Why the B2B Sales Model is Broken

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I spent the last week in Portland at Djangocon, which is a conference for people who are making really cool web apps with a toolkit called Django wizards…

All kidding aside, I haven’t been surrounded by as many really, really smart people since Nuclear Power School in the US Navy. One of the presenters, Brad Fitzpatrick, casually mentioned his disdain for dealing with the typical sales process for hosting, software or whatever.

It got me thinking a lot about how wrong most of the assumptions we make in B2B sales are. Here’s the truth:

B2B Sales is Completely Broken.

People are too busy to put up with your internal inefficiencies crap. Buyers don’t care if they are talking to the right rep for their region, and really get pissed off when they have to wait for their regional rep to call them back. They have problems they want solved. They want to get things done. They are creating the future… and have to wait for Shannon who handles the southeast region to call them back next week… which means you and your super-awesome stuff get left out of the future. Remember the idea of rapport? Well rapport usually doesn’t start with severely annoying the future customer.

Your sales process begs prospects to lie to you and totally blows up  any chance of trust right from the get go. We teach salespeople to qualify prospects by asking questions. Salespeople have in turn taught prospects that the only way to get an answer is to lie to the salesperson.  Prospects have learned that “are you the decision maker?” “how many seats?” or “when do you need to have it by?” only have one answer if you want to continue the conversation. Can you really ever trust your prospects if you know they are lying to you? Do you think they trust you if they know the only way to orbit your hairball of a sales process is lying?

Your pricing makes you look like the devil incarnate.  People really despise contrived multi-dimensional pricing models that have nothing to do with reality. Try as you will to hide it,  the minute you have to find out a company’s revenue, number of seats and combine that with number of servers or size of market to calculate pricing, your prospects know what they are dealing with. Back to that rapport and trust thing… do you really think you have any at all at this point, or are you simply a means to an end?

So what do you do to fix it?

Simple: stop selling so damn hard and start helping people get things done. Make it easy for people to trust you and buy from you.