If you are in sales (or a movie buff), you have undoubtedly heard the phrase “ABC, always be closing,” from Glengarry Glen Ross. That may be a good motivational mantra for selling real estate, but it’s less effective in B2B sales. When dealing with lead qualification for B2B technology, selling it makes more sense to think of ABC as “always be consulting.”

Ensuring customer success is at the heart of consultative selling isn’t just fluff. When you are selling technology, selling the product alone isn’t enough. You must sell a solution for a problem that your technology can solve. That means much deeper customer engagement that delivers an immediate return and more ROI over time. That’s why leading companies invest in customer success.

The old cliché tells us that the “customer is always right.” While the validity of such an old business myth may ring true in many situations, it is ABSOLUTELY true when it comes to learning about who your customer is and what keeps them using your product or service. To effectively master customer success, you first need to truly understand who your customer is. Customer Success is about helping your customers achieve their desired outcomes, and if you don't understand who your customer is, what they value, and the goals they have, how are you going to make them successful?

In our last blog, we talked to Matt Saydah, MarketStar’s senior director of ad and media sales, about his personal experience working with MarketStar as an outsourced services provider during his time at AdRoll and Dropbox, and about what he thinks about MarketStar as an employer. This is the second half of that interview.

Every company wants a faster sales cycle. The challenge with selling technology is that selling complex solutions requires a more complex sale process, which means a longer sales cycle. The length of the sales cycle also depends on your target customer.

Having one of your customers sign on to your team is the highest praise any service company can receive. If we can impress our customers enough to quit their job and become a MarketStar employee, we must be doing something right.

You know that selling B2B technology is hard, and selling B2B enterprise technology is even harder. Enterprise sales, like enterprise infrastructures, are more complex with higher price tags, and that means higher risks for buyers. Making the wrong purchasing decision can have a domino effect that can affect the entire enterprise infrastructure. That’s why enterprise buyers are more cautious and deals require more stakeholders and take longer to close.

The best sales reps are like chameleons—adapting their sales pitch to resonate with the way a client best receives it.