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Event

June 10, 2022 by Market-Partners Inc.

Martyn Lewis at the 2022 SAMA Annual Conference

Last week, Market-Partners Inc. Principal and Founder, Martyn Lewis, presented again at SAMA’s Annual Conference. The two-and-a-half-day event was packed with though-provoking presentations, breakout sessions, and corridor conversations. Thank you to the organizers for all their hard work, as well as to the old faces and new friends we had the pleasure of speaking to in New Orleans.

Martyn presented alongside cohost Deb Honea of AWS on Managing the Hidden Buying Journey. Whether you couldn’t make our session or are simply looking for a refresher, we wanted to provide you with a quick summary and some actionable insights from our part of the conference.

Managing the Hidden Buying Journey

Our research shows that salespeople are involved in less than 10% of their customer’s buying activities – yet 100% of these activities can and will affect how likely a customer is to make a purchase. Leaving so much of your customer’s buying process in the dark is the most frequent cause of “buying journeys to nowhere.” This is a critical situation where the salesperson has forecasted the sale, believing their champion is taking things from there; but in reality, the champion is getting hung up on resistance from within their organization, about to decide the seller’s offering is not worth the effort.

The truth is your customer is probably going through this journey for the very first time, having never purchased your offering before. This means your champion can easily be caught off guard when unexpected players come out of the woodwork with objections they don’t have the answers to. As sellers though, we have hopefully seen successful purchases in the past, making us acutely aware of the roadblocks and how and when they occur. Because of this, we are in the perfect position to be proactive – anticipating objections and either resolving, mitigating, or navigating prospects away from friction.

This is why strategic account management and mapping the buying journey go hand in hand. When we map the buying journey, we can see what will happen in the buying process ahead of time: who will get involved, what they care about, and what the concerns will be. And because these patterns are predictable across a specific market, this means we can manage these journeys and operationalize around how our customers buy.

A Key Moment from Our Session

One exercise that resonated with our audiences in New Orleans was asking members to put themselves in their customers shoes. Most of businesspeople have been involved in a corporate purchase at some point, maybe even been the champion themselves. So, think back – what happened the last time your organization bought something?

The shared experience among attendees was that there were many, many people to convince in order to progress the deal, and that the list only grew as more and more players began to stick their oar in. Upon asking when these additional players got involved, the response was always, “At the very end” – to which there were audible laughs of agreement.

Bringing Buying Journeys into the Light

When an organization is considering any kind of large-scale offering, most employees and departments assume the proposal is going to die like a majority of them do. So, it is only when the sale is starting to look possible that coworkers and stakeholders choose to object. Is this brand the right fit for our business? How will this affect existing systems? Why is this initiative more important than what I am doing? Suddenly, objections both big and small begin to pile up.

While late-stage opportunity crash and burn remains an all-too-common problem, it doesn’t have to if a seller has properly mapped the buying journey. These well-equipped salespeople can work with their champions to incorporate key players earlier in the journey, managing them more directly. This not only shortens the overall buying process but massively increases the chance of a successful purchase.

Want to put this into action? Next time you are speaking with a prospect, make a mental note of the steps they are taking and the challenges they will soon face based on your previous sales. Instead of focusing on the “selling” itself, help your customer navigate their buying journey; prepare for any upcoming friction with the proper tools, information, and knowledge to help bypass it as effectively as possible. And voila, the journey has already started to be revealed!

Filed Under: Announcement, Blog, Event

March 17, 2022 by Market-Partners Inc.

Market-Partners Inc. CEO, Martyn Lewis, at SAMA 2022

Market-Partners Inc. is proud to announce that we will once again be speaking at Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA)’s 2022 Annual Conference! This year, our CEO and founder, Martyn Lewis, and Deborah Honea will be presenting on Managing the Hidden Buying Journey.

For more details on our presentation, search for “Session 123”: https://bit.ly/3CQS6kA

Register for the conference, May 23-25 in New Orleans: https://bit.ly/3ijXrHL

Filed Under: Announcement, Event

December 23, 2021 by Market-Partners Inc.

30-30 | Forecasting: Misery to Mastery

On December 17th, Market-Partners Inc. CEO and Founder, Martyn Lewis, hosted a virtual micro-workshop sharing the results of some of our most valuable forecasting studies and surveys, giving you new insight into the circumstances creating forecasting discrepancies – and exactly what you can do to go from misery to mastery.

