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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Develop stronger, more profitable relationships with your buyers in the digital era
Right now, how we buy and sell is evolving dramatically. People have fundamentally changed the way they do business. To put it simply: buyers no longer interact with sellers in the same way. To ensure a profitable future, sales leaders and teams need to embrace this transformation. In the face of globalisation, ecommerce, subscription services, and new digital tools for buyers and sellers alike, you need new strategies to generate successful sales and better bottom lines.
Deep Selling shares the cutting-edge sales model you need to create a buyer-obsessed, high-performance culture. Your team urgently needs to embrace the growing suite of digital and AI technologies. But new technologies alone won’t solve all your selling problems. To really maximise your success, you need to evolve your selling frameworks and behaviours. You need to use these new tools in smart ways, embedding them into your sales execution models.
In this book, you’ll discover how to:
- Audit the current sales techniques and cycles in your organisation
- Transform your sales execution models
- Achieve organisational buy-in through new performance measures and shared goals for success
- Use data to drive strategy, and revolutionise your selling with the latest digital and AI tools
- Build deeper buyer relationships that create more value and improve buyer outcomes
With Deep Selling, you and your team will learn how to meet buyers on today’s real-world terms — and engage them more fully and successfully than ever before.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Brent Adamson
About the authors
Graham Hawkins
Dr Mark Micallef
INTRODUCTION
The sales innovation paradox
The way forward: Deep Selling
How to achieve Deep‐Selling excellence
Who are we to be writing this book?
Before we get started
PART I: HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED
CHAPTER 1: THE DIGITALISATION ARMS RACE
A timeline of sales digitalisation
The dark side of digitalisation
The race to adapt
CHAPTER 2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS
So what is AI?
What AI will mean for sales
What's next for AI?
Will the robots take over?
CHAPTER 3: Welcome to the Age of the Buyer
The impact of digitalisation on the buying process
Buyer expectations are higher than ever before
The changing balance of power
The crisis of customer confidence
Walking the buyer tightrope
CHAPTER 4: THE FALLING EFFECTIVENESS OF SALES TEAMS
How the sales role has evolved
Business model evolution
The impact on sales teams
The new reality for salespeople
CHAPTER 5: THE AGE OF DEEP SELLING
The road from buyer centricity to Deep Selling
Why it's time to go Deeper
The four elements of Deep‐Selling excellence
Introducing the Deep‐Selling maturity model
From the Shallows into the Depths
PART II: THE ROADMAP TO DEEP‐SELLING EXCELLENCE
PHASE 1: SHALLOW TO EMERGING
CHAPTER 6: AUDIT YOUR CURRENT STATE
Houston, we have a problem
Articulate and quantify the problem
Deep‐Selling maturity assessment
Looking to the future
PHASE 2: EMERGING TO EXPLORING
CHAPTER 7: Develop Deep buyer understanding
How do buyers see you as a vendor?
Understanding your buyers
Defining your ideal and minimum buyer persona
Mapping the buyer journey
Buyers as the foundation of Deep‐Selling success
CHAPTER 8: ADAPT YOUR STRUCTURE TO YOUR BUYERS' NEEDS
Aligning resources with the new buyer journey
The sales enablement layer
Assessing your team's skill composition
Fighting the age of attrition
CHAPTER 9: EVOLVE YOUR SALES EXECUTION MODEL
Effective buyer outreach
The sales model continuum
Approaches to value‐based selling
Building your sales playbook
Sales execution for repeatable wins
PHASE 3: EXPLORING TO DEEP
CHAPTER 10: Create abuyer‐obsessed, high‐performance culture
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Redefining success for buyer centricity
Identifying new success metrics
Setting the benchmark for sales performance
Rewarding success with the right incentives
How vendor organisations are redefining success and rewards
CHAPTER 11: EMBED DEEP SELLING WITH A BALANCED SCORECARD
What gets measured gets managed
Introducing the balanced scorecard
Optimising the balanced scorecard for your organisation
How the balanced scorecard reimagines performance measurement
CONCLUSION: YOU CAN NO LONGER SURVIVE IN THE SHALLOWS
The opportunity of going Deep
You choose the limit
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: digital technology and the evolution of buying approaches...
Table 3.2: NAB vendor stack, December 2013...
