SBI’s Newest Report Expands on Resources to Drive Commercial Productivity

SOUTHLAKE, TX, Apr 19, 2024 – SBI, the go-to-market (GTM) growth advisory, is pleased to announce the latest expansion to its research on commercial productivity with a report titled Revive Commercial Productivity by Easing Buying Friction.

Key Findings:

• Executives are more involved in purchase decisions, with 78% of buyers saying their decisions were often overruled by senior executives.
• More executive scrutiny, stakeholders, and internal bureaucracy are creating friction and slowing deals, with purchases taking 12% longer than buyers anticipated.

In early 2024, CEOs named buyer factors as the top threat to commercial productivity. To understand how buying behaviors are undermining commercial productivity, SBI surveyed 600+ B2B buyers who recently completed or attempted to complete a purchase and supplemented that data with one-on-one interviews with CEOs, CROs, and COOs about their teams’ experience working with customers. From those data points, the paper offers recommended actions that GTM leaders should take to improve commercial productivity.

“In most cases, current commercial strategies aren’t wrong, but they aren’t enough,” says Nick Toman, SBI chief strategy and product officer and chief architect and co-author of the Challenger Sale. “Our research identified multiple ways commercial strategies need to evolve to meet the needs of today's buyers and drive productivity.”

The report suggests four ways commercial strategies must evolve.

1. Demonstrate the organizations’ ability to evolve with buyers as their conditions change.
2. Help buyers anticipate how the change will impact their needs to avoid the distractions created by re-learning, re-aligning, and redeciding.
3. Expect, track, and engage executive and ad-hoc stakeholders to avoid late-stage slowdowns.
4. Invest in commercial talent and in-person engagements to improve relevance and trust.

This is the latest piece of research that builds upon SBI’s ongoing efforts to produce resources dedicated to helping organizations diagnose problems impacting their commercial productivity and optimize their GTM functions to drive revenue growth. A previous paper, titled Delivering Sales Velocity in Today’s Market, featured groundbreaking research that explored the relationship between seller approaches and deal velocity and size.

Other resources that GTM leaders could use in tandem with this research include SBI's Talent Map, which provides companies with a structured way to evaluate their commercial organization, identify what competencies define their top sales performers, and develop scalable training and enablement to replicate these competencies across their sales team.

About SBI

SBI is a Growth Advisory offering collaborative consulting, advisory services, and a world-class sales training and commercial productivity practice. Our team of strategic implementers has owned and operated the marketing and sales functions at the world’s most successful growth companies. Our approach is based on an intimate understanding of the buyer-seller journey. Working as an extension of our client’s teams, SBI applies relevant data and insights to deliver impactful strategies that generate significant ongoing top-line growth. Visit https://sbigrowth.com to learn more.