How to improve B2B sales results.

A Statistical Analysis of the Correlation of Account Planning Workshop Activities to Revenue Results.

Executive Summary

• A statistically significant study of B2B account planning workshops shows average growth of 5x the benchmark in the following 4 quarters, despite a negative trend over the prior 8 quarters.
• The contribution of specific workshop activities to such exceptional revenue growth is identified using regression analysis.
• We have shown that the key activities responsible for 70% of the dramatic reversal and 5x revenue outperformance can be replicated using simple tools. These activities are equally relevant to much smaller and simpler accounts or prospects.
• Such tools can be very light touch, intuitive, adaptive, low cost and industry agnostic such that they can be used by untrained part-time sales reps in small B2B businesses as well as strategic account managers in multinationals.
• Iterations of these tools have been tested in the field and the final version is being implemented in the ProspectSafari platform.

Account Performance vs Trend

We have facilitated hundreds of account planning workshops for global and strategic account teams in HP, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and others in 23 countries. By measuring single account revenue for the 8 quarters prior to each workshop and the 4 quarters following, we can determine the revenue growth trend and compare post-workshop sales results to both this trend and the local / regional benchmark growth rate. This paper examines the results for one client in one country. For this client we captured full data for 114 workshops. The plot below shows the distribution of sales results by prior trend and benchmark multiple.

We are often asked to run workshops for troubled accounts so the average has a negative prior trend. There is no clear variation based on trend; almost all workshops show outperformance compared to the benchmark, with the top 10% outperforming by 20 – 120x. Excluding the top and bottom deciles the average outperformance is 5.2x the benchmark (i.e. if the norm is growth of 10%, these accounts grow by an average of 52%). Their average trend for the 2 years prior to the workshop was -13%.

Analysis & Next Steps

These are exceptional, statistically significant results showing that the consistent outperformance is clearly a direct result of the workshop activity. It was therefore important to investigate this activity further, to understand which items are key to achieving immediate revenue growth. We can then study how to replicate these activities methodically for all accounts and possibly any deal size, without using expensive facilitated workshops.

Sales Results vs Workshop Variables

We completed a checklist after each workshop giving a subjective rating (0-10) of the account team’s preparation at the start and progress during the workshops regarding certain key variables. Since generally the rating is performed by the same facilitator for all workshops of a given client, there is a consistent rating score method across all accounts for that client.

Linear multivariable regression analysis¹ of workshop activities vs revenue performance revealed the most important determinants of revenue growth and their relative contributions are:

1. Knowledge of customer people, priorities, projects & challenges (40%)
   • Existing knowledge of customer people, priorities, projects and challenges and their linkages   (4%)
   • Improvement in knowledge from team discussion & our interviews   (20%)
   • Action planning to fill gaps in our knowledge   (16%)
2. Understand & fix customer issues re our engagement (30%)
   • Existing knowledge of issues with account team engagement.     (0%)
   • Improvement in knowledge from team discussion & our interviews   (12%)
   • Action planning to understand & resolve the issues   (18%)
3. Positioning of sales opportunities vs customer challenges, priorities, projects (20%)
4. Completion of Value Proposition (10%)

Notes on interpretation of results:

• Workshops were biased towards troubled accounts. In a normal population of accounts we would expect (1) to be higher and (2) a little lower.
• Positioning of opportunities (3) is more important than the above 20% implies, however;
  • Clearly (1) and (2) are prerequisites for (3). Completion of these in the workshop means that (3) would naturally occur afterwards. Conversely, positioning of opportunities vs customer priorities & projects cannot occur if these are unknown.  
  • (1) and (2) are important because they signal to the customer that her issues and priorities are important to us and they also enable and auto-drive (3) and (4).
• Extrapolation: from experience and subsequent testing we believe similar relative importance applies for;
  • Prospects: (2) is redundant but relative weightings of the other items can considered valid.
  • Small business / small deal size: complexity is reduced, the CMap is simpler but the above items (1-4) are equally relevant.

The Keys to B2B Sales Success

Approximately 70% of the 114 account planning workshops in this study were failing with a consistent negative revenue trend over the preceding 2 years. Half of these were billing less than 75% of the prior years revenue over 8 consecutive quarters. All of these failing accounts were recovered, with a positive revenue trend starting within a matter of weeks and generally exceeding the country average growth rate. Across all workshops, revenue grew at over 5x the national average.

Clearly the activities in each workshop were responsible for this consistent outperformance. The above regression analysis shows that 90% of the success is down to following these simple steps:

1. Knowing what you don’t know about the customers people, priorities, projects and challenges.
2. Taking actions to close the knowledge gap and fix any perceived issues with current or prior engagement.
3. Position sales opportunities to align them with customer priorities and projects.

We know that these steps can be applied to smaller businesses and to prospects as well as existing accounts. We therefore set out to define a few simple tools that could help even an inexperienced sales rep to follow these steps.

Key 1: Knowing what you Don’t Know about your Prospect

In the workshops we were able to leverage prior customer interviews to ask the account team very specific questions about the customer. These questions were designed to reveal the knowledge gaps and document the required actions to resolve.

