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Introducing the 4 Cs of Modern Sales Transformation

I TALK TO hundreds of CEOs and VPs of sales every year. What is holding many back from changing is the thought of going against what made them successful for decades. Despite the fact that 68% of salespeople say that their role has permanently changed due to the shifts in the sales landscape, asking a leader who took a company public or scaled a company to a billion in revenue to pivot to a new model feels like a nearly impossible task. Ask any seller who has seen success in their career if they would like to change what's made them successful—you are going to get quite a bit of hesitancy.

I get it. As a lifelong seller and sales leader, I would be a bit nervous reading a book that tells me if I don't adapt, I might end up like Blockbuster. The good news is that from my work with thousands of companies, I've honed the practice of making change management applicable and tactical, so even the most seasoned leader and salesperson can make this adaptation quickly. Interestingly, 52% of sales leaders believe that their teams need to improve their adaptability skills. I use the word adaptation very specifically because this is all that is required. You don't need to change everything up or throw everything out the window to make your B2B selling process innovative. In fact, most organizations and sellers already have the building blocks to get there. In order to make this adaptation easier, I've honed all of my work and experience down to four simple principles call the 4Cs. Over the course of this book we will review the key concepts in the principle, understand the 3 pillars that make up each principle, and give you the tactical roadmap to move from your current to ideal state. Most are already doing pieces of the puzzle, and the 4 Cs will really help you pull those pieces together in an actual framework that is easy to deploy and execute. Let's walk through the 4 Cs now.

The 4 Cs of Innovative Selling

I've distilled the necessary steps for innovation in sales organizations down to what I call the 4 Cs:

• Commitment to technology and AI proficiency
• Current go-to-market (GTM) strategy
• Customized sales journey
• Consistent performance optimization

The 4 Cs of Innovative Selling is a framework to help break old habits that aren't working anyway and rebuild sales organizations and sales skills/processes, all to meet the changes in consumer behavior and rise of AI. Each section in the chapters that follow maps to one of these principles. The chapters that follow are arranged just like a typical sale, from how to generate more meetings through closing the deal. This makes it easier for you to map innovations to your current process for easy adaptation.

These pillars are embedded in the chapters, and each principle is actionable.

These four principles can take any company from its current state to innovation in a matter of weeks/months, and each principle is critical to making this a reality. Each principle has three tactical pillars that anyone can focus on individually to master. These principles are dependent on each other, and while implementing just one principle will be an immediate improvement to your current process or team, without the others, you may not unlock the innovation you are hoping for. So don't jump ahead too soon.

With that said, if you want a few tips on one specific principle so you can close a deal this month, feel free to skip ahead to that chapter. Just be sure to come back to the process. Without further ado, let's talk through the principles and pillars of each at a high level.

Principle One: Commitment to Technology and AI Proficiency

Principle one is a commitment to technology and AI proficiency (CTAP) which will be critical to building and scaling amazing sales organizations as technology today. Technology today will transform tomorrow's teams. A staggering 63% of sales organizations are increasing their technology investments to stay competitive. However, 74% of sales professionals say they spend too much time on tasks, which detracts from their selling time. Right now, many sales leaders and teams are questioning these big investments because the productivity gains aren't quite what was promised. The good news is that it's fixable. Here are the pillars that will help you get there:

Here are the pillars, which will discuss each one in Chapter 3, that will help you get there.

• Engineering technology to match customer behavior changes
• Ensuring technology and process are intertwined
• Habits to stay at the forefront

I addressed the first pillar in Chapter 1. So congratulations, you already have an idea about one of the 12 pillars. Most people find that this pillar is the easiest to understand because everyone can completely relate to it in their everyday lives.

The other two pillars tackle head-on the poor implementation of many process and technology changes, along with new habits for organizations to adopt to continue this process in perpetuity. This principle walks you through the importance of looking at technology and process changes as one. Technologies are often implemented based on the latest trend, and then new methodologies are implemented, many 20–30 years old, to fix process changes that don't actually solve the real issues for not hitting revenue targets. These two issues lead to poor adoption and lack of buy-in from the sales organization. Throw in Generative AI, and things get even more critical. You can no longer outsource your knowledge of these tools to technical teams because the technology should be at the heart of how you build a modern B2B sales organization. With AI, we are seeing productivity gains of 20%–30% overnight by consolidating hundreds of hours of research and learning into minutes and hours. All sellers and sales leaders must have a commitment to staying on top of technology trends

Principle Two: Current Go-to-Market Strategy

Principle two is an adjustment of thinking to how many companies lead marketing and their outbound strategy. We continue to focus on trying to automate more activities versus higher quality of touchpoints. For many, if not all revenue organizations, high volumes of activities as a primary focus will lead to few results. Consider these three pillars that make up excellence at this principle:

• Marketing and lead generation team alignment
• Focus on outcomes and not on volume metrics only
• Hyper-customized touchpoints in outbound

In the latest 2023 report from Skaled Consulting, only 9% of companies were hitting their outbound goals. The volume of outbound B2B continues to grow with over 306 billion emails sent every day. When I said earlier that all of these principles are intertwined, these issues are related to the first principle because it is the lack of understanding of how to use key technologies that has landed many marketing and sales organizations here. Companies began overusing technology to automate emails, with no personalization, and developed a mindset of “If we want something to be scalable, we have to automate it.” It's the quantity-over-quality mindset, but as the volume of activities has gone up, the results and performance of teams have gone down.

Many companies have looked to automate GTM activities instead of thinking of ways to automate the mundane so humans can focus on higher-quality, custom activities. Alarmingly, 57% of sales reps expected to miss their quotas in 2023, and it's no wonder when you look at the types of activities we are asking sellers to do. The future of teams is tracking a lower volume of activities and a shift in focusing on results-based KPIs.

Having a current, relevant GTM strategy is critical to every company that is looking to grow. Current strategies utilize technology to automate behind-the-scenes activities, create paths for buyers to learn more without salespeople being involved, and then create scalable ways for salespeople to generate more pipeline. These three pillars address each of these issues. Once you start to see just how intertwined all of the principles of the 4 Cs are, you'll understand why so many organizations are struggling to innovate.

Principle Three: Customized Sales Journey

Principle three is focused on building a sales journey based on how customers want to buy. Most if not all current B2B sales methods are built from the viewpoint of how companies want to sell instead of how people want to buy. Customers want speed and a personalized experience. The pillars for this principle are as follows:

• The customer journey is mapped and optimized for the ideal experience at each step
• Options are included for customers to learn more without calls
• Plans exist to move customers who are high intent to later stages quickly

A majority of this book focuses on this principle, where I go through details on how to build a repeatable process to meet your customers where they are at each step in the process. In fact, customer experience (CX) has been ranked as the number-one priority for businesses, surpassing product and pricing. Companies that invest in CX initiatives can potentially double their revenue.

That same study found a significant 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience. The more expensive the item, the more customers...