Table 3.3: Qantas vendor stack, August 2013...
Chapter 4
Table 4.1: average outside salesperson salary...
Table 4.2: reasons for turnover among sales professionals...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1: comparing product‐centric and Deep‐Selling approaches...
Chapter 6
Table 6.1: common vendor organisation issues...
Table 6.2: people audit
Table 6.3: strategy audit
Table 6.4: metrics audit
Table 6.5: digital‐readiness audit
Table 6.6: tech‐stack maturity levels
Table 6.7: tech‐stack maturity audit
Chapter 7
Table 7.1: segmentation characteristics chart
Table 7.2: a buyer question template for buyer journey mapping
Chapter 9
Table 9.1: value‐based selling approaches...
Table 9.2: sales playbook tools
Chapter 10
Table 10.1: buyer acquisition metrics
Table 10.2: buyer health metrics
Table 10.3: KPIs template
Chapter 11
Table 11.1: potential balanced scorecard metrics
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1: moving from Shallow to Deep Selling
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1: the three stages of the buyer journey
Figure 3.2: the parallel nature of the buying journey and the sales cycle
Figure 3.3: vendor engagement in the new buyer journey
Figure 3.4: the modern B2B buyer journey...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1: the old, up‐front revenue model
Figure 4.2: the new, ongoing revenue model
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1: different types of sales cultures...
Figure 5.2: the four elements of Deep Selling...
Figure 5.3: the Deep‐Selling maturity model...
Figure 5.4: moving from Shallow to Deep Selling...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1: Deep‐Selling maturity scores...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1: vendor positioning matrix (adapted from the Kraljic matrix)
Figure 7.2: sources of buyer data for data‐led selling
Figure 7.3: the ideal buyer persona intersection
Figure 7.4: buyer question, goal and concern mapping
Figure 7.5: a completed buyer experience map
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1: responsibilities for each sales function
Figure 8.2: the traditional sales role
Figure 8.3: the modern sales role
Figure 8.4: the one‐team approach
Figure 8.5: skills matrix template
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1: traditional sales execution flow
Figure 9.2: the sales model continuum
Figure 9.3: the four buyer quadrants
Figure 9.4: from buyer experience map to sales playbook
Figure 9.5: sales playbook with activities, objectives, content and owners
Figure 9.6: completed sales playbook
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1: an example team benchmarking bell curve
Figure 10.2: improving the bell curve
Figure 10.3: Victor Vroom's motivational model
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1: a Deep‐Selling balanced scorecard
Guide
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Brent Adamson
About the authors
INTRODUCTION
Begin Reading
CONCLUSION: YOU CAN NO LONGER SURVIVE IN THE SHALLOWS
Notes
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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First published 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
© Sales Hub Pty Ltd, DM Micallef Group Pty Ltd 2025
All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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FOREWORD BY BRENT ADAMSON
The world of sales is constantly evolving. But it's evolving far too slowly.
Yes, we're using new tools, deploying new tactics and employing new technology, but the speed of change in B2B sales today is far too slow relative to the speed of change in everything else. Today's go‐to‐market models look completely different. Customer buying behavior has shifted dramatically. Technological and digital innovation threatens to cut out sales altogether. And generative AI is rapidly rewriting the rule book for … everything.
Yet, inside the eye of this swirling storm of dramatic change, it's not uncommon to hear sales executives call for a return to the ‘basic blocking and tackling of sales’ that drove their success as sellers 10–20 years earlier. Indeed, if there were a single, common thread across most sales leaders’ strategy for performance improvement, it would be an almost nostalgic call to ‘get back to basics’. To return to a set of skills that worked at a time and in a commercial environment that no longer exists.
To be fair, many sales leaders seeking a ‘return to the brass tacks of selling’ are referring less to a set of specific skills or tactics and more to a sense of discipline and process they believe to be lacking across their team. They often express a desire for their team to work with ‘a greater sense of urgency,’ ‘greater purpose’, and ‘a higher degree of precision’ without fully articulating exactly what that might mean in terms of specific or concrete behaviors. Instead, they'll speak in terms of outcomes, rather than inputs: ‘We need to have better customer conversations’; ‘We need to help our customers see our value’; ‘We need to create Raving Fans’. After all, those are the results they're looking to (re)capture with far greater consistency.