This free micro-workshop followed our 30-30 format. The first 30 minutes were an interactive presentation of the content summarized below. Afterwards, those wishing to explore the topic deeper were invited to stay an additional 30 minutes dedicated entirely to questions and discussion.

The first 30 minutes have been summarized below, covering the effects and causes of forecasting misery, four tips for forecasting mastery, and a dynamic method for using forecasting as sales coaching.

You can also watch the video replay here.

Summary

Sales forecasting is, and should be, a fundamental component of the sales function for any company. Regardless of their industry, organizations must know where their business is heading, how to match their supply to their demand, and where to invest and divest their resources to capitalize on opportunities.

However, despite forecasting’s critical importance, the state of play is abysmal. From a study we conducted of more than 1,200 sales organizations, we found that:

• 90% of sales opportunities do not close as forecasted

• Of opportunities marked as “75%,” less than one in six close as originally forecasted

• 55% of forecasted deals are ultimately lost

In the same survey, we also asked, “To what extent do you think you could improve your overall business performance as a result of superior forecasting practices?”

• No one who responded thought there would be no impact

• 26% responded there would possibly be an impact

• 28% responded there would probably be an impact

• And an overwhelming 46% reported there would definitely be an impact

As a result of these discrepancies, our research shows organizations invest more time, into more systems, using more complex approaches, for little to no gain. That means we are taking more energy and effort from sales leaders and front-line salespeople to achieve no meaningful results. These inefficiencies are most felt when it comes to sales coaching; the number one reason we hear from sales managers as to why they don’t have time to coach is that they are spending that time forecasting.

Worst of all is that sales leadership typically defends their current forecasting approaches, even when they don’t work.

The 7 Causes of Forecasting Misery

1. Forecasting to Achieve a Goal: a firm creates a goal of 10 million this quarter, therefore needs to forecast 10 million even if it’s impractical or impossible

2. Forecasting Sales Closing Instead of Customer Commitment: when your customer is going to be in a position to buy is not always going to line up with when you’d like to close

3. Misusing Forecast Probabilities: forecasting probabilities are usually meaningless, not reflecting any statistical reality in terms of whether or not a customer will buy

4. Either Win It or You Don’t: you can’t get 50% of a deal…

5. Forecasts as Pipeline Stages: your sales forecast and your sales pipeline are not the same thing

6. Forecast Reviews as Story Time: during a forecast review, stories and excuses on why numbers are missed, or deals did not close, often lack useful information

7. Lacking Individual Accountability: when sales managers override what the sales rep is telling them because they “need the deal to close this quarter,” we lose individual accountability

Forecasting Mastery

1. Separate the Pipeline from the Forecast

Contrary to popular belief, the sales pipeline and forecast are two very different things.

Every opportunity you are working on, regardless of likelihood that it will close, belongs in and is a part of your pipeline. The forecast is a subset of the pipeline; those opportunities you believe, with a degree of certainty, you will close sometime in the future.

As we discussed extensively in Myth and Magic of the Sales Funnel, you should never tie the stages of your pipeline to forecasting probabilities. When organized in that way, salespeople will game it out of necessity, being forced to hold some opportunities back while moving others forward based on the confidence they can close the deal, not where the customer actually is in a purchasing decision. This undermines the integrity of both the pipeline and the forecast.

This is why the stages of the sales pipeline must represent the stages of the Buying Journey. Not only is your customer’s buying process the only one that ends in revenue, but it also gives organizations objective criteria as to where opportunities are in their funnel.

2. Segment the Forecast into Sub-Pipelines

There is very rarely one pipeline making up all of an organization’s revenue. Business may come from run rate, small deals, upgrades, new deals, and many other product and service categories. Therefore, sales opportunities flowing through these different pipelines will need their own metrics, such as average deal size, close ratio, or cycle lengths.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these pipelines should also have their own forecasts. Some of these will be rather simple. For example, you might already know 90% of your customers renew, so your renewal forecast can be solved with a basic trend analysis. However, a statistic like this could give you important insight – if renewals alone cover 80% of your pipeline, then only 20% of that needs to be forecasted new deals.

3. Shift the Focus from When the Salesperson Will Close to When the Buyer Will Be in a Position to Commit

As an opportunity moves from interest to commitment, the salesperson is usually forecasting it, while from the buyer’s perspective, the real work has just begun. This can be seen below in this generic macro Buying Journey.

