Dave Eddleman: Hey everyone. I’m Dave Eddleman from the Alexander Group. I’m joined here with my colleague Mike Burnett, also with the Alexander Group. Both of us are principals and co-leaders of the business service area practice. We’re here to share with you today a preview of some of the market research we’ve done around sales coverage and job roles in business services, and we’ve got a really great sample, over 250 respondents from CROs and over 100 live interviews. So a nice data set from which we can draw insight as we think about sales coverage and job roles. It does align with corporate strategy. And that corporate strategy for us drives particular growth plays within the go-to-market model. So Mike, why don’t we just open it up and talk about some of those prevalent growth plays that we’re seeing in coverage models within business services?
Mike Burnett: Happy to Dave. And as you mentioned, there’s a number that came out of the discussions we had with executives around what are the plays they’re running to try to jumpstart or accelerate growth in their business. Within B2B service businesses, there were four that really jumped out the most. Number one was just continuing to try to increase seller productivity. Second was investing in solutions, selling capabilities not just from the individual seller’s capabilities, but also how do we as an organization come together to improve our ability to sell broader solutions. Third was continued investment in demand generation programs. And then the fourth major area was trying to enhance and better connect the sales team and the service teams that are oftentimes delivering these services being sold. That was cited as a major area of growth and interest amongst executives that we spoke with.
Dave Eddleman: Yeah. And you can see there’s lots of different growth plays and this handful that you talked about, Mike, are top of mind for many of our clients. But there are many others I want to just point that out. As we think about, going into our clients, coverage models and taking a look around and look at the roles and rules of engagement there’s a lot of complexity, a lot of different groupings within the go-to-market model. How do we think about, okay, where do we start and what kind of current deployment activities are going on within our client environment?
Mike Burnett: Yeah. So one of the first things that we looked at and refreshed as part of this research was trying to understand what a day in the life of sellers looked like. So we were able to create an updated time profile of what your primary seller within the B2B services space looks like. Someone who has both hunting for new logos and new business but is also responsible for farming or growing their existing account base. And what we found was pretty wide variations in terms of how effective organizations are at freeing up sales time for their primary sellers. One of the key data points we found was that the average seller in this space is only getting about 24% of engaged selling time, actual account development and time in front of customers trying to persuade them into making a purchase. We did see best-in-class north of 30%, around 36% in terms of engaged selling time. And when we talked with executives, there was a lot of renewed interest. This isn’t a new concept, but a lot of renewed interest in how can we try to improve selling time through the use of alternative resources by offloading activities. But also with the introduction of AI, there’s an interest in terms of how can we make sellers’ time more efficient and give more time back to them to meet with customers.
Dave Eddleman: Yeah, that’s been an issue for a lot of years on how to offload all the other activities that salespeople are engaged in and back into engaged selling time with customers, influencing them to buy something. So it’s a great analytical tool. Our clients really enjoy looking at it. It’s a very sober tool because we see exactly what activities they’re engaged in and what they’re not, but it’s a really great baseline as we think about how to reformulate strategy and drive some of these growth plays. What do you have right now out in the field in terms of sales motions and service motions and marketing motions? Moving on to one particular role that we’ve been talking about a lot recently is this business development role and how it’s used and all the variants that we see in business services. I wonder if you could just speak to that a bit.
Mike Burnett: Variance is the best way to say it. Dave, this is probably the role that we get the most questions about in B2B services. And what we found is there are probably three different archetypes that we typically run into that really are applicable or have different applications based on the type of services you’re selling, the level of complexity involved, and oftentimes the level of the buyer that you’re going to be interacting with. So the three archetypes that we’ve seen are, first, your traditional lead generation rep, think of a less tenured individual who has the ability to be doing outbound and inbound lead outreach qualification in order to hand off an opportunity to a seller. Second is a new logo hunter. So a BD individual, where their responsibility is to find and close new business and then work in tandem with, an account manager or another seller to own the relationship beyond that point. And the third and perhaps the most nuanced role that we’ve seen in the B2B services space is an archetype we’re calling the BD executive. Ultimately, it’s this this individual has a vast network of relationships, tenure, subject matter expertise, typically in an industry that allows them to generate net new business through their network. So what’s interesting about this BD rule is it’s not necessarily dedicated to new logos or to generating new leads. They’re going to have a bit more involvement where their network is able to generate either through existing customers or through customers that have moved on to a new logo or a competitive account. And they can help generate opportunities that they can pull in other sellers into in order to plant a flag and help drive growth. So it’s really interesting to see these three variations that oftentimes get lumped together. There’s a lot of confusion that we’re hearing around what’s the right role for our business as we try to generate net new growth.
Dave Eddleman: Yeah, it’s a great point. And yeah, our clients are always trying to figure out how do they connect to the rest of the coverage model. What level of influence do they have, whether they’re hunter, farmer or hybrid or whatever they are? So a lot of interesting conversations to drive efficacy through that particular role. Well, thank you for listening to the short clip here and our preview of the research we have. We will have virtual roundtables around this subject. And we’re glad to do a more extensive readout individually. So for more information go to www.alexandergroup.com. Thank you for joining.