But if we step back for a moment, take our selling hat off, and look at B2B commerce through the lens of B2B buying, we begin to appreciate just how insufficient an individual seller strategy may be, no matter how disciplined, to drive sales success going forward.
Today's B2B buying is a world of complex solutions purchased by large, diverse buying groups, engaging across an increasingly broad range of digital and human‐led channels, supported by a vast array of technology, data and AI. It is informed by an unfathomably deep library of online content, information and research, all supported by a diverse cast of third‐party consultants, advisory services and independent advocates. Relying on individual sellers to effectively navigate this kind of complex, team‐based buying environment through a simple upgrade to individual skills is like sharpening a knife to win a gun fight. It's not necessarily a bad idea, but it's likely to prove desperately insufficient nonetheless.
Today's world of B2B buying is emphatically a team‐sport activity, spanning sometimes well over 10 different customer stakeholders each representing different functions, geographies, business units, organisational priorities and even performance metrics. To ask an individual seller to corral that kind of complexity on their own, no matter how skilled, is not only unfair, but far more importantly, unwise.
But you don't need to take my word for it. In Deep Selling Graham Hawkins and Mark Micallef break down, step by step, the range of challenges facing today's sales professionals — and sales organisations — supported by an extensive survey of recent B2B sales research and the synthesis of mountains of data. And the conclusion is pretty clear: The path forward for sales success is less an individual one than an organisational one. Effective selling is Deep Selling. And Deep Selling is a team sport.
What exactly is ‘Deep Selling?’ I'll let Graham and Mark unpack the concept in detail but, at a high level, Deep Selling represents a broad organisational strategy for winning, retaining and expanding customers through the entire customer lifecycle. It is not only an acknowledgement of the radically different commercial environment in which sales operates today, but both a tactical and strategic framework for adapting to that new reality.
At the heart of Deep Selling lies a deliberate, systemic shift to customer‐centric selling, aligning the entire commercial organisation — sales, marketing, customer success, support, even partners — to engage customers on their terms, through their preferred channels, around their specific challenges.
In many ways, Deep Selling serves as the one‐stop textbook for any senior executive looking to re‐orient their entire organisation around the customer. Irrespective of role, function or level, Deep Selling provides tactical frameworks for assessing current performance, identifying the gaps in greatest need of upgrade, and prioritising practical next steps for rewiring the entire commercial enterprise.
Deep Selling isn't about individual upgrade, but organizational improvement. Effectively, it's a roadmap for building the go‐to‐market engine for today and tomorrow.
How do we win in a very different world of B2B buying? By building a completely new engine for B2B selling. Deep Selling is that engine.
Happy reading,
Brent Adamson
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Graham Hawkins
Graham Hawkins is a globally recognised sales leader and international keynote speaker, having been voted one of the top 25 global sales leaders by CrunchBase and top 50 global sales experts and influencers by Thompson Reuters, along with receiving the 2018 LinkedIn Top Voice award.
He holds an MBA (Distinction) from RMIT University where he is an adjunct lecturer and is the author of two bestselling books: The future of the sales profession and Sales transformation. The founder and CEO of SalesTribe and Transform Sales International and founding member of The Sales Enablement Society, he has dedicated his career to figuring out what works in sales and how business‐to‐business (B2B) sales professionals and vendor organisations can adapt to the modern, buyer‐led environment.
His most recent venture is co‐founding Qoos.ai, an AI‐Guided Selling platform for sales professionals, with Brent Adamson, co‐author of bestselling books The challenger sale and The challenger customer.
Dr Mark Micallef
Dr Mark Micallef is a digital transformation expert with extensive experience in designing, building and deploying multi‐year transformation programs in various industries. He holds a PhD in digital transformation and innovation management from RMIT University, where he is also an adjunct lecturer in strategic and network marketing.
Mark is a respected academic, having authored several publications in leading international journals including the Journal of personal selling & sales management and Industrial marketing management. His work has won several prestigious awards including Industrial Marketing Management’s Best thesis in B2B marketing for 2024.
He is also an experienced sales director, sales manager and salesperson, with more than 20 years of practical experience and a further eight years’ experience consulting in sales, transformation, leadership and buyer success.