No alt text provided for this image

As the customer is attempting to overcome these hurdles within their organization, the salesperson is almost never in the picture. They mistakenly think their “champion” is “running with it,” letting hope and optimism slowly kill the deal.

This is exactly why we must map and manage the Customer Buying Journey. When we understand where the friction and hard work is during the buying process, we can better support our customers through their purchase and into successful adoption. The good news is that these once hidden roadblocks, when uncovered, are predictable across any given market, allowing firms to create ultra-effective approaches to dealing with these obstacles.

4. Shift the Attention from the End of the Sales Pipeline to the Start

The reason meeting sales quotas is a challenge for so many firms is actually very intuitive – there are not enough opportunities going into the sales pipeline, and those that are do not move fast enough. Like with any process, if you want more out, you have to put more in, and that fact should shift the focus from the end of the sales pipeline to the start.

The part that remains counter intuitive though is that the beginning of the pipeline should be high speed and high churn. While it flies in the face of a “sales funnel,” you do not actually want a disproportionate number of leads in the earlier stages of your pipeline. Rather, you should be qualifying leads quickly, seeing if and where they are in a Buying Journey to better focus your efforts. Because of this, the mid to end of your funnel will be lower speed, lower churn, as you focus on supporting and managing those customers through their buying process.

Power Forecasting

Power Forecasting is how we move forecasting from an administrative task to a fundamental performance coaching tool.

It all starts with The P.D.L.A. Cycle: Plan, Do, Learn, Adjust. This cycle is the heart of any kind of performance coaching, but it can be particularly beneficial when it comes to forecasting. When we forecast, we are already planning. The key is then looking back at the end of the period, learning from what actually happened, and then adjusting selling practices to set and achieve future forecasts.

Finally, instead of sales managers saying they do not have time to coach, because they are forecasting, they are coaching while they are forecasting.

Filed Under: Event, Resource

November 2, 2021 by Market-Partners Inc.

30-30: Reconnecting Sellers to Buyers

On October 28th, Market-Partners Inc. Principal and Founder, Martyn Lewis, hosted a virtual micro-workshop focused on developing more precise and effective market messaging, as well as enabling sales to connect with, and maintain more valued and trusted relationships, with buyers.

This free micro-workshop followed our 30-30 format. The first 30 minutes were an interactive presentation of the content summarized below. Afterwards, those wishing to explore the topic deeper were invited to stay an additional 30 minutes dedicated entirely to questions and discussion.

The first 30 minutes have been summarized below, covering the growing divide between sellers and buyers, how it happened, and what sales and marketing can do about it. 

You can also watch the video replay here.

Summary

Our goal as sales and marketing teams has always been to change the course of events, to get someone to buy when they otherwise may not have. Most of us would likely agree that the only way to influence these decisions is by providing creative, valuable, and meaningful solutions, and that such strategies should begin with an intimate knowledge and close relationship with your customer.

However, this knowledge and relationship has been disrupted, as sellers become increasingly disconnected from buyers. So, what exactly is happening and how do we fix it?

The Growing Gap

There have been two major drivers that have resulted in this divide. First, buyers believe they can get information more easily and conveniently from the Internet than your typical salesperson. This aversion to speaking with reps comes from the belief that salespeople do not add value to their immediate situation, choosing to only interact with them when they absolutely have to. 

Second, buying has become more complicated. There rarely is a single decision maker; there is a greater aversion to change; there are more alternatives available; and resources are often fully deployed. Additionally, decision making is more comprehensive to stakeholders, and more employees are involved in the process. With this comes differing perspectives, resulting in far more conflicting priorities and agendas.

All of these complexities have spawned Buying Journeys that look more like the one below versus what you may have seen before.

An example 5 Step Buying Journey including non-exhaustive buying activities.

Look back over the 19 buying activities surrounding the Buying Journey above – how many of these activities are sellers typically involved in?

If you’re familiar with our research, you know the correct answer is less than 10% – but the most important statistic is that 100% of these buying activities impact when and if a buyer will buy. Unfortunately, a majority of sales teams are still trying to convince themselves that this doesn’t matter. Many are holding out hope that with the right script, the right sales process, or by speaking to the right person, they can somehow shortcut this process and speed up the sales cycle.

