The post:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/first-ten-.html

The B2B sale is a relationship sale. What Seth describes is selling into referrals. This is the way most businesses actually grow. Better than 70% of sales come from or through existing customers in many companies and industries.

To scale up in that sales environment, it makes sense to apply a process mentality to figure out what activities further those relationships. What activities can we control that speed the buying decision? What are we doing that unintentionally lengthens the sales cycle? Identify problems. Try to discover root causes. Test ways to improve.

Relationships are relationships – can’t standardize them. But human nature is human nature, too. This allows some activities (and not-doing certain activities) to be adopted as standard practices. See also: behavioral finance.

Dumping a lot of volume into a leaky process just creates a bunch of work and chasing after the wind. So, like Seth says, start with small investments. Look for things to try that you can afford to repeat if they work and won’t kill you if they don’t. Pull back fast from activities that don’t give sustainable results – either tweak them and try again, or move on. Find a few small things that seem to help. Do more of those. As repeatable results become evident, begin to add volume to the process inputs.

Related posts:

1. Respectfully disagreeing with Seth Godin on equity
2. How does this save me money?
3. Relationships vs. Markets: 5 differences between sales and marketing
4. 5 reasons why sales & marketing processes aren’t a silver bullet
5. Why should marketing be invisible?

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