely to have some success there because we will find that certainly and in a team I'm working with at the moment, one of the salespeople, they love podcasting. So my advice to them is, hey, podcast, get out there and do that because that's your way of creating content. Another one really loves statistics, right? So they all get out there and they'll promote lots of statistics as their content creation. So find what works, be it social media, be it blogging, be it podcasting, be it guest post, guest posting is becoming more and more impactful webinars, right? Work out what works for them and make sure everyone's creating content. I think if each salesperson can build one piece of content that can then be repurposed into multiple forms, you're generally going to find that you're only needing to create content once or twice a month. I'll throw up a link in the show notes that gives you something from HubSpot that will help you, give you some ideas and around creating content. Okay, and the last one I want to talk about today, that came up as really important as a challenge for sales leaders over the next 12 months is using technology effectively. So that's not just improving compliance to an existing tech stack, but that's also improving on that tech stack that they have using your tech stack. So the technology in your business to integrate the human experience with your salespeople and the digital experience, not with your salespeople, super important. We have not been in an era of such significant digital change in my career, in my 20 plus years in the B2B environment. So I think being able to integrate that human and digital experience, those companies that get that right, they will be ahead of those that don't buy a significant quantum. In fact, if we look at some stats around just to highlight that challenge. So Zendesk, plenty of research coming out of Zendesk, they found that 32% of sales reps feel overwhelmed by the AI tools available to them. So if you have a sales team of 10 people, three of those are going to be completely overwhelmed by the AI tools they have available to them. That just looked at who was really overwhelmed. It didn't actually look at those that were struggling to grapple with technology, and I suspect that number will be far higher. So as leaders, we need to focus not on learning of new AI tools, but actually making sure the tools that we have in our business are embraced by the whole team. Because if we can have just the tech stack in our current business working, we are going to be far better off than where we currently are. So what can we do about improving the state of technology in sales teams for Me, number one is start to get your teams embracing video. I speak about this really commonly, but I see it as the most powerful method for sales teams to build relationships when they can't get in front of customers. Liam, Video ask Bombbomb. Plenty out there and there's heaps more out there. Right, but plenty out there that sales teams can be using. And it's a very basic piece of tech to master. Yes, it can be confronting for some people, but it just requires a little bit of practice to be able to get there. And I can say myself that I certainly in the early days found it a little bit difficult, but I'm reasonably comfortable now. About eight weeks in from using video. Okay, next one. Automation. So where we can roll in automation on our stages, that's going to really help our team spend more time with customers. So at an absolute minimum, our salespeople should be able to create sequences for nurturing and earlier stage lead generation that helps move customers along their journey. So what do I mean by that? I mean steps that we consistently apply. 5, 6, 8, 10, up to 14 or 15 steps that we apply in our processes to how we will nurture customers. Let's use LinkedIn as an example. That might be request to connect, connection accepted, thanking them for their acceptance. A few days later you're asking them questions, perhaps around any of their challenges or opportunities. A few days later you might be sharing with them some resources that you have available or some content that they might like to look at. A few days later you might be again asking them around any challenges that they have or anything you can do to help them. A few days later you might be sharing with them some case studies or some great opportunities in the market. Right. And of course it's much better if you have engagement with with customers back and forward. And I certainly would not recommend that. We are too early trying to talk to people about our services. We really want to be uncovering the opportunities and the problems. But our sales people must have a sequence that they can roll out repeatedly. Once you get that sequence right, generally you can use it for the whole team. But a lot of CRM tools now have automation available, so make sure you're using them again, this is a more difficult one. You can get in touch with me if you're stuck on this one. What else can you do around tech for me, and I probably should have mentioned this at the start actually is upskill yourself. Get really sharp on the tech tools available in your industry. But even before that, make sure you know how to use the tech tools in your business. Because whenever anything new is coming across to a team, it's really important as leaders that we can, and often, you know, we don't want to do this always, but we can often pace it and set the example as to exactly how we can show our teams to use the tech. I've got a resource around my top four learning techniques for myself that include how I embrace tech that's coming out very, very shortly. Look out for it on social media and you'll be able to download that for free. Last but not least, make sure around tech that whenever adopting it, even if we're leading from the front, even if we've got automation nailed, even if we're using video and all these other cool tools that we continue to nurture our team until they build the habits. We personally, as a business, we work off 21 times to memorize something and then three blocks of 21 to build it into a routine. So if you can nurture your team to build the habits around using tech, it's going to take you about 60 times, which is a couple of months, two and a half months. Right. So make sure you stick with it, provide lots of support and lots of encouragement around the journey. Okay, so they're the top five that came out of the key challenges from our market research project we run that sales leaders are looking to overcome in 2023. Talent management, number one, building trust, number two, key account management or customer attention, number three, social selling, number four. And number five, last but not least, was using tech as part of your everyday process. So lots of great stuff in there, and I hope you've taken something really valuable about that. A final word though, before we finish up for today is that those five areas, they won't apply to every single sales leader out there. And certainly if all five of them are major challenges for you, then I definitely recommend you get out and get some help, either internally or externally really quickly. But what they are is a great summary. So if you can pick out one or two of those that are really relevant to you and your team that you can work on straight away, then this podcast has been really impactful for you. So really important is I challenge everyone to step through those five areas that we went through, the five challenges. Download the transcript if you need to, and find some action items for yourself that you can get out of it. I'll also have that out as a free resource. It's launching today with the podcast. So again, you should be able to see that through social media if you'd like to download more. Okay, so that was a really chunky episode. Lots and lots of quantitative data around what people are looking at for their learning and challenges over the next 12 months and beyond. If you couldn't get all of that because we moved really fast today, jump onto the show notes in your own time. They're on the website strongestsalesteams.com they're also through social media and you can download anything you want. Of course. Get in touch with me if you'd like to get some help or book a discovery call. It's free. I love spending half an hour with people because I can always find something to help them and make that time really valuable. Again, get in contact through social media or directly via the website. But before we leave today, I want to talk about a health and wellbeing tip. And I'm focusing a little bit around mental fitness at the moment and mental wellbeing. And that'll be a bit of a theme for the next couple of weeks. But certainly for me, sometimes life can seem like the challenges are larger than the Swiss Alps or the Italian Alps or the Rockies. Right. That they are so insurmountable that we just don't know how we're going to get through them. I can tell you, I personally, I have these challenges really regularly. I am not alone. I'm not immune. So what works really well for me, and I've had lots of help across my career on this, is to break down these big issues into smaller, chunkable items. So you might have one large issue that you can break down into four, five, six or even eight things that you can approach and then once you've got it into those segments to break it down and again and again if you need to, into really, really actionable and short term visions that you can achieve. So it's almost like you're walking to the next tree in front of you or the next stream in front of you, or up the next hill. And once you do that, once you can break a really complex problem into the simple, then you start to be able to look at how you can achieve that. So big problems break into small solutions, small chunkable items that you can get done. Try it with a problem that you've got out there, try and break it down from your big problem to a smaller number and then a smaller number again and see how you go. And of course, get in contact if you need to. That's it for me today. Until next time. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks everyone. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.