Brewing the champagne of ICPs

INDUSTRY NEWS

Brewing the champagne of ICPs

Belgium just destroyed 2,352 cans of Miller High Life. It’s a classic “Know thy customer” (and European regulations) blunder. A lot of headache and spilled beer can be avoided by taking the time to properly research your ideal customer. And when sales pipelines get tight, it can be too easy to make compromises and critical mistakes that impact sales performance. According to a recent post from Greg Hessong, a Sr. Director in Gartner’s Sales Advisory practice, there are “3 Common Mistakes in Building an Ideal Customer Profile.” The effort required to create your ICP strategy is worth celebrating – with or without the Champagne of Beers.

Persona non grata

Poor personas. According to a 2021 Forrester study, personas were the least requested asset by sales and partner teams. One of the big reasons that sales enablement materials are not being leveraged comes down to ease of access. That’s why sales tech vendors are so excited about using AI to respond to natural language queries or even better – analyze the context and serve up relevant information in real-time. But are we there yet? Barry Vasudevan, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, explains why activating sales personas and messaging with AI holds great promise, and also significant risks. Buckle up, folks, the AI-powered sales journey is going to start out a bit bumpy.

ChatGPT dishes all things sales

Interviews with sales leaders often uncover gems about what they eat for breakfast or their first job. LinkedIn’s latest “How I Sell” interview has none of that. According to this particular celebrity interviewee, that’s because, “as an AI language model, I don’t have emotions.” You heard that right, LinkedIn invited/prompted ChatGPT to share its B2B sales best practices. Normally, you only get one person’s perspective, but with ChatGPT, you are getting an amalgamation of all the best B2B sales advice found on the internet. ChatGPT doesn’t get too deep, but there are some AI-generated nuggets in there. However, keep in mind that this is the same generative AI technology that created the notorious Pepperoni Hug Spot pizza commercial all by itself.

IN THE GROOVE

Productivity booster

If there’s one common trait across all salespeople, it’s that they love selling. That also means that they hate doing anything that keeps them from selling – even if they’re important things like logging calls and emails, scheduling meetings, and keeping Salesforce current for accurate reporting and forecasting. That’s one of the reasons that reps love using Groove. By eliminating time-consuming administrative tasks, Groove is giving a Fortune 50 Bank a 20% productivity boost. One user at this preeminent financial services institution summed it up this way: “Groove gave us our Fridays back!

LEARN SOMETHING NEW

Challenging sales

OK, we see the confusion. This article is less about the Lone Wolf or the Challenger, and more about the top sales enablement and leadership challenges of 2023. RAIN Group recently followed up on a 2019 industry survey to find out how the challenges facing sales leaders have changed in the past three years. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, it will come as no surprise to learn that longer sales cycles and “no decision” losses are on the rise. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This new survey explores many facets of the current environment, including the difference in how sellers and sales leaders view these challenges. We challenge you to read it. (Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson would be proud!)

Sales inflation

Do you remember when a scoop of ice cream cost a nickel? We don’t, but presumably, it did at one point. But, we do recall when it was a lot easier to book a meeting or advance an opportunity. Sadly, inflation has broken through the bonds of dairy and non-dairy consumer goods to impact our world of B2B sales. Sales inflation is affecting everything from the number of touches to generate an opportunity to the size of the buying committee. On top of that, sales teams have fewer resources today to deal with these outsized challenges. The situation isn’t great, but Latané Conant, CMO at 6Sense, has three strategies for boosting efficiency across the revenue team to combat sales inflation. When it comes to ice cream inflation, you’re on your own.

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