The Formula for Success

The only way forward is to reconnect sellers to buyers by bringing value and relevancy across the Buying Journey. What they rarely need is additional product information. Your customers may be buying what you’re selling for the first time – but this is likely not your first time watching a buyer buy. As an expert in how to acquire your offering, you already know the challenges and issues that come up along the way, allowing you to help your buyers buy.

Leveraging that knowledge, here is a five-point strategy you can use for reconnecting sellers to buyers.

1. Decode the End-to-End Customer Buying Journey

Our research has shown time and time again that buyers within a particular market buy in remarkably similar way. The same roles get involved with the same agendas, motivations and concerns. They consider the same alternatives, face the same pressures and use the same decision-making approach.

These patterns should allow you to better understand the activities that will happen along the way. This goes beyond purchasing and what you might “see” yourself. Consider the entire process from your customer’s perspective, including aligning all the players, change management and value realization.

2. Optimize the Buying Journey

Once the Buying Journey has been mapped, look at where you can optimize it. Not create optimistic shortcuts, but rather what you can do to help the buyer buy, such as gain earlier stakeholder alignment or bringing barriers forward.

3. Determine How you Can Help

While you might not be able to aid in every buying activity, figure out where you can bring value and relevancy. Examples include implementation planning, strategies for handling push back and competing agendas, developing user training, providing change management approaches, and better integration into existing systems, processes, or workflows.

4. Adopt Precision Marketing

With the Buying Journey map in hand, your marketing team can then align messaging and content to a prospect’s individual role and step in their journey. A switch must be made from why the offering should be bought to how to acquire it, aiming content more at the friction along the journey than traditional value propositions.

5. Enable Sales

To be effective, sales teams need to know how to identify where the buyer is in the Buying Journey, what the buyer is likely doing, what they are concerned with, and how to be relevant and add value. Like marketing, sales should also have access to customizable content and tools that offer the key buying roles insight and value at the various stages of the Buying Journey.

Filed Under: Event

September 21, 2021 by Market-Partners Inc.

30-30: Myth and Magic of the Sales Funnel

On September 14th, Market-Partners Inc. CEO and Founder, Martyn Lewis, hosted a virtual micro-workshop covering the myths and faulty assumptions behind most sales funnel structures – and demonstrated the true magic of what this tool should do for your business!

This free micro-workshop followed our 30-30 format. The first 30 minutes were an interactive presentation of the content summarized below. Afterwards, those wishing to explore the topic deeper were invited to stay an additional 30 minutes dedicated entirely to questions and discussion.

The first 30 minutes have been summarized below, covering everything from the origin of the sales funnel, how it is being misused, the myths and truths of this tool, and how you can improve it for your business.

You can also watch the video replay here.

Summary

The concept of the sales funnel was first proposed in 1898 by advertising executive and Advertising Hall of Fame inductee, E St. Elmo Lewis. He outlined what has since been coined the AIDA model, an acronym for the four stages of the purchase process – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. It cannot be over emphasized that even in its original form, the sales funnel had nothing to do with sales process or forecasting, only the customer’s perspective and decision making.

Fast forward to today, and the sales funnel remains one of the most important and strategic business tools. It informs sales teams how to effectively manage a portfolio of opportunities. It provides the business radar allowing for coordination within an organization. It matches supply to demand, serving as a critical planning and diagnostic tool for understanding where revenue is coming from and what is changing in projections.

However, this is rarely how the tool is used in today’s businesses. In fact, investments into the sales funnel often yield meager returns. But if it is so critical for all the reasons above, why is that the case? For starters, the sales funnel is not only being misused as a forecasting model, but it is cumbersome, gamed, and sandbagged to suit a sales team’s needs. This results in a funnel that’s more time than it’s worth, and tactical at best.

So how can we fix these broken funnels? We believe it is best to start from the ground up.

First, let us begin by dispelling the common myths and misconceptions surrounding sales funnels, and from there, uncover the truths of how to make this tool work for your business.

The Seven Myths

1. The stages in the sales funnel are not forecast probabilities

2. The stages in the sales funnel are not your sales process

3. The stages in the sales funnel are not “won,” “shortlisted,” “no decision,” or any characteristics of an opportunity either

None of these three “stages” represent a meaningful or grounded progression of an opportunity for your customer. They are the status of the opportunity, not the step that it is at.