In practice, similar results can be achieved by using a consistent set of qualification questions which the sales rep must answer on a Likert scale (1-5). This allows a score to be calculated showing the level of knowledge and understanding. If the sales rep knows that improving this score will lead to greater sales success, then action planning to fill the gaps should occur naturally.

In both cases it is the point of view of the customer that is being used and recorded. No amount of thinking and analysis by the sales rep in isolation can substitute this. Studies have shown that cognitive bias will ensure that all that brain power will be used to find supportive rather than problematic evidence². By requesting input or feedback from the customer however, this error is minimised. Indeed by writing down and sharing incorrect information we can leverage behavioural psychology to push the customer to provide correct information and collaborate in the proposal.³ (See the FAQ for more info).

We experimented with this approach across a number of workshops and with sales reps in the field. We found that a standard set of questions, customised for the clients sales process and ICP, ideally using Evidence Based Qualification (EBQ)⁴, yielded the best results. Data collection can be further enhanced by sharing a draft 1-Page Business Case or Mutual Action Plan with incorrect or incomplete content with the customer.

Further studies⁵ have shown that given the proven correlation to B2B revenue success, this method of scoring qualification questions can yield highly accurate B2B sales forecasts.⁶

Key 2: Visualisation of the Customer Map (CMap)

Given the importance for account outperformance, various methods of capturing and displaying the links between a specific customer’s challenges, priorities, projects, initiatives, contacts and views have been tested with account teams in the field.

Crucially, the data (projects, contacts, etc) can be added with no linkages, and then each item can be linked to any others. Data entry and particularly the addition of a new link should be very fast and simple on a mobile app so that the sales rep can add the information as and when it comes to light. In reality, if the links are not captured on discovery, the information is likely to be lost.

Sales opportunities (deals) can then be added to this map, with each deal linked to customer projects, priorities, contacts etc which are themselves interconnected.

In practice, we found that it is the indirect connections (eg this opportunity is connected to that business priority which has these 3 executive sponsors) that are most useful. Clearly the more apparently unimportant linkages are recorded, the more such useful second or third level indirect connections are revealed. It must therefore be quick and simple to record any connection.

Our objective is for the individual to immediately “see” the relevant links when focussing on specific issues or contacts in an otherwise complex web of internal relations, to identify gaps in knowledge and to align opportunities in a natural and obvious way.

At it’s simplest it shows the connection of a sales opportunity to internal projects, priorities and people (step 3 in the Keys to B2B Sales Success above).

Whilst this is equally relevant for smaller deals, the customer map (CMap) is simpler. For larger deals there are more contacts, projects etc to consider and the number of links grows exponentially. Visualizing all the links resembles a ball of spaghetti, so intuitive filtering is key (eg a click on a project shows all linked items, or a click on a contact and an opportunity shows all the paths that link them). The base tool to be refined and eventually incorporated into our ProspectSafari platform is available for demo at: https://www.talcap.net/Cmapv4/

Conclusion

We conducted hundreds of account planning workshops for troubled accounts. Despite an average revenue decline of 13% over the prior 8 quarters, we were able to effect a dramatic turnaround with immediate effect, yielding an average revenue growth of over 5x the country benchmark for revenue growth. Outperformance of 5x – 80x was achieved for more than half of all accounts, regardless of their performance over the 2 years prior to the workshop.

Despite the goal of the workshop being to produce a documented Value Proposition in a specific format, statistical analysis shows that this is of very little importance (10%) to the achievement of positive results. Far more important (70%) is the simple activity of discussing and mapping what we know & don’t know about the customer’s challenges, priorities and projects and about issues with the account team’s engagement to date, and taking actions to get a more complete understanding.

It follows that B2B sales outperformance can be achieved by building a sales process around these steps;

• make the sales rep aware of what they don’t know about the prospect or customer
• inceltivize and make visible their progress in improving this knowledge and understanding
• systematically build a customer map (Cmap) that shows the links between their challenges, priorities, projects and people
• position sales opportunities within this CMap

Whilst we have had success in facilitating workshops to do this, we believe that appropriate tools can be used by sales reps and account teams to do this and achieve significant B2B sales outperformance. These tools should use qualification questions to reveal knowledge gaps about challenges, priorities, projects and people and a dynamic, filterable Cmap to show their interconnections. Using machine learning to weight the answers to the qualification questions can yield an accurate predictor of deal win success applicable to both large and small deals.

Simple, intuitive, low-touch tools that can be used by untrained sales reps on deals of any size in any industry to achieve significant revenue improvement is the “holy grail” for B2B sales. We plan to build these tools within our ProspectSafari platform.

FAQ for Improving B2B Sales Results

Footnotes

1. Advanced Statistics: Multiple Linear Regression, Keith A. Marill ↩︎
2. Why Do Humans Reason? Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 2011 ↩︎
3. The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt 2012 ISBN 978-0-141-03916-9 ↩︎
4. Sales Process Excellence. Michael Webb 2014 ISBN 0977107221, 9780977107223 ↩︎
5. A Bayesian Classification Approach to Improving Performance for a Real-World Sales Forecasting Application, C. Gallagher, M. G. Madden and B. D’Arcy  2015 IEEE 14th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), Miami, FL, USA, 2015 ↩︎
6. Optimal Sales Forecasting Method for B2B, ProspectSafari 2025 ↩︎