We all know that buyer behavior has changed, and we’ve all participated in many, many discussions about the implications of this behavior change for B2B sales organizations. Technology presented buyers with an unprecedented opportunity to bypass traditional mechanisms for acquiring the knowledge needed to make purchasing decisions. Sales forces had to take a step back at that point and ask themselves: “If we’re no longer face-to-face dispensers of information, who are we?”

That question lit the bonfires of social selling, created panic in the marketing department, and led to the creation of a lot of unnecessary corporate Facebook pages. Now the smoke has cleared, and what we can see is that everyone is using LinkedIn, everyone has a general understanding of what is and is not possible to achieve with Twitter, and much of the tried-and-true wisdom of professional selling remains intact.

As the world of buying and selling continues to change around us, and even as it becomes more difficult to navigate, the sales professional has a compass that will always point to true north: focus on the customer. And the sales organization should provide each salesperson with a framework to support this customer-at-the-core approach in the form of a sales process, a sale methodology, and coaching and training to offer every member of the team a path to high performance. This is what I mean by tried-and-true wisdom: a philosophy, a process, a methodology and a path forward.

We’ve said that technology presented buyers with an unprecedented opportunity. Now let’s consider a corollary: An unprecedented opportunity also exists for sales organizations—the opportunity to greatly improve forecast accuracy and funnel confidence through the automated collection of sales behavioral data.     

Most large sales organizations struggle with unsatisfactory forecast accuracy and funnel confidence, and the advent of the Internet, social media, mobile, etcetera hasn’t changed that.  But the ability to use auto analytics to capture and analyze the entire range of sales behaviors and activities promises a level of efficiency that has never been achievable before.

The key to this new standard of efficiency is transparency: making all sales-related activities of all members of the sales team visible, measurable and ultimately quantifiable. Many sales managers already take their people through a post-deal debrief, for both won and lost deals, to figure out what worked and what didn’t. The potential now exists to assess the presence or absence of success factors while there is still time to influence the outcome.

Transparency represents an upheaval that will be wrenching for some salespeople and liberating for others. But once transparency is woven into the culture, sales organizations can expect to see a higher win rate and a lower turnover rate. Salespeople will discover that there is no longer any place to hide, but there is also no longer any need to hide.

Joe Galvin, one of the sales world's most prominent thought leaders, is now a Salesforce Sales Community contributor. This community is a new collaborative networking group for sales executives sharing best practices and innovations in sales leadership. We encourage all salesforce.com customers to join Joe and other top sales thought leaders in the new Salesforce Sales Community. 

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