INTRODUCTION
Today's sales leaders find themselves in an almost impossible situation, caught in a vortex of competing pressures. They must meet the rising expectations of senior management and the board, adapt to the changing reality of the sales and buying landscapes, and find a way to boost falling sales team performance and reduce attrition rates. At the same time, new technologies promise to solve these challenges, and yet when vendor organisations attempt to innovate, these projects fail more often than they succeed.
How did we get here?
Simply, the rise of globalisation, digitalisation and servitisation have irrevocably transformed the sales and buying landscape.
From a buyer perspective, these trends mean buyers are more informed, have more choice and are therefore more powerful than ever before. However, this power has led to greater responsibility, and between 40 and 60 per cent of purchasing decisions now end in a ‘no decision’ outcome due to buyer fear of messing up.1 Increased risk averseness means that buyers are less likely to take chances on unproven vendors than in the past, and they are rationalising the vendors they do have.
Meanwhile, globalisation and market maturity have led to higher competition across every industry, with lower barriers to entry than ever before. Previously niche products are becoming increasingly commoditised, forcing vendors to compete on price and squeezing vendor margins and profits. The combination of risk‐averse buyers, higher competition and increased commoditisation often means the only way for vendor organisations to expand is within their existing buyer base.
Yet, despite these changes taking place, many vendor organisations continue to operate the same way they always have. Among many sales teams, and even at the executive level, there is a mistaken belief that sales is the way it's always been: just follow the script, follow the formula. One‐hundred calls equals 30 interested parties. Thirty interested parties equals 10 meetings. Ten meetings equals three sales. Keep working the numbers and always be closing. This was what worked when your executives were in the field, and if it worked for them, why shouldn't it work for today's sales professionals?
While this might be the executive point of view, any switched‐on sales leader knows that the old‐world, push‐selling, product‐centric approach is no longer working. B2B sales cycles are longer than ever before, typically ranging from six to twelve months for complex, high‐value solutions. Meanwhile, the time required to bring a new hire to full productivity is longer than ever, with 65.2 per cent of organisations saying it takes at least seven months to bring new hires up to speed, and 28.8 per cent of organisations saying it takes at least one year.2 Average tenure among salespeople has also dropped to just 1.4 years (or 16.8 months), with the median annual turnover among sales professionals sitting at 50 per cent in 2022!3
If you do the maths, this means the average salesperson only has time to complete one to two sales cycles before moving on to their next role, and many will not successfully close those sales, with only 22 per cent of salespeople hitting their quota in the fourth quarter of 2022.4
In tandem, we have experienced an explosion of digital technologies over the past 15 years, with the latest trend being the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In the face of falling profits and opportunities, many vendor organisations are eager to jump on the technology bandwagon. Whether the push comes from leaders who are keen to remain on the bleeding edge, or tech‐savvy junior employees who want to make an impact, each new tool is treated as a magic pill that might solve their struggles.
This leaves sales leaders stuck like flies in a metaphorical web.
They are caught between the pressure to drive strategic change while managing the day‐to‐day operations of their sales team. On one hand, they are charged with innovating, yet they don't know where to start. Some might even lack clarity around what exactly should change. They know they are getting left behind, but don't know how to catch up. At the same time, when they are buried in day‐to‐day pressures it is impossible for them to get a broader perspective. In some cases, they might intentionally blinker themselves to reduce the noise so they can focus on just getting the job done.
These leaders are also caught between innovation and risk reduction. In a typical vendor organisation, where costs are climbing and revenue is falling, sales leaders likely have the CEO on one shoulder and the CFO on the other, with the CEO pushing for innovation and transformation, while the CFO wants to reduce risk and focus on reliable revenue drivers (like quotas and commissions).
Ultimately, sales leaders are facing challenges from all directions, and attempting to address any of them only results in an even more tangled web.
The sales innovation paradox
We know things can't continue as they are. Yet, in cases where sales leaders attempt to innovate, or even attempt to implement a change forced on them by another part of the organisation, this rarely ends well.
Many changes being implemented by vendor organisations are those driven by technology. These changes might start with the vague direction of ‘let's leverage AI’ (or any other trending tool), and leaders quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the hundreds of tools available in any category without the knowledge and resources to choose appropriately. Or they might start with a specific tool (or selection of tools) in mind, yet even in this case many vendor organisations lack an understanding of how to use these technologies to create value.
