B2B sales 2024: 5 trends that will help sellers overcome the odds
B2B sales in 2024 include focused selling, personalized sales, and more. Find out the key trends that will help sellers succeed in a tough economy.
It’s easy for B2B sales teams to get laser-focused on the next big deal. And with revenue targets the No. 1 priority, they should. But the process that takes a prospective lead, nurtures it, and turns it into booked-won revenue shouldn’t be overlooked.
Many traditional B2B sales organizations consistently fall back on ad-hoc practices, makeshift scrum activities, spreadsheets, or over reliance on senior management involvement to move deals forward. “Don’t break it if it isn’t broken” might be the rationale and traditional methods do work.
But they’re inherently slower and less efficient than connected lead to cash processes, particularly with disparate slioed systems in an organization, putting sales organizations at a disadvantage. Today, seamless lead to cash is essential. Let’s dive into what it involves and the benefits.
What is lead to cash process
Lead to cash is an integrated process that encompasses all the steps involved in a sale, from a customer’s interest in a product or service to a company’s realization of revenue.
Seamless lead-to-cash involves:
- Identifying leads and scoring them to assess their potential
- Taking the lead from marketing and automatically routing it to the right seller
- Providing the seller with steps to progress the deal through completion
- Handing off to the ERP system for fulfillment and billing.
Connecting front-end marketing automation and sales automation systems with back-end ERP systems provides a seamless flow.
Here are five key benefits of connected lead-to-cash:
- Improved sales productivity
- Increased efficiency
- Driving revenue growth
- Better forecast management
- Improved customer experience
Navigating common hurdles in the lead to cash business process
Let’s be honest—the lead-to-cash process isn’t always smooth sailing. Many businesses find themselves tangled in inefficient manual tasks, juggling systems that don’t communicate, and worrying about human errors that could derail order processing. Coordinating seamlessly between your sales, finance, and service delivery teams can feel like a complex juggling act. And when you add in the challenge of integrating CPQ software and CRM tools while keeping payment terms aligned, it might seem downright overwhelming.
But here’s the good news: these obstacles aren’t insurmountable. By streamlining your operations, establishing a single source of truth, and adopting integrated software solutions, you can transform your lead-to-cash cycle into a well-orchestrated process that drives better results for your business.
Streamlined processes: More productive sellers
All sales organizations want to win more business each quarter, which means doing more, faster. Call blitzes, sales campaigns, presidents club, booking contests – these all try to drive productivity, but rely on the seller and their motivation to work. And like drive and motivation, these mechanisms are prone to fatigue. They’re not a stable solution for consistent revenue generation.
By connecting lead to cash processes at all stages of the customer acquisition journey, sales organizations can resolve the inefficiency between sales actions and stages.
Boiling down the sales processes reduces steps and boosts customer response times, ultimately resulting in more efficient order fulfillment. Across the sales process, sellers can focus on strategic value-add actions instead of the process itself, resulting in increased sales productivity and overall efficiency.
Driving revenue growth with better efficiency
As you might expect, increased sales productivity and operational efficiency help sellers take more actions and win more business, while also providing greater visibility into business operations. But streamlined and connected sales processes also open the door for increased revenue growth beyond faster deal cycles alone.
Connected lead to cash processes help eliminate costly mistakes from human errors that naturally arise as multiple people work on a deal. Manual processes can exacerbate issues with solution mix, pricing, discounting, terms and conditions, timelines, and more. It is extremely common when sales organizations bounce between disparate systems such as – sales automation, customer relationship management (CRM), ERP, and pricing systems. Added challenges come with a geographically dispersed workforce, especially when there is no single source of truth in place.
Less errors and issues mean deals can close on time and businesses can recognize revenue, leading to streamlined provisioning and timely client payment.
Moreover, united lead to cash processes give organizations the ability to maximize revenue with intelligent upsell and cross-sell options that look at usage data to suggest options, common packages, and easy add-ons within a single system.
Similarly, deal configuration driven by data and rules helps protect deal margin, ensuring that discounts, packages, and terms/conditions conform to corporate standards.
Show me the way: How guided selling helps seal more deals
The modern B2B sales process is dynamic and fast-paced. Through guided selling, businesses can empower their sellers to engage more effectively with customers and win more deals.
Lead to cash and sales forecasting
Because sales organizations live and die by their quota attainment, the importance of pipeline and forecast accuracy cannot be overstated. Anyone who’s tried to manually compile weekly sales forecasts and pipeline reports from sellers knows how challenging this process can be.
At the enterprise level, accurate sales forecasting relies on accurate data and a mechanism for unification/reconciliation. Organizations that still try to manage this process between spreadsheets are fundamentally behind. The same is true for organizations that have sales automation or forecasting solutions that aren’t connected to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other systems.
As with spreadsheets, the biggest issue with data integrity is human error. This often surfaces with data transformation or export/import, but can also be as simple as someone accidently hitting the wrong key.
The solution is connecting data at the process level so that data seamlessly flows without manual intervention, reducing the risk of human error, and ensuring customer needs are met. Data quality is preserved and sales managers can focus on value-add activities like evaluation and modeling, not an inefficient process. This has the added benefit of then flowing directly into ERP workflows.
Better sales process, better CX
Optimized, connected lead to cash processes have enormous organizational impacts, but also dramatically improve the buyer experience.
Throughout, buyers have a clear understanding of what comes next. They’re presented with consistent interactions from multiple sales stakeholders and not given contradictory information.
Solution options and pricing stays consistent, and sellers can easily explain changes if they occur based on the policies and rules enforced by the connected sales solution. Buyers experience one brand with consistent value.
With this kind of seamless CX, an organization can deliver the kind of experience today’s B2B buyers expect. Connected lead to cash processes help organizations improve performance, maximize revenue, and enhance the customer journey while propelling success in complex, constantly changing B2B markets.
