Strategic Sales Focus: Choosing Where to Compete in B2B Sales
Table of Content
Introduction
The old sales playbook was not elaborate. Dial more numbers. Send more emails. Work harder than the other people. The measure that was to be used was activity and the reasoning behind this appeared correct: the more effort, the more results.
The playbook has stopped being useful in the current B2B sales.
Enterprise buyers have transformed. Hundreds of outreach attempts are made towards them each week and they have been conditioned not to respond to volume-oriented outreach tactics. The decision committees are bigger, sales cycles have prolonged and buyers do a lot of research before dealing with vendor. In this context, hard work brings about a decreasing payoff.
The sales people who always make their numbers in the modern time have an alternative way of doing things. They are selective on where they compete, selective on which deals to take and disciplined on what they reject. This is a strategic focus between the predictable performers and those who are focused on metrics of activity but have not produced results.
To operationalize this in your team, align your execution with advisory services.
Why Strategic Focus Beats Activity Volume
The traditional sales management focused on the activity measures since it was simple to quantify. Logged calls, emails, meetings booked - all these figures gave an idea of what the salespeople were doing on the day-to-day basis. The expectation was that the greater the activity, the greater the revenue would be realized.
This assumption breaks down in enterprise sales for several reasons.
First, enterprise buyers react to relevance, and not persistence. A prospect who is contacted with the tenth generic outreach of the same company does not get interested all of a sudden. They become annoyed. The buyer has been conditioned by the salesperson to disregard them.
Second, all opportunities are not equal. A pipeline full of unqualified deals takes massive effort to work and has random results. Time spent on the low-probability opportunities directly offsets time available on the high-probability ones.
Third, enterprise sales involves finite resources. Sales engineers, sponsor call executives, legal review to contract review functions are all limited functions. Sprinkling them on to too many mediocre deals diffuses their impact on the deals that are important.
The move towards activity to strategic focus needs the posing of different questions. Rather than asking oneself how many touches they can make in a week, the question to ask oneself is where can I actually win?
Key Insight
The shift from activity to strategic focus requires asking different questions. Instead of measuring how many touches a salesperson can make in a week, the relevant question becomes: where can they actually win? This reframing transforms sales from a volume game into a strategic discipline where deal selection matters as much as deal execution.
Understanding Your Winning Scenarios
Strategic sellers build good insight on their areas of strength and why. This is not hunch or conjecture, it is pattern recognition which is founded on actual results.
Begin with the closed-won deals of the previous year. Find patterns in a variety of dimensions.
This is what your dream customer looks like, as a result of this analysis not in theory but in fact where you are actually winning.
One trend that numerous sellers find is that they have situations where they win. You might always win when it comes to replacement of legacy systems that cannot scale, but lose when it comes to greenfield implementation. Or you win when using companies with private equity that are under pressure to increase their margins, lose when there is no urgency amongst buyers.
These trends are used as a criterion of selection. You can easily evaluate the extent to which a new opportunity suits your winning situations when it materializes. Good matches should be pursued to the end. Wretched matches should be cured with sincere qualification discussion which could disclose that it need not be sought at all.
| Dimension | Questions to Answer |
|---|---|
| Segment | Which industries, company sizes, and growth stages appear most often? |
| Problem | What specific pain points did these buyers have? |
| Trigger | What events or changes prompted them to seek a solution? |
| Competition | Who else did they evaluate, and why did you win? |
| Champion | What roles typically championed your solution internally? |
The Discipline of Saying No
Most sales people are uncomfortable with selective pursuit. Incentive structure and training promote the concept of saying yes to all opportunities. A larger pipeline appears more desirable during a review meeting. Refusal of the opportunities is tantamount to giving up.
However, high performers know that by saying no to bad opportunities they can say yes better to good ones.
What about going after a deal that you are not likely to win? You make time on discovery calls, demos and prepare proposals. You take supporting resources of sales engineering and leadership. You bring the possibility in your projection and inventing untrue assurances about revenue in the future. When the deal finally gets closed with a rival company, you not only lost the deal but also the time and money you would have used in other areas.
The bad deals become even more expensive. Every hour spent wrongly moves away your potential to serve those prospects on which you may earn.
Developing discipline around deal selection requires clear criteria for what you will and won't pursue. These criteria are supposed to include your winning situations and company priorities.
