Agile & Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal

Do you find yourself questioning the makeup of your sales team?
Are your costs on the rise, but customer pressure to lower prices is stronger than ever?
Are you monitoring more metrics, yet struggling to effectively change sales behavior?
Does daily firefighting steal the time you need to coach your team to better performance?
And most of all… are you concerned that what’s worked in the past is not as effective now?

If you are asking yourself any of these questions, this book is for you...

This is not the book we expected to write when we started ideation in early 2020. It is fair to say that a global pandemic changed our plans! While COVID interrupted or paused many aspects of selling, we observed that it also demanded that certain changes accelerate in the most agile and resilient sales organizations.

It is absolutely clear: Sales leadership as usual just will not work any longer. At The Brooks Group, we have been training and coaching business-to-business salespeople and sales leaders for more than 40 years. Throughout that time, we have seen a steady group of core fundamentals as critical to success — prospect intelligently and consistently, prepare to have quality sales calls, ask good questions to understand what really motivates buyers, and connect the dots between what buyers need and want and what you offer as a supplier. Selling fads and quirky approaches have come and gone, but the fundamentals — what our founder Bill Brooks called IMPACT Selling — have consistently been the way to improve results.

That said, starting late in the twenty-teens, as the makeup of typical B2B sales forces and the technologies used in their day-to-day work were changing, we started to see the best sales organizations add some important things to our list of selling fundamentals. Intentional sales cultures, team alignment, understanding of buyer journeys, and useful metrics were just a few of the areas the best of the best sales teams used to stay ahead of the competition.

Then 2020 happened. Walking day-by-day with our clients through the start, middle, and now (we hope) the end of the pandemic has helped us see very clearly that, to quote Marshall Goldsmith, “What got you here won’t get you there.”[1]

Today’s B2B customers are very clear that they see little value in most sales calls. Buyers have wrestled control of the buying process away from sellers, seeking contact and content only after they have short-listed options and built an evaluation model, including a low, cost-based price.

At the same time, sales leaders tell us their teams are not properly preparing for calls, talking more than listening in sales calls, and too often leading with price.

If any of these issues sound familiar to you, please read on. Through research examples, client conversations, and our own experience, we describe six key trends making their impact on sales organizations today. We have also worked hard to provide implementable ideas and resources that will help you lead where you need to go. Not sure where, exactly, you need to head? Reading this book is a good first step.

[1] Goldsmith, Marshall, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (New York, NY: Hyperion, 2007)