These changes rarely deliver the promised results. The first outcome is where the implementation doesn't get off the ground because the process of managing the change becomes too complex and too costly. The second outcome is that the new technology is implemented, but it only makes existing processes and structures more difficult to manage. This leads to end users finding workarounds, and often doing manual work that takes more time than the way they were managing things before.
These outcomes leave leaders biased against new ideas and technology because they believe these implementations will fail. Every time there is a failure, vendor organisations become even more risk averse and less willing to take chances on wide‐scale technology transformations.
Even worse for sales leaders is that if these implementations fail, it is seen as the sales leader's responsibility (even if the original drive for the change came from outside the team).
What is going wrong?
First, the leadership at many vendor organisations doesn't see the need to change, which means there is an immediate barrier to doing anything differently. This is particularly common in organisations where the executive team and board are made up of former field sales professionals who have a mindset of knuckling down and getting on with it. They don't recognise that the old ways of working are no longer effective in the modern sales and buying environment.
In cases where organisations do see a need to change, they see technology as being the answer — the magic pill we mentioned earlier. This puts organisations in a position of doubling down on what doesn't work. Generally, new tools don't change the way an organisation is doing things — they allow the organisation to do those things more efficiently. If an organisation is focusing on the wrong things (or things that don't work in today's sales and buying landscape), new technology will simply accelerate poor behaviour.
Howard Dover coined the term ‘the sales innovation paradox’ to describe this. Organisations have high expectations for growth and they invest in training, technology and enablement, but they experience failing sales performance as a result. In short, they don't see the expected return after implementation.
As software engineer Grady Booch said, ‘A fool with a tool is still a fool’.
It is clear that something needs to change, but vendor organisations keep focusing on the wrong things.
The way forward: Deep Selling
The world has changed, and it is time for vendor organisations to change with it. Vendor organisations must shift from the old‐world, product‐centric approach of push selling to the new‐world, buyer‐centric, data‐driven approach of Deep Selling.
The old‐world approach to sales was Shallow: vendor salespeople would play the numbers game, going a mile wide and an inch deep, knowing that the more prospects they pitched, the more deals they would eventually close. In the past, this worked: vendor organisations had proprietary solutions, buyers had limited access to solutions and information, and buyers treated salespeople as trusted advisers who could help them solve business problems.
Today, with changing buyer dynamics, new technology and more competitive markets, everyone is fishing in the Shallows. To borrow the term ‘blue ocean’ from Renée Mauborgne and W Chan Kim's book Blue ocean strategy, going Deep is your blue ocean. The Deep water is where the big fish are. Yes, it is harder to get to, but there's less competition there.
What do we mean by Deep Selling?
Going Deep is all about the quality of relationships over quantity. Say goodbye to spray and pray and hello to competitive differentiation.
Going Deep necessitates fewer buyer engagements. This is more sustainable over the long term and is critical for today's business models, which rely on net retention.
Going Deep requires vendors to strategically use technology to uncover data and derive actionable insights about their buyers, which can then be leveraged to deliver the expected buyer experience. You can't meet expectations if you don't go Deep.
Going Deep means creating value for buyers and improving buyer outcomes over internal vendor outcomes, like revenue and profit.
Going Deep on the upfront research (pre‐approach and approach) allows the vendor salesperson to quickly hit the key buyer requirement ‘show me you know me’.
Going Deep is about highlighting how products can meet individual buyer needs.
While Shallow sales approaches tend to promote the use of technology to accelerate behaviours that annoy, interrupt or even badger potential buyers, Deep Selling approaches encourage vendor organisations to spend more time understanding the buyer before engaging with them. This meets the needs and preferences of the modern buyer, including building trust and developing a truly consultative relationship. At the same time, going Deep has a real impact on an organisation's financial metrics and internal engagement.
Deep Selling is a buyer‐centric approach for vendor organisations, and being buyer centric has a range of benefits. Buyer‐centric organisations are 25 per cent more profitable and have 5.1 times higher revenue growth than their product‐centric counterparts.5,6 These organisations have 25 per cent higher loyalty and, when it comes to employee satisfaction and retention, 83 per cent of those who work for companies that prioritise buyer satisfaction are at least pretty sure that they'll still be there in two years.7,8
Ultimately, going Deep means more opportunity with less competition and more value. And this approach addresses many of the issues facing today's sales leaders.