When opportunity has been proved to not satisfy a number of requirements, the correct reaction should be to have an honest chat with the prospect. Give the reason and explain that you would not best fit their scenario. This strategy creates credibility when it is not generating immediate revenue. Vendors who acted in terms of honesty about fit are remembered by the prospect; their reputation is paid back in the future.
| Pursue | Decline or Deprioritize |
|---|---|
| Clear executive sponsor with budget authority | No identified champion above middle management |
| Quantified business problem with urgency | Vague pain without timeline or consequences |
| Competitive positioning on your strengths | Feature comparison where you're at parity |
| Defined buying process and timeline | "We're just exploring options" |
| Strategic fit with your solution's core value | Heavy customization required to fit |
Economic Thinking in Deal Selection
Activity metrics are a measure of what you did. Economic metrics determine the value that you have created.
Revenue does not give complete information on the quality of the deals. A massive deal which had to be highly discounted and implement services and custom code might end up costing more than it makes. A smaller deal on full margin with typical implementation and high growth potential can be even better.
Best salespeople consider opportunities in the economic perspective that goes beyond contract value.
Consider gross margin first. What is the percentage of the contract value that is profit after direct costs? Transactions that involve a lot of professional work, bespoke development, or purchased third-party additions can create a splash on the top line and little margin.
The cost of customer acquisition recovery is important in the knowledge of the sustainability of deals. It is that the payments of this customer will take them more than the sales, marketing and onboarding expenditures they used to acquire them? The long CAC recovery deals are a waste of resources that could be used to embarrass other opportunities that have shorter payback periods.
Long term value is shown by expansion potential. Will this customer increase his use, or increase products or increase to other business units? Land-and-expand deals can seem minimal in the short run but produce much value over time.
Non-financial benefits are taken into consideration in strategic positioning. Does the acquisition of this customer generate reference, competitive displacement or new segment? Certain deals are worth investing in more than they are directly economic due to the capabilities they allow.
Important
Every deal has hidden economics beyond contract value. A large deal requiring heavy discounting, custom development, and extensive professional services might generate impressive top-line revenue while destroying margin. Conversely, a smaller deal at full margin with standard implementation and strong expansion potential often creates superior long-term value. Strategic sellers evaluate opportunities through this economic lens before committing resources.
Alignment Before the Sale Prevents Problems After
One of the most expensive mistakes in enterprise sales is closing deals that can't be delivered as sold. This occurs in cases where salesmen are left to work without set limits on what can be promised and what should not be promised.
The repercussions are manifested following signing of contracts. Implementation finds out that promises need functionality that is not there. The customer success discovers that anticipated results cannot be attained using conventional methods. Finance knows that custom work is killing expected margins. The client that thought he/she was getting something gets a different one, and this contaminates the bond and jeopardizes a renewal.
Strategic sellers avoid such troubles by knowing their limits when selling them.
Each sales organization is supposed to have clear policies on what is to be sold without checking, what is supposed to be checked with the internal approval and what is not available at all. These guidelines need to include pricing flexibility, customization commitments, implementation schedule and the feature roadmap promises.
Bring in the right stakeholders at the right time when it is necessary to cross regular boundaries due to opportunities. Product managers are to consider roadmap commitments. Leaders of implementation should confirm promises of timeline. Atypical pricing arrangements should be accepted by finance. It is a time consuming alignment with the sales process and it saves a great deal of problems that would cost much more after the close.
Winning in an upright manner implies concluding contracts which you are capable of fulfilling. Agreements that are closed as a result of overpromising will boil up in the short-run but cause long-run issues that will ruin customer relationships, waste company resources, and slow down renewals and expansions needed to sustain growth.
For team enablement on this topic, use sales workshops.
Sharpen Your Sales Focus
Transform your sales approach from activity volume to strategic precision with expert guidance on deal selection and qualification.
Get Strategic Sales ConsultationMeasuring Progress Instead of Activity
Majority of sales metrics follow actions: the number of calls made, e-mails sent, meetings taken, demos given. These activity metrics give an insight into what the salespeople are doing but they do not control the outcomes.
The issue with activity metrics is that they are gauging input rather than output. A salesperson could achieve all activity goals and zero progress in deals of significance. They can be seen as being productive in reports and generating no revenue.
