In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to adapt is not just an advantage, it’s a necessity. As buyer behaviors and expectations shift, sales operations leaders must collaborate closely with sales enablement to ensure that seller behaviors evolve in tandem. By systematically capturing and categorizing seller behaviors as either adaptive or static, organizations can pinpoint gaps where seller actions fail to align with changing buyer needs. This process is crucial for creating a framework that elevates individual seller performance and enhances overall sales effectiveness.
The Need for Adaptive Selling
Adaptive selling is a dynamic approach that tailors sales strategies and interactions to the unique needs and behaviors of each buyer (see chart). In contrast to static selling, which relies on a one-size-fits-all approach, adaptive selling requires sellers to be agile, responsive and informed. This adaptability is essential in today’s B2B environment, where buyers are more informed and have higher expectations than ever before.
Sales operations leaders play a pivotal role in integrating adaptive selling into the sales process. This involves leveraging technology to enhance the precision and efficiency of seller interactions and providing the scalability necessary to implement adaptive selling across the entire sales team. A thorough assessment of the existing revenue technology stack is essential to identify technologies that support adaptive selling behaviors.
Steps to Incorporate Adaptive Selling
- Assess Current Sales Processes: Begin by analyzing seller behaviors that have been categorized as adaptive versus static. Map these behaviors against the sales stages and include the buyer tasks they support throughout the buying journey. This analysis will help identify where static behaviors create misalignment between sellers and buyers, pinpointing areas where sellers struggle to adapt to buyer needs.
- Map Available Technology: Identify the revenue technologies within your stack that inform seller decision-making and optimize sales actions using AI. Technologies such as revenue intelligence or GTM data applications provide actionable insights into buyer behavior, enabling sellers to adapt their actions in response to or anticipation of buyer needs. Note any gaps in technology that hinder adaptive selling.
- Design a Future State with Tech-Enabled Sales Workflows: Define a future-state sales process that seamlessly incorporates adaptive selling behaviors and existing AI-enabled technology. This process should enhance sellers’ decision-making and responsiveness throughout the sales cycle.
- Facilitate Competency Development: Collaborate with sales enablement to analyze data-driven insights, such as performance metrics, to identify seller skill gaps. Develop training and reinforcement initiatives to address these gaps. Co-manage feedback loops to promote continuous refinement and ensure sellers are consistently equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to adapt effectively.
Leveraging Technology for Adaptive Selling
Technology plays a crucial role in supporting adaptive selling behaviors. Your existing revenue technology stack can be categorized into ecosystem layers based on the type of seller action support they provide during the sales process. These layers include:
- Engagement: Facilitates direct interactions between sellers and buyers, analyzing engagement levels to understand buyer challenges.
- Action: Enables sellers to execute sales-related tasks efficiently. Conversational and emotion AI tools help capture customer responses in real-time, allowing sellers to adjust negotiation strategies.
- Insights: Provides sellers with actionable insights to inform and adapt their strategy. Collaboration: Enhances sellers’ ability to coordinate with internal and partner resources.
- Visibility: Collects and analyzes sales data, providing recommendations for performance improvement.
Many organizations have fragmented technology stacks that do not fully support adaptive selling, leading to underutilized technology and suboptimal sales outcomes. It is crucial to ensure that planned technology investments to fill existing gaps will provide sellers with action guidance that adapts to the demonstrated needs of each buyer.
Sales operations leaders must also prioritize reducing seller burden as an analysis step during tech investment planning. Overwhelmed sellers are less likely to achieve their quotas, indicating that simply adding more technology is not the solution. Instead, a strategic approach is required to ensure technology acts as a teammate rather than an added burden.
Conducting an annual evaluation of the technology stack performance against identified outcomes with the CSO, other sales leaders and IT can help outline technology performance and identify new gaps to plan for. By identifying quick wins for AI to augment actions and assessing the value of current technology, organizations can close the performance gap between high performers and other sellers.
Incorporating adaptive selling into the sales process is not just about enhancing individual seller performance, it’s about creating a more agile and responsive sales process that aligns with the evolving needs of buyers. By partnering with sales enablement and leveraging technology strategically, sales leaders can transform static, linear actions into scalable, dynamic strategies that better meet the demands of modern B2B buyers.
Authors
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
