Sales cycles have binary outcomes; win or lose, profit or loss, growth or contraction, celebration or regret.

As large enterprise ERP and CRM publishers and partners aggressively pursue mid-market opportunities to shore up declining revenue streams; sales strategy and methodology execution will increasingly determine who triumphs in this last remaining business application battleground.

Old school feature/function, show up and throw up, “lead with the product” selling will no longer carry the day and VARs that are unable to penetrate the executive suite, add meaningful value throughout the selection process, and deliver measurable benefits to the customer will have to rely upon discounting to remain even marginally competitive.

This challenge is compounded by an economic environment that values preservation of capital over investment, and risk reduction over aggressive growth.

If you haven’t seen it yet, expect planned upgrades to be delayed, IT investments to be postponed, capital and operating plans to be re-written and funded projects to be re-prioritized. Initiatives that do not produce meaningful, measurable results that inherently align with short term business strategy will simply not survive the culling process.

• If you sell business applications and rely upon IT relationships for selection and procurement support; you are doomed.
• If you are a sales professional, or manage a sales team, that relies upon talented delivery staff to deliver customized software demonstrations to “close” the deal; you are doomed.
• If you cannot demonstrate, in customer friendly business terms, how your solution set increases profitability (through whatever means) AND reduces risk; you are doomed.

Given the elevated competitive desperation and an increasingly conservative buying community, now is the time to either invest in your existing sales or look to the expanding pool of high caliber talent that have recently joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

Sales professionals that fail to execute on a strategic selling (not solution selling) methodology are destined to suffer a string of “column B” losses.

Historically, sales training has been limited to the honing of tactical skills, focusing on rudimentary qualification techniques, presentation tricks and tips, functional product knowledge or worse, navigating through overly complex methodologies that align poorly to mid-market sales cycles and customer buying behaviour.

Herding passive aggressive (or sometime just plain old aggressive) sales professionals into one-day lecture-style courses, delivered by bubbly trainers yet to face the uncomfortable scrutiny of a miserly financial controller, seldom delivers lasting results.

Talented or inept, naive or weathered; all willingly endure these brief theoretical seminars with wide grins, a flurry of note taking and the silent cynicism of the experienced.

More often than not at the end of the session they return immediately to the ineffective habits and uninteresting strategies that undermined their results in the first place; grateful for the distraction but no better equipped to effectively qualify, control and close opportunities than before.

Whether you hire anew or build upon your current team, shift your focus and investment away from strategies and skills that drove past performance as the capabilities that make so many sales professionals look good on paper today are of little value moving forward.

Develop business acumen, an understanding of financial and operating metrics. Reduce the emphasis on understanding “infrastructure, integration and system” and increase the opportunities for business process optimization and risk reduction.

Encourage and reward curiosity. Be bold, be fearless and be prepared.

Think like a businessman and you will earn the right to ask for a contract. Think otherwise and expect the inevitable. Sales cycles have binary outcomes; win or lose, profit or loss, growth or contraction, celebration or regret.