How to achieve Deep‐Selling excellence
Every sales leader we've spoken to in every industry, bar none, knows there needs to be a shift in thinking. We call it the mindset, skill set and toolset.
Mindset includes elements like vision, values and culture — it's who you are and what you believe. Skill set spans structure, processes and incentives — how you get things done. And toolset comprises the tools that will support these changes, namely the technology and systems you implement. To achieve Deep‐Selling excellence, there must be a shift in your organisation's mindset, skill set and toolset towards Deep Selling.
While every sales leader we've spoken to agrees with this in principle, most of them don't know where to start. This book is your starting point.
In this book, we will show you how to evolve your organisation and sales team for the buyer‐led era.
In part 1, you will discover the current trends facing the sales and buying landscape, and why these trends mean it is essential for vendor organisations to change if they want to survive. These include:
the role digitalisation has played in the evolution of sales and buying models
how buyers have changed, and why they expect more from their vendors than ever before
why traditional, field sales teams are struggling, and the real cost this is having on sales teams and vendor organisations
why Deep Selling is the way forward.
We will then share the four elements of Deep Selling as well as the Deep‐Selling maturity model, giving you the ability to assess where your organisation currently sits on the maturity model and to develop a clear roadmap for moving from Shallow to Deep. Figure 1 summarises the four elements.
Figure 1: moving from Shallow to Deep Selling
In part 2, this roadmap is broken down into three phases (Shallow to Emerging; Emerging to Exploring; and Exploring to Deep) and encompasses the following activities:
Audit your organisation's current state:
After performing a current‐state analysis, you will perform a guided audit on your organisation's level of buyer centricity and digital readiness as well as conducting an audit of your current sales tech stack. These results will combine to indicate your organisation's level on the Deep‐Selling maturity model.
Develop Deep buyer understanding:
You will understand your current buyers, leverage AI to create ideal and minimum buyer personas and map out the ideal buyer journey.
Adapt your structure to your buyers’ needs:
With the ideal buyer journey mapped out, you will reorganise teams into functional buckets that align with this buyer journey.
Evolve your sales execution model:
We will explore the main sales execution models for different buyer and product types, diving into a deeper, consultative approach. You will also develop a one‐page sales playbook that can be shared throughout the organisation.
Create a buyer‐obsessed, high‐performance culture:
You will redefine what success means to your organisation and measure and reward performance based on those metrics. Within the sales team, you will assess current team composition and performance to set the benchmark for ongoing improvement.
Embed Deep Selling with a balanced scorecard:
You will develop a balanced scorecard to monitor your organisation's progress into the future and to ensure you stay on track.
Importantly, this should not be seen as a linear process — one where you complete the three phases and you are done. Instead, we consider the journey to becoming a Deep‐Selling organisation as one that will be ongoing, with your organisation and your team continuing to evolve alongside your buyers and available technologies.
Once you complete the phases, you can revisit the audit exercises in chapter 6 to determine your organisation's new level of Deep‐Selling maturity, at which point you can revisit the roadmap to go even deeper.
Who are we to be writing this book?
As you will have read in the section ‘About the authors’ at the beginning of the book, we (Mark Micallef and Graham Hawkins) are both B2B sales professionals with a combined 55 years of experience in the profession.
Between the two of us, we have worked with hundreds of vendor organisations and thousands of sales professionals. We have seen what works and what doesn't when it comes to sales success in the modern, buyer‐led era, and how to effectively leverage digital technology to drive that success.
The Deep‐Selling roadmap shares what we have learned and how you can redesign your sales organisation.
After reading this book, you will understand what isn't working in your organisation and what can be done about it. You will have the proof points you need to effectively communicate your organisation's current state both upstream and downstream, and you will have a guide for achieving Deep‐Selling excellence.
When you face resistance and objections to the change (because every change encounters resistance), you will have a defendable position. This book is based on extensive study of what works, drawn from our personal experience, organisations we've consulted with, hundreds of interviews with sales professionals and vendor organisations, and two decades of academic literature on sales. This will give you more effective levers to pull when making your case across the organisation.