Progress measures are concerned with movement across the purchasing process. They gauge the extent to which deals are actually progressing to close, rather than the extent to which activities are taking place.
Measures of progress such as decision milestone completion are effective. Has the prospect affirmed their issue and its business implications? Have they settled on criteria of evaluation? Are they recognizing all the stakeholders and decision-makers? Have they ascertained budget and schedule?
The depth of engagement with champions is more important than the number of contacts. Does your champion actively sell internally or does he or she passively await your push? Are they giving an idea of internal processes and barriers? Do they coach you on the ways to get around in their organization?
Executive awareness signifies priority of deals. Is this initiative aware of economic buyer leadership? Are they cognizant of the problem and its effects? Have they been in support of doing it?
Economic driver knowledge demonstrates the quality of qualification. How do you know you will justifiably spend this purchase? Have you assisted the prospect in developing the business case? Does the value measure in their terms?
Such measures of progress are much more predictive than counts of activities. A deal that has good pointers and moderate activity will succeed more effectively than a deal with vigorous activity but stagnated progress.
Precision as Competitive Advantage
Precision is the hall mark of strategic sellers. They are also very specific in whom they are addressing, what they are saying, how they qualify, what they are predicting and their execution.
Targeting means being specific, or trying to target the people that happen to fit your winning situations, instead of just spraying outreach to wide lists. It involves the higher conversion rates and better quality of deals on the condition of taking smaller prospect pools.
Being precise is being able to talk to the actual issues and results that are relevant to your target buyers. The generic value propositions water down the influence. Relevant, specific messaging is noise-cutting and attention-earning.
Qualification accuracy implies the use of the same criteria on all opportunities and honest discussions in cases where fit is dubious. It entails sound pipeline that is close to the truth and not optimism.
Accuracy in prediction implies making promises that it will happen with certainty. It dictates knowing what deals will close and what type of deals you wish will close.
Precision in execution refers to the act of keeping to your promises, observing all your deadlines, and providing all the deliverables of the quality your prospects expect. Even the best positioning cannot be spoiled by sloppy execution.
Precision is accurate as in ways that no effort can make. An exact method can be organized, explained to new members of the team and refined as time goes by. Raw effort is still at the personal level and does not last long.
Building Strategic Focus Into Your Practice
Strategic focus has to be practiced and supported by the organization.
Begin by recording your winning situations. Dissect your previous victories in order to determine patterns in portions, issues, activations, competition and champions. Develop clear guidelines on when an opportunity is worth following.
Look through this filter at your existing pipeline. Which possible winning situations fit you? What are long shots that are consuming disproportionate resources? Carry out candid discussions regarding opportunities which need de-prioritization or quitting.
Change your definition of success. Provide progress indicators to activity metrics. Monitor decision milestones, champion involvement and economic driver transparency. Win the right deals and not only win deals.
Invest towards delivery teams. Know what in your organization can be sold. Establish relationship with products, implementation and customer success in a way that you could access them in a proper manner in the sales cycles.
Practice saying no. In the cases when opportunities are not fitting, discuss it directly. These should be in the form of honest evaluations and not rejection. Develop a reputation of integrity that creates value of relationship in the long term.
The Path Forward
The competition of sales is no longer based on effort. Volume-based approaches do not work as buyers are too many and do not have enough attention. The victors in the current B2B sales can be described as those who select their struggles wisely and engage them accurately.
Strategic focus is not working less. It is a matter of channeling your limited time and energy into those areas that you can legitimately win at. It is more about creating reliable income generator engines and not just wishing that doing something will lead to outcomes.
The dilemma of every sales professional is apparent: to which side will you compete and why are you going to win there?
People that answer this question intelligently and take the actions they do will not simply do more dealings they will make better deals. Higher margins. Better customer relations. Further renewals and extensions. A business that is founded on sustainable success as opposed to hustle.
The professional selling that is currently the most significant development is the transition to the strategic focus. Individuals who adopt it place themselves as strategic business thinkers as opposed to taking orders. The resisting ones will see their efforts-based strategies yield a decreasing payoff in a more and more advanced market.
Choose where you compete. Understand why you win. Say no to everything else. That is the way that contemporary salesmen become successful.
