What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

I recently wrote about the need for B2B organisations to transform their marketing from a cost centre to a revenue centre. It's a topic that is attracting an increasing amount of attention, and I'm delighted that Dan McDade of PointClear has agreed to share his experiences of this critical transformation is a guest article for the Inflexion-Point blog. I think you'll enjoy his perspectives - over to you, Dan:

If you are a B2B sales leader, you may want to look at this. CSO Insights have just published their 2012 Sales Management Optimisation study.  As always, the conclusions from their latest research make compelling reading.

We want our customer to agree with us, right? So why am I suggesting that the last thing you want is for your customer to start by sharing your point of view - at least in the first call? Because there’s a hidden problem if that first conversation goes too smoothly.

How can you simply and succinctly explain what you do to a potential prospect or other interested party, and make them want to learn more? How can you ensure that your story is consistently communicated in every marketing message and in every sales conversation? The key is to make the story simple and uncomplicated - the sort of story that can be laid out in three short sentences and told in the time it takes to ride in an elevator (or a lift, to us Brits).

Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of Selling Power - in a characteristically provocative piece - recently predicted that the number of sales people in the United States could decline from the current 18 million to around 4 million by 2020. He quoted a Gartner report that projected that 85% of interactions between businesses will be automated, without any need for human interaction.

The length of the average sales cycle is a concern for many B2B sales leaders, and with good reason: successfully shortening average sales cycles enables sales organisations to increase sales capacity without having to increase sales resources. From everything that I’ve observed, the key to systematically shortening average sales cycles lies in selling smarter, not harder - and I’d like to share 3 proven ways that could help your organisation achieve the same:

John Wanamaker - described by Wikipedia as the father of modern advertising, and a pioneer in marketing - is famously and frequently quoted to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. Now, you might think in today’s digital age that it would be easier to determine the return on your marketing resources - and it is, but only up to a point. In fact, as we’ll see, the real problem is often much worse than Wanamaker supposed.

Who (or what) does your company really compete against? For the majority of B2B product or service offerings, the answer is unlikely to be restricted to a list of conventional “competitors” that look broadly similar to your own organisation. In fact, the key to achieving your full potential probably lies in redefining your sense of who or what your opposition looks like when it comes to your prospect’s time and attention.

CSO Insights have just released their eagerly-awaited annual review of the state of sales performance - reflecting detailed inputs from over 1,500 sales organisations from around the world. Their latest report suggests that B2B sales leaders could and should do more to equip their sales people to succeed through more relevant and effective training.