Nate: Hello and welcome to the Center for Business Modeling’s Expert Series podcast. Center for Business Modeling’s mission is to help business leaders and entrepreneurs plot a simplified path to success with a full array of streamlined financial, operations, sales and marketing planning tools. I am your host, Nate Warren. In the interest of making the best use of your time today — and by the way, thank you for listening — we’re going to offer you 15 solid minutes of insights so you can get on with your day and focus on what you do best. So today we’re talking with our esteemed guest, Jim Franklin. Good morning, Jim! Jim: Good morning, Nate, and thank you so much for that introduction. Nate: Absolutely, we are happy to have you. So as we understand it, drawing on your deep experience as a sales executor and manager and engineer of sales processes, you’re going to talk to us about some of the shortcomings that are inherent to the traditional linear sales funnel that we all know and love, right? Jim: That’s correct, Nate. I’m going to talk a little bit about the buyer’s cycle and the sales funnel and how important it is to make sure that you are addressing both and, quite frankly, that they are integrated. But first I would like to set a little groundwork, some foundation for this discussion with some of the challenges that are facing today’s sales organizations. As a sales leader, these numbers should be very eye-opening, but also should represent some tremendous opportunity. If we look at these sources — there is multiple that sources this information came from — including CSO Insights, including Demand Metrics and Forrester. But a couple of things that we really want to take a look at and more important to address, the buyer’s cycle and how that integrates to the traditional sales funnel, is if you look at that top graphic there, the buyer’s journey, most of that decision up to 70%, is already completed. And we will talk about how that process is kind of enabled by the buyer throughout the cycle. And then a couple of the other ones I want to talk about are the sales reps: Only 58% make quota and only 33% of the sales reps’ time is actually spent selling. So what we want to do is, how do we address those challenges? How do we start looking at what that means? So in addressing the challenges, I have found there is typically three key questions. Nate, if you would forward the slide please, thank you. Is your sales process capable of matching the dynamic buyer’s cycle? Is your sales team trained to understand and does the organization have the ability to deliver the right content at the right time to the appropriate buyer persona? Now this is a very important 2 bullet point for several reasons because I’ve introduced a couple of terms here that we will talk about throughout the course of it; the buyer persona and then the business issues and the dynamic buyer’s cycle. So

1. The Buyer’s Funnel: A More Dynamic
Way to Convert, Sell and Win
James Franklin
Managing Director
Impact B2B Sales

2. Presenters
Our Guest
James A. Franklin is a senior sales leadership
professional with over 20 years of success in building,
leading, mentoring, managing and coaching sales
teams in North America.
Your Host
Nate Warren is the host of the Business Planning
Expert series and a marketing/advertising/PR writer
and editor with more than 25 years of experience
across newspapers, startups and agencies.

3. Challenges facing Sales Organizations
Most of the buyer decision is made prior to engaging with a sales rep
Buyer Begins
Search
Buyer Contacts
Vendor
Buyer Purchase
Decision
70% COMPLETE
Only 45.9% of
sales forecasts
are accurate
Only 33% of a
sales rep’s time is
actually spent selling
Only 58% of
sales reps made
quota last year
Over 50% of
companies have no
formal sales process
PROCESS

4. How to address the challenges?
• Is your sales process capable of matching the
current dynamic buyers cycle?
• Is your sales team trained to understand the
business issues facing today’s buyers?
• Does your organization have the ability to
deliver the right content to the appropriate
buyer persona at the right time?

5. The Traditional Seller-Centric Sales Funnel
• An incomplete picture
that costs you leads
and extends sales
cycles
• Typically very linear
• One size DOES NOT
fit all

6. Planning for the Dynamic Buying Process:
The Five Elements
• Explore – A prospect does research to
discover a particular universe of relevant
solutions
• Evaluate – A prospect dives deeper into the
features and business value of a subset of
targeted solutions and begins a comparison
process.
• Engage – The prospect reaches out to
request demos, case studies, pricing, etc.
that informs them whether or not the
solution will effectively address their
business needs.
• Experience – The prospect becomes a
customer and ideally experiences the
benefits of the solution.
• Expand – Becomes an advocate for the
vendor partner, which opens possibilities for
additional products and/or services.

7. Buyer’s cycle and selling funnel

8. Responsive, Not Rigid
• Right content to the right prospect
at the right time
• Train reps to identify prospects
business requirements throughout
the buyer’s cycle
• Track EVERYTHING
© CBM Confidential

9. Key Questions
• Have you identified the buyer’s cycle?
• How are you mapping buyer’s cycle to your
sales process, training and content delivery?
• What is your technology stack that supports
the buying cycle and sales process?
• Does your current reporting and analytics
solution support KPIs – e.g., conversion ratios,
content tracking and forecast accuracy?
© CBM Confidential

10. Our Guest Today
James Franklin
http://linkd.in/1F2gldy
jim@impactb2bsales.com
Managing Director
Impact B2B Sales

11. Center for Business Modeling
View the entire Business Planning Expert Series
https://www.centerforbusinessmodeling/expert-series/
Have a topic or a guest you’d like to see? Email us at info@centerforbusinessmodeling.com