I recently re-read The Challenger Sale. 

Granted, I don't work in sales but everybody sells - whether it's a product, a service or your personal brand. 

I also believe that sales skills are essential for any consultant because they teach you to think differently when you're trying to provide solutions, are doing presentations and pitches or are simply talking to a customer about a difficult situation.

Especially when it comes to solutions, you need to help your customer get to the solution on their own by probing them with questions and guiding them rather than point-blank dropping the solution onto them because that's not how they'll truly adopt it - they need to come up with it on their own so that it sticks and so that they firmly believe in it. 

Back to the book - it lays out the ideas and strategies behind some of the most successful sales teams and sales reps and how they perform the job in today's world of sophisticated buyers.

Most of the selling approaches used nowadays are no longer effective because buyers are fed up with being interrogated without receiving any value.

There's a better approach to successful selling that the book promotes - the Challenger model.

Why the Challenger Sales Approach Works?

In only 14% of organisations, the PR and communication department is going through a process of digital transformation. 

This seems rather odd to me compared to 42% for the marketing and advertising department. 

14% to 42% is a big gap. 

I recently discovered one of the reasons for this. 

I flew to Copenhagen early this month to attend an internal training for a rather large organisation where I was asked to be their keynote speaker and specifically present on digital communication and digital communication trends. 

As it turns out, fear is one of the key reasons why the PR/communication department is behind when it comes to digital transformation.

Comms professionals fear technology. They fear the unknown. They fear experimentation and failure. They fear change. 

But as I said in my presentation, fear only holds us back. 

Digital transformation requires change. Yes, change can be scary and change can create resistance but change is good because change means progress.  

If you run an agency (or any business for that matter), you know how important sales is. After all, it's how you win new clients, expand your service portfolio and generate revenue. 

Through my experience as an agency consultant at HubSpot, I've found that every agency has different sales, service and account management processes. Unfortunately, many don't even have processes which is, put simply, bad business practice (or no business practice?). 

Don't believe me? 

I'll give you the hard facts. 

We recently surveyed over 1,400 agency professionals from around the world to uncover the biggest sales challenges and published those in a new report called 2019 State of Agency Selling. 

Through this survey, we found that 46% of agencies only have a somewhat defined sales process, while the next largest group of 31% doesn't have a defined sales process at all. 

I consider myself very lucky to have some super intelligent and talented friends. 

Kareem and his brother Aamen are among them. Kareem worked with me at HubSpot and Aamen was at Google. After gathering some great experience at those software companies they both set out to start their own business around content and are doing a terrific job at it. 

I was honoured when they invited me to participate in their sparerooms talk show. 

We chatted about:

• public relations,
• my Inbound PR book and how small business and entrepreneurs can take on some of the tips,
• the writing and publishing processes while working full-time and how others can do it too,
• building a personal brand online and offline, 
• and building a partner program for smaller companies.

Check out the video for the full conversation, there are some fun moments as well!

Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority that cannot be isolated to just the marketing or IT department. Everybody in the organisation has a role to play. 

I've just finished reading the 2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation report which clearly illustrates how disruptive technologies continue to impact organisations and markets and how digital transformation as responsibility is moving beyond IT and is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement but there's still a lot of work to be done. 

As the report describes, digital transformation means modernising how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy where customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and organisational culture are the clear drivers that empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Let's take a look at some of the key findings that stood out to me while reading the report.

The Top 4 Learnings about the State of Digital Transformation