CEO and author J.B. Wood believes that with the right data, you can put the right offer in front of the right buyer at the right time with a high degree of accuracy. Has he discovered the recipe for the perfect sales moment?
CEO and author J.B. Wood believes that with the right data, you can put the right offer in front of the right buyer at the right time with a high degree of accuracy. Has he discovered the recipe for the perfect sales moment? On today’s Voice of Value episode, we continue our conversation with J.B. where he describes a new customer engagement model his company TSIA calls LAER – Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew. A frequent industry speaker on the topics of business outcome engineering, X-as-a-Service (XaaS) business models, and transformations in the traditional customer-supplier relationship, J.B. explains this four-stage maturity model and gives you the secret to a never ending cycle of building accounts. That cycle is based on Process, and that’s what owns today’s customer.
J.B. also describes the Consumption Gap that exists in many B2B relationships and explains that success happens when supplier and customer outcomes are aligned. World-class companies are transitioning from a transactional model to a LAER model. Listen to today’s episode to understand why.
J.B. Wood is president and CEO of the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), the leading association for today’s technology and services organizations. An author and frequent industry speaker on the topics of business outcome engineering, X-as-a-Service (XaaS) business models, and transformations in the traditional customer-supplier relationship, J.B. is redefining the Sales process in the age of cloud and managed services.
[1:57] J.B. says we can accomplish amazing things by caring deeply about something that we used to consider the customer’s responsibility — adopting the value of the asset.
[3:15] What did Amazon teach us? With a high degree of accuracy, and with the right data, you can put the right offer in front of the right buyer at the right time. That’s the perfect sales moment.
[4:40] Listen to J.B. define LAER.
[10:13] When asked, “Who owns the customer?” the answer has always been the salesperson. But J.B. says that is changing. Who owns the customer now? Listen here.
[21:16] LAER cuts across every customer-facing task, so who owns the responsibility for redesigning the go-to-market model? At some companies everyone wants to own it, and at other companies no one wants to own it. Listen to why J.B. thinks it’s essential that the right person owns this architecture. (CROs and CCOs, get your resumes ready.)
[24:16] J.B. says there are still a lot of people who shy away from the discussion of business outcomes. J.B. believes there will be more contractual relationships that rotate around outcomes in the future, and more outcome-based incentives.
[26:28] J.B.’s passion is around insights and research. Here he explains the Consumption Gap, which he says exists because the incentives of the suppliers and the incentives of the customers are not lined up.
“For large technology firms – this podcast offers invaluable insights for sales reps, sales managers, those who own their firm’s go to market strategy – and strategic business leaders across the enterprise. YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS.
JB Wood with the Technology Services Industry Association knows the world of enterprise sales has been turned on its head, for good. RIP customer RFPs and vendor PowerPoints. Self-educated customers have no need for reps who ‘show up and throw up.’ What matters now are “last mile” conversations, as sales reps morph into quarterback-consultants and clients double down on business outcomes. Tech companies have to pivot from focusing on “winning the deal at any cost” to securing at-risk revenue over the long haul – by obsessing about delivering industry-specific customer value/success.
More things change, the more they are the same: I cut my teeth on high-stakes enterprise software sales in the late 90s, when it seemed sales reps couldn’t set foot in an account without an army of vertical industry experts to back them up. Great model for building credibility with the client – and for driving sales costs through the roof and tanking profitability.
Now, Wood says it’s inevitable that sales will become more verticalized (client value/outcomes have to be industry-specific). But you’ve got to thread a tight needle to provide the industry expertise your clients demand, without overlaying so many resources onto sales that your costs doom the business from the start. Maybe it should come as no surprise: Wood says companies today that are farthest along in mastering this efficiency game were born in the cloud.”