You will also have more awareness about your organisation's competitive advantage and gain the ability to create further competitive advantage through Deep Selling. You will have a deeper understanding of what your buyers expect, which takes out the guesswork, empowering you and your team to deliver to those expectations. This will propel you and your team towards better results, meaning that not only are your executive team and board satisfied, but the people on the ground are happy as well.
Simply, until now, you have been a passenger in a car that has been driven by the board, executives, the market and your buyers. After reading this book, you will be the one in the driver's seat.
Before we get started
This book is designed as a complete ‘how‐to’ to guide for managers who want to transform their sales organisation and capture greater value from the latest digital technologies and tools.
For more information, and access to the tools, processes and frameworks contained in this book, visit www.deepselling.com, or scan the QR code.
PART IHOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED
CHAPTER 1THE DIGITALISATION ARMS RACE
Over the past three decades, there has been an explosion of digital connectivity. Of the eight billion people on the planet, 5.35 billion use the internet and there are more than 15 billion connected devices globally.9,10 Sixty‐nine per cent, or 5.6 billion, subscribe to a mobile service, and this is expected to hit 74 per cent by 2030.11 Active social media identities are also approaching the five billion mark.12
The adoption of digital technologies, including personal computers, mobile phones, the internet, social media, AI and digital platforms, has radically changed and evolved the requirements for effective selling and buying. Consider social selling — a common approach used by salespeople to find and interact with potential buyers — which wouldn't be possible without social media technology.
In a similar vein, vendors and suppliers are being forced to adapt their approaches to match each other. In this digitalisation arms race, the use of new technologies on one side necessitates adaptations on the other. For instance, as vendors use Google and other search engines to find solutions, suppliers must develop websites, advertise their products online, create content and develop e‐commerce solutions so they are able to be found in the new environment.13
These changes come with a range of benefits such as automating and speeding up tasks, increasing communication efficiency, and giving both buyers and sellers greater access to information and the ability to disseminate that information.14,15 However, challenges have also arisen from the adoption of these technologies.
In traditionally relationship‐based professions like sales, one of the clearest implications is the reduction of face‐to‐face interaction. Seventy‐five per cent of B2B buyers use social media to research vendors, with 50 per cent naming LinkedIn as a trusted source.16 Digital technologies are able to replace human salespeople for up to 47 per cent of the sales process, with multiple predictions over the years reporting that the need for salespeople will continue to decline.17 In fact, as of 2019, buyers already completed 87 per cent of their purchasing journey before contacting a vendor salesperson.18
And this is the way modern buyers prefer to engage — nearly 75 per cent of B2B buyers would prefer to buy from a website than a human salesperson, with 93 per cent preferring to buy online once they have decided what to purchase.19 When sellers and buyers do interact, it is often through digital channels.
This is why increasing numbers of sales and buying organisations are investing in new technologies to support, supplement and replace human workforces, with digital technology being used in buying to autonomously process orders and replenish inventory, or in selling for content creation and identifying prospects.20,21,22
Activities that were previously conducted exclusively by humans are now completed more efficiently and effectively through digital technology, demonstrating an unmistakable trend in selling and buying away from human‐to‐human interaction and towards digitalisation and automation. This has reduced the importance of humans in selling and buying approaches and has significant implications for the future.
A timeline of sales digitalisation
In Graham's 2017 book, The future of the sales profession, he gave an overview of the evolution of modern sales from the birth of James H Patterson's National Cash Register Company (NCR) in 1884 up to the mid 2010s.23 In this discussion, we will focus on the role technology has played in driving the evolution of buying and selling approaches.
This starts with the pre–digital technology era: before 1980.
The pre–digital technology era: before 1980
The pre–digital technology era was one where a salesperson would try to influence a buyer to purchase during sales encounters. The sales and buying process was typically completed in a single meeting and between an individual buyer and seller.24 During these encounters, the salesperson would follow a formalised sales process that focused on explaining the proposition of their offering, demonstrating the offering and then persuading the buyer to buy.25
We can see this approach dating all the way back to Patterson and the NCR, where he developed a four‐step sales process following an audit of the company's most successful salesmen:26
Approach:
In the approach, the salesman did not mention the cash register. Instead, he explained that he wanted to help the businessman find ways to increase his profit.
