Podcast
The Common Sense Approach to Modern B2B Buying and Selling
Welcome to the show Rick McCutcheon
On this week’s episode of The Common Sense Professional, we are joined by Rick McCutcheon. Rick will share his Common Sense insights to B2B buying and selling today.
Rick is an eight-time recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award. He has been involved in the technology industry for more than 25 years as a company founder, board member, educator and consultant. As a professional speaker and workshop leader, Rick has travelled globally to deliver practical yet innovative messages on modern selling strategies to thousands of Microsoft business professionals. Rick is also the creator and host of the PartnerTalks for LinkedIn video series.
The B2B Buying and Selling Cycle
The modern selling process is all about content-driven sales, making the entire customer journey through the buying cycle a much longer one. Content-driven sales centres around identifying potential buyers and ensuring that they are seeing the content you are putting out there.
“Don’t look for a buyer that fits the right category you are looking for. You need to find a buyer that is in the buying cycle.”
If you are selling CRM, for example, and you are the person who is going to kickstart someone into the buying cycle, it could still take anywhere between 8-24 months before they are really ready to buy. When it comes to sales, you need to be looking out for the people who are already engaging in content. Those who are coming to CRM webinars, reading blog posts, and showing up at user-group meetings. These are the people who are well into the buying cycle. Now, it’s time to sell.
Sales and Marketing Alignment in B2B Buying and Selling
The age-old tensions between the sales and marketing team continue to present themselves in a content-driven sales approach. For Rick, sales and marketing alignment is all about the marketing team knowing where your buyers are in their journey, and when it’s time for the sales team to step in and be able to help.
“We want our marketing people to be able to really get in front of those people who are in the buying process and know where are they, what are they reading, what content are they absorbing and get them over to our sales side. But, we really need our sales team to have intelligent and real conversations with people and help them.”
How to Get More Out of B2B Buying and Selling Software
Too often we hear reports of terrible numbers of failed automation implementations. How do we avoid these pitfalls and get the most out of our sales and marketing software?
Rick tells us that CRM fails because the data fails; it’s not good, it can’t be trusted, and we aren’t using it properly. Overall, the data doesn’t add any value to anyone in the organization
“At the end of the day, the ROI on CRM is one thing: the condition of your data. If I have good data I can forecast, I can see what happened, I can market, I can sell, I can bring on new dealers, I can do all kinds of things. If I don’t have good data, I can come up with all of these processes but I don’t know how to execute because I don’t have this information.”
Fast Five Favourites
At The Common Sense Professional, we like to ask our guests a rapid-fire round of questions to get to know their favourite things in personal and business development, right now.
- Favourite tool to grow your business: LinkedIn
- Favourite book right now: What It Means To Be A Detroit Redwing
- Favourite podcast: Talking Sopranos
- Favourite sales strategy: SPIN Selling
- How do you measure success in your business: The reception of PartnerTalks by his audience and his ability to create content for his business based on the episodes.