For foundational background, see sales process.
Introduction
The old sales playbook was not elaborate. Dial more numbers. Send more emails. Work harder than the other people. The measure that was to be used was activity and the reasoning behind this appeared correct: the more effort, the more results.
The playbook has stopped being useful in the current B2B sales.
Enterprise buyers have transformed. Hundreds of outreach attempts are made towards them each week and they have been conditioned not to respond to volume-oriented outreach tactics. The decision committees are bigger, sales cycles have prolonged and buyers do a lot of research before dealing with vendor. In this context, hard work brings about a decreasing payoff.
The sales people who always make their numbers in the modern time have an alternative way of doing things. They are selective on where they compete, selective on which deals to take and disciplined on what they reject. This is a strategic focus between the predictable performers and those who are focused on metrics of activity but have not produced results.
To operationalize this in your team, align your execution with advisory services.
Why Strategic Focus Beats Activity Volume
The traditional sales management focused on the activity measures since it was simple to quantify. Logged calls, emails, meetings booked - all these figures gave an idea of what the salespeople were doing on the day-to-day basis. The expectation was that the greater the activity, the greater the revenue would be realized.
This assumption breaks down in enterprise sales for several reasons.
First, enterprise buyers react to relevance, and not persistence. A prospect who is contacted with the tenth generic outreach of the same company does not get interested all of a sudden. They become annoyed. The buyer has been conditioned by the salesperson to disregard them.
Second, all opportunities are not equal. A pipeline full of unqualified deals takes massive effort to work and has random results. Time spent on the low-probability opportunities directly offsets time available on the high-probability ones.
Third, enterprise sales involves finite resources. Sales engineers, sponsor call executives, legal review to contract review functions are all limited functions. Sprinkling them on to too many mediocre deals diffuses their impact on the deals that are important.
The move towards activity to strategic focus needs the posing of different questions. Rather than asking oneself how many touches they can make in a week, the question to ask oneself is where can I actually win?
Key Insight
The shift from activity to strategic focus requires asking different questions. Instead of measuring how many touches a salesperson can make in a week, the relevant question becomes: where can they actually win? This reframing transforms sales from a volume game into a strategic discipline where deal selection matters as much as deal execution.
Understanding Your Winning Scenarios
Strategic sellers build good insight on their areas of strength and why. This is not hunch or conjecture, it is pattern recognition which is founded on actual results.
Begin with the closed-won deals of the previous year. Find patterns in a variety of dimensions.
This is what your dream customer looks like, as a result of this analysis not in theory but in fact where you are actually winning.
One trend that numerous sellers find is that they have situations where they win. You might always win when it comes to replacement of legacy systems that cannot scale, but lose when it comes to greenfield implementation. Or you win when using companies with private equity that are under pressure to increase their margins, lose when there is no urgency amongst buyers.
These trends are used as a criterion of selection. You can easily evaluate the extent to which a new opportunity suits your winning situations when it materializes. Good matches should be pursued to the end. Wretched matches should be cured with sincere qualification discussion which could disclose that it need not be sought at all.
| Dimension | Questions to Answer |
|---|---|
| Segment | Which industries, company sizes, and growth stages appear most often? |
| Problem | What specific pain points did these buyers have? |
| Trigger | What events or changes prompted them to seek a solution? |
| Competition | Who else did they evaluate, and why did you win? |
| Champion | What roles typically championed your solution internally? |
The Discipline of Saying No
Most sales people are uncomfortable with selective pursuit. Incentive structure and training promote the concept of saying yes to all opportunities. A larger pipeline appears more desirable during a review meeting. Refusal of the opportunities is tantamount to giving up.
However, high performers know that by saying no to bad opportunities they can say yes better to good ones.
What about going after a deal that you are not likely to win? You make time on discovery calls, demos and prepare proposals. You take supporting resources of sales engineering and leadership. You bring the possibility in your projection and inventing untrue assurances about revenue in the future. When the deal finally gets closed with a rival company, you not only lost the deal but also the time and money you would have used in other areas.
The bad deals become even more expensive. Every hour spent wrongly moves away your potential to serve those prospects on which you may earn.
Developing discipline around deal selection requires clear criteria for what you will and won't pursue. These criteria are supposed to include your winning situations and company priorities.
