Rounding up the latest in sales research and innovation.
February 24, 2021
The Mastery blog highlighted Resources in February 2021. Resources supplies the R in Maestro’s DRIVE information-gathering framework, aligning with some of the Budget category in BANT selling. But in addition to asking about money, DRIVE strives to uncover the human resources aspect of any decision to buy. Bandwidth, time, and team competencies all factor into whether a deployment will be a success and whether the customer will use and gain value from the product—and go on to renew.
This month’s sales news roundup surfaces some of the most insightful recent reports on resources.
Over the last couple of years, the Harvard Business Review has published numerous pieces that paint a really…interesting picture of budgeting at large organizations. First of all, departments have uneven access to resources to invest in technology. Or they have budget, but they find the technology procurement process too complicated, so invest in off-budget shadow procurement. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that these practices can lead to inefficiencies and, potentially, information security problems.
The issue isn’t insolvable, however. Take, for example, the situation of hospitals. Despite having notoriously byzantine budgeting systems and many barriers to innovation, ranging from regulatory compliance to resistant and siloed leadership, they’ve managed to implement a wide range of technology tools under pressure from the pandemic.
Ok, the prize for most engagingly-titled recent SaaS research goes to this French study: “AQUAMan: An Adaptive QoE-Aware Negotiation Mechanism for SaaS Elasticity Management.” The researchers deploy complex calculations to help businesses negotiate renewals successfully and mitigate client churn by maintaining service levels that are likely to keep customers satisfied. I’m not sure how it got named AQUAMAN, given that the Jason Momoa fanbase doesn’t seem particularly susceptible to churn.
When it comes to preventing churn and maximizing ARR, more and more organizations are turning to customer success professionals. The role of customer success is overlapping more and more with sales as they are expected not only to keep users happy and having a good experience, but also sell them on the value of renewing.
When we are talking about the human aspect of resources, it’s important to think about how the capabilities of everyone on a team work in concert. Different backgrounds, abilities, and perspectives make for the most capable teams. During Black History Month we’re reminded of the long struggles of workers striving to bring about diversity and inclusion. The latest statistics suggest we still have a long way to go until there are equitable resources available to innovative Black founders. Less than 1% of U.S. venture capital went to Black-founded startups in 2020.
Resources are only a small part of the decision-making process for a prospect, and they’re only a small part of sales information gathering. Follow the Mastery blog for the next three months as we journey through DRIVE and investigate Impact, Velocity, and Expectations questions.
Aquaman isn’t going to solve your sluggish sales cycle. But the Maestro Group can. Contact Mastery@maestrogroup.co today.
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