4. Stages in the sales funnel do not directly correlate to forecast probability

Forecast opportunity is an attribute of a sales opportunity. For example, there is a huge difference between probabilities when you are selling an add-on to an existing customer versus when you are trying to convince a customer to switch to you from their incumbent. For this reason, you should not try to force a forecast probability onto a stage. As a result, the sales funnel will simply become a forecast classification system.

5. It’s a myth that the sales funnel should be three times the quota

This is for three main reasons. First, different businesses require different funnel metrics. It could be more or less depending on your offering or market.

Second, funnel size is not a useful metric – what you actually want is flow through the pipeline.

And third, if you ask for 3x the quota, you will get 3x – but it will most likely not be real opportunities!

6. There is rarely one sales funnel within a business

If you have multiple offerings, you need more than one pipeline, as different products come with different cycle lengths, number of prospects, conversion ratios, and order sizes.

7. The “sales funnel” is not always funnel shaped

As stated before, you don’t want to manage funnel size or shape, as you want leads to be passing through the early stages very quickly.

The Seven Truths

1. The stages are the stages of the Customer Buying Journey

The Buying Journey gives firms both observable and objective behavior and exit criteria to categorize the meaningful progress of their opportunities.

2. Divide the business into sub funnels

Pipelines have different metrics based on the different areas of the business they represent. Therefore, the total business must be divided into its sub-components, or funnels, for there to be meaningful management.

3. The missing element is time

Time is the main factor to consider, because as stated in Myths 5 and 6, you want your Sales Funnel to flow. The movement of opportunities into and through the funnel has to be the primary concern.

4. There are four vital funnel metrics

Input: how much is being put into the top of the Funnel

Time: how much time does it take to go from step to step, from lead to order

Conversion: how many opportunities from each step do we convert to the next?

Order Size: what is the order size coming out at the end of the funnel?

5. You do need these opportunities during the course of a year – but not all at one time

So, what should your funnel look like at any one time? You can calculate this using the four vital metrics mentioned above, telling you how many opportunities need to be at each stage to close the desired number of orders.

6. Don’t manage the size of the total funnel, manage the input, time, conversion, and order size

7. Effective funnel management is at the heart of productive selling

Gives sales teams a direction of where to invest their time, the ability to discover best practices, and is at the heart of performance coaching

The sales funnel, or pipeline, should be the most valuable tool for sales professionals, sales managers, and anyone else dependent upon the development of revenue through sales opportunities. There is no such thing as “above the funnel;” every opportunity that is known to an organization must be tracked. It is only by managing the sales funnel that businesses know what is happening, what is about to happen, and what they need to make happen. 

Filed Under: Blog, Event, Resource

July 8, 2021 by Market-Partners Inc.

Martyn Lewis to Speak at UXPressia on July 20th

Whether you’re still mapping out your specific market’s Customer Buying Journey or already have a completed map in front of you, the question remains — how best to use it? It’s time to take the drive into developing and deploying business strategies based on this innovative perspective.

For decades, Market-Partners Inc. (MPI) has put forward the argument that the days of pulling a buyer through a sales process are long over. The only process that results in an acquisition is your customer’s buying process, which is why the role of sales and marketing must become managing customers through the stages of their end-to-end Buying Journey. Similarly, post-sales should focus on supporting the customer on their way towards full adoption.

In this presentation, MPI CEO and Founder, Martyn Lewis, will explain how this customer-centric perspective can be taken beyond CX and UX and translated into both the Market Engagement Strategy and Customer Buying Journey Navigator. These two tools are the cornerstones of the Outside-In™ approach, outlining optimal business activities at each step of the end-to-end Buying Journey to predictably guide customers from initial interest to satisfied use.

Topics will include:

‣ You’ve mapped the Customer Buying Journey… now what?

‣ Developing the Market Engagement Strategy

‣ Translating your strategy into a selling and CX approach

‣ Building the Customer Buying Journey Navigator

‣ Operationalizing around the Customer Buying Journey

‣ Aligning and enabling the entire organization to the Market Engagement Strategy

‣ Gaining clarity in roles and responsibilities across the organization

‣ Results of adopting the Outside-In™ Approach

The talk will be followed by the Q&A session where you can ask Martyn your questions.

Register for the event here

Filed Under: Announcement, Event

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