B2B Sales: Frictionless to a flying success

That the funnel is retired will no longer be news. But whether everyone has embraced the flywheel yet, I highly doubt. Be honest, how central is your future customer to your commercial process? Are you able to fully integrate your marketing, sales and customer success processes? Building bridges is not enough anymore!

That the funnel is retired will no longer be news. But whether everyone has embraced the flywheel yet, I highly doubt. Be honest, how central is your future customer to your commercial process? Are you able to fully integrate your marketing, sales and customer success processes? Building bridges is not enough anymore!

The properties of a flywheel:

• You can get a flywheel moving by turning it forcefully
• if you do this with more force, the wheel will spin harder
• and if there are no things causing 'friction', a flywheel will spin infinitely

A maximally spinning flywheel represents the growth of your business:

• you get the flywheel moving with every action that leads to valuable sales contact.
• Happy and satisfied customers then cause the flywheel to spin harder.
• Every negative experience in this process causes the flywheel to spin less quickly, preventing growth of your business.

Growth = making your flywheel spin harder by increasing power and minimizing friction.

And that's where you sit, as a sales professional tussling for every lead. With all your energy and ideas, you field structured through your sales tasks. You make sure the flywheel is turning. But it can go harder. It always has to be harder. Your targets go up, more sales colleagues join you: the sky is the limit.

Zoom out for a moment and take a critical look at your successful sales process (put all the steps of your future customer at the center and look at your sales process as a buying process) and assess where friction arises. Where can you prevent friction to really grow? Look at marketing, sales and customer service. Integrate these processes and your colleagues around your prospective customer's journey!

This model from HubSpot is going to help you do that: Frictionless Selling Framework.

'Frictionless selling' is a way to rethink your sales process and make it easier for both buyer and seller. Your prospective customers are constantly looking for easier, faster and smoother ways to find the necessary information that is going to help them make the right buying decision

What exactly are the differences between traditional sales and frictionless selling? Think about the questions below, with associated differences, and place this in the context of your current sales process:

1. Is your team adequately facilitated?

Traditional Sales professionals:

• Do cold standard outreaches
• Work in their own "silo of sales
• Use many different tools, data is scattered
• Do not set priorities -> mass is cash (?)
• Deliver mainly quantitative output

Frictionless Sales professionals:

• Do customized informational outreaches
• Break silos with marketing and customer success colleagues
• Use an all-in-one platform for all data in a central location
• Work systematically in setting priorities
• Deliver primarily qualitative output

2. To what extent do you match your approach to your customer's needs?

Traditional Sales approach:

• Provides information available during business hours
• Is characterized by many emails back and forth to schedule a meeting
• Knows firm negotiation based solely on self-interest
• Steers toward a sale

Frictionless Sales:

• Offers information available 24/7, that is, at any time
• Features smart tools to easily schedule meetings
• Has a transparent process to achieve the best cooperation and price
• Leads to a purchase

3. Companies that make a difference today focus on customer success.

Here, a good CRM is the key to this success. With a good CRM as a foundation, you transform your teams from traditional sales representatives, to sales professionals who are able to completely eliminate friction. But you're certainly already getting headaches: in fact, 1 in 3 CRM implementations fail and half of sales professionals dislike using their current CRM. So the big question is: Which CRM is easy to use and powerful enough to scale my sales process and grow my business?

Fortunately, today you don't have to choose between "easy" and "powerful. You can choose both. HubSpot acts as an all-in-one platform that gives you a centralized view of all customer data. This allows you to provide the consistent and personalized experience your prospective customers expect today at all stages of your commercial process. HubSpot's software enables your team members to organize their processes frictionlessly with efficient tools to manage contact with leads into valuable customer relationships. Gain insights that lead to effective coaching of your team members and playbooks to easily get new colleagues up-to-speed.

The CRM systems we all already know are cumbersome, not user-friendly and totally uninspiring for tomorrow's sales professionals. The companies that make a difference take the customer experience as the starting point for growth. So remove the friction from your current processes, break through the silos and centralize your future customers' data.