When opportunity has been proved to not satisfy a number of requirements, the correct reaction should be to have an honest chat with the prospect. Give the reason and explain that you would not best fit their scenario. This strategy creates credibility when it is not generating immediate revenue. Vendors who acted in terms of honesty about fit are remembered by the prospect; their reputation is paid back in the future.
| Pursue | Decline or Deprioritize |
|---|---|
| Clear executive sponsor with budget authority | No identified champion above middle management |
| Quantified business problem with urgency | Vague pain without timeline or consequences |
| Competitive positioning on your strengths | Feature comparison where you're at parity |
| Defined buying process and timeline | "We're just exploring options" |
| Strategic fit with your solution's core value | Heavy customization required to fit |
Economic Thinking in Deal Selection
Activity metrics are a measure of what you did. Economic metrics determine the value that you have created.
Revenue does not give complete information on the quality of the deals. A massive deal which had to be highly discounted and implement services and custom code might end up costing more than it makes. A smaller deal on full margin with typical implementation and high growth potential can be even better.
Best salespeople consider opportunities in the economic perspective that goes beyond contract value.
Consider gross margin first. What is the percentage of the contract value that is profit after direct costs? Transactions that involve a lot of professional work, bespoke development, or purchased third-party additions can create a splash on the top line and little margin.
The cost of customer acquisition recovery is important in the knowledge of the sustainability of deals. It is that the payments of this customer will take them more than the sales, marketing and onboarding expenditures they used to acquire them? The long CAC recovery deals are a waste of resources that could be used to embarrass other opportunities that have shorter payback periods.
Long term value is shown by expansion potential. Will this customer increase his use, or increase products or increase to other business units? Land-and-expand deals can seem minimal in the short run but produce much value over time.
Non-financial benefits are taken into consideration in strategic positioning. Does the acquisition of this customer generate reference, competitive displacement or new segment? Certain deals are worth investing in more than they are directly economic due to the capabilities they allow.
Important
Every deal has hidden economics beyond contract value. A large deal requiring heavy discounting, custom development, and extensive professional services might generate impressive top-line revenue while destroying margin. Conversely, a smaller deal at full margin with standard implementation and strong expansion potential often creates superior long-term value. Strategic sellers evaluate opportunities through this economic lens before committing resources.
Alignment Before the Sale Prevents Problems After
One of the most expensive mistakes in enterprise sales is closing deals that can't be delivered as sold. This occurs in cases where salesmen are left to work without set limits on what can be promised and what should not be promised.
The repercussions are manifested following signing of contracts. Implementation finds out that promises need functionality that is not there. The customer success discovers that anticipated results cannot be attained using conventional methods. Finance knows that custom work is killing expected margins. The client that thought he/she was getting something gets a different one, and this contaminates the bond and jeopardizes a renewal.
Strategic sellers avoid such troubles by knowing their limits when selling them.
Each sales organization is supposed to have clear policies on what is to be sold without checking, what is supposed to be checked with the internal approval and what is not available at all. These guidelines need to include pricing flexibility, customization commitments, implementation schedule and the feature roadmap promises.
Bring in the right stakeholders at the right time when it is necessary to cross regular boundaries due to opportunities. Product managers are to consider roadmap commitments. Leaders of implementation should confirm promises of timeline. Atypical pricing arrangements should be accepted by finance. It is a time consuming alignment with the sales process and it saves a great deal of problems that would cost much more after the close.
Winning in an upright manner implies concluding contracts which you are capable of fulfilling. Agreements that are closed as a result of overpromising will boil up in the short-run but cause long-run issues that will ruin customer relationships, waste company resources, and slow down renewals and expansions needed to sustain growth.
For team enablement on this topic, use sales workshops.
Sharpen Your Sales Focus
Transform your sales approach from activity volume to strategic precision with expert guidance on deal selection and qualification.
Get Strategic Sales ConsultationMeasuring Progress Instead of Activity
Majority of sales metrics follow actions: the number of calls made, e-mails sent, meetings taken, demos given. These activity metrics give an insight into what the salespeople are doing but they do not control the outcomes.
The issue with activity metrics is that they are gauging input rather than output. A salesperson could achieve all activity goals and zero progress in deals of significance. They can be seen as being productive in reports and generating no revenue.