Proposition:
The proposition was when the salesman first described the register, explaining how it would prevent theft and give an accurate account of the day's receipts.
Demonstration:
In this stage, the salesman would demonstrate the machine at the local NCR office, or at a nearby hotel where he had set up a display.
Close:
Salesmen were not to ask for an order, but to take for granted that the buyer would buy by asking questions like, ‘What colour should I make it?’ or ‘How soon do you want delivery?’ They were then instructed to fill out their order form with the buyer's details and hand it to him to sign.
Over the next century, there was an explosion of sales methodologies. In the 1930s, this included mood selling, brand‐based selling, psychological selling and barrier selling, alongside the 1936 release of Dale Carnegie's seminal book How to win friends and influence people.
The trend of sales methodologies continued through the next few decades, with SELL, ADAPT, ARC and AIDA in the 1940s and 1950s, the Xerox Corporation's ‘needs satisfaction selling’ system in the 1960s and SPIN selling in the 1980s.
Throughout this era, buying approaches were situational and recognised that different buying situations carried different levels of risk.27 Buyers focused on each transaction independently and would invest different levels of effort based on the risk inherent in each buying situation. For example, when purchasing a solution for the first time, buyers would spend a significant amount of time and effort at each stage of the buying process, while they would put less time and effort into repeat purchases due to the lower level of risk.28,29
Not surprisingly, the persuasive approaches of vendor salespeople often clashed with the situational, risk‐avoiding approaches of buyers, which resulted in an adversarial relationship between buyers and sellers.30 Unfortunately, this relationship dynamic persists in many buying and selling relationships today, particularly when vendor organisations and their sales teams cling to outdated approaches.
The information technology era: 1980–1995
After 1980, digital technology started to play a more significant role in selling and buying practice as personal computers and other information technologies were heavily adopted by both selling and buying organisations.
The introduction of information technologies enabled buyers to access more information and to consider how their decisions impacted the organisation's performance.31 This meant that buyers began to take a more strategic and holistic approach to buying, rather than making purchases in isolation.32,33 Buyers began to recognise that involving vendors in buying decisions improved buying outcomes and they subsequently put more effort into managing their vendor relationships.34,35
Meanwhile, vendors began to identify that the one‐size‐fits‐all sales approaches of the previous era were becoming less effective because buyers had different processes, buying rationality and relationship approaches, depending on their personal characteristics or roles.
In response, vendor salespeople began to practise adaptive selling behaviours and made efforts to understand and respond to each buyer differently.36 This had the effect of salespeople focusing on problem‐solving over persuasion and required them to invest in developing long‐term and mutually beneficial relationships with buyers. This period saw the selling centre become more strategic as vendor organisations moved away from product‐based strategies and instead focused on customer relationship management (CRM) strategies that allocated sales resources to buyers based on their ability to achieve an organisation's strategic goals.37
Selling and buying transitioned from transactional processes with adversarial buyer‐seller relationships to a more cooperative process whereby sales and buying centres worked together to solve problems for mutual benefit. Sales approaches focused on concepts like value creation, relationship management, commitment‐trust and adaptive selling, and vendor organisations spoke to strategic alignment and competitive advantage to appeal to buying rationality.38,39
Information technologies enhanced these capabilities by providing the means for buyers and sellers to manage their relationships more strategically and effectively. For example, personal computers, which gained widespread uptake during this era, made information more accessible and provided new ways to store, analyse and use data, which had previously been decentralised across sales and buying centres.40,41 Likewise, mobile phones provided salespeople with a new level of freedom and mobility, enabling them to visit more customers while staying connected when they were on the road.
The internet era: 1995–2010
The period between 1995 and 2010 saw a significant increase in the use of digital technologies to support and transform selling and buying approaches.
Increased competition saw buyers start sourcing solutions and services rather than products — especially for complex buying tasks — to relieve growing commoditisation pressures.42 The buying of services and solutions required more collaborative buying approaches and — unlike previous buying approaches, which could be completed independently — solutions buying required buyers to establish and define needs with vendor organisations, as these needs were not always known or clearly defined.43 This period therefore saw the evolution of more collaborative purchasing approaches.
The product‐to‐solutions transition also required corresponding changes to sales approaches, as the approaches of previous eras had become less effective.44