Progress measures are concerned with movement across the purchasing process. They gauge the extent to which deals are actually progressing to close, rather than the extent to which activities are taking place.
Measures of progress such as decision milestone completion are effective. Has the prospect affirmed their issue and its business implications? Have they settled on criteria of evaluation? Are they recognizing all the stakeholders and decision-makers? Have they ascertained budget and schedule?
The depth of engagement with champions is more important than the number of contacts. Does your champion actively sell internally or does he or she passively await your push? Are they giving an idea of internal processes and barriers? Do they coach you on the ways to get around in their organization?
Executive awareness signifies priority of deals. Is this initiative aware of economic buyer leadership? Are they cognizant of the problem and its effects? Have they been in support of doing it?
Economic driver knowledge demonstrates the quality of qualification. How do you know you will justifiably spend this purchase? Have you assisted the prospect in developing the business case? Does the value measure in their terms?
Such measures of progress are much more predictive than counts of activities. A deal that has good pointers and moderate activity will succeed more effectively than a deal with vigorous activity but stagnated progress.
Precision as Competitive Advantage
Precision is the hall mark of strategic sellers. They are also very specific in whom they are addressing, what they are saying, how they qualify, what they are predicting and their execution.
Targeting means being specific, or trying to target the people that happen to fit your winning situations, instead of just spraying outreach to wide lists. It involves the higher conversion rates and better quality of deals on the condition of taking smaller prospect pools.
Being precise is being able to talk to the actual issues and results that are relevant to your target buyers. The generic value propositions water down the influence. Relevant, specific messaging is noise-cutting and attention-earning.
Qualification accuracy implies the use of the same criteria on all opportunities and honest discussions in cases where fit is dubious. It entails sound pipeline that is close to the truth and not optimism.
Accuracy in prediction implies making promises that it will happen with certainty. It dictates knowing what deals will close and what type of deals you wish will close.
Precision in execution refers to the act of keeping to your promises, observing all your deadlines, and providing all the deliverables of the quality your prospects expect. Even the best positioning cannot be spoiled by sloppy execution.
Precision is accurate as in ways that no effort can make. An exact method can be organized, explained to new members of the team and refined as time goes by. Raw effort is still at the personal level and does not last long.
Building Strategic Focus Into Your Practice
Strategic focus has to be practiced and supported by the organization.
Begin by recording your winning situations. Dissect your previous victories in order to determine patterns in portions, issues, activations, competition and champions. Develop clear guidelines on when an opportunity is worth following.
Look through this filter at your existing pipeline. Which possible winning situations fit you? What are long shots that are consuming disproportionate resources? Carry out candid discussions regarding opportunities which need de-prioritization or quitting.
Change your definition of success. Provide progress indicators to activity metrics. Monitor decision milestones, champion involvement and economic driver transparency. Win the right deals and not only win deals.
Invest towards delivery teams. Know what in your organization can be sold. Establish relationship with products, implementation and customer success in a way that you could access them in a proper manner in the sales cycles.
Practice saying no. In the cases when opportunities are not fitting, discuss it directly. These should be in the form of honest evaluations and not rejection. Develop a reputation of integrity that creates value of relationship in the long term.
The Path Forward
The competition of sales is no longer based on effort. Volume-based approaches do not work as buyers are too many and do not have enough attention. The victors in the current B2B sales can be described as those who select their struggles wisely and engage them accurately.
Strategic focus is not working less. It is a matter of channeling your limited time and energy into those areas that you can legitimately win at. It is more about creating reliable income generator engines and not just wishing that doing something will lead to outcomes.
The dilemma of every sales professional is apparent: to which side will you compete and why are you going to win there?
People that answer this question intelligently and take the actions they do will not simply do more dealings they will make better deals. Higher margins. Better customer relations. Further renewals and extensions. A business that is founded on sustainable success as opposed to hustle.
The professional selling that is currently the most significant development is the transition to the strategic focus. Individuals who adopt it place themselves as strategic business thinkers as opposed to taking orders. The resisting ones will see their efforts-based strategies yield a decreasing payoff in a more and more advanced market.
Choose where you compete. Understand why you win. Say no to everything else. That is the way that contemporary salesmen become successful.
For foundational background, see sales process.
Table of Content
