5 Mental Shifts to Increase Your B2B Sales ROI

Would you believe me if I said there is a single factor that, if changed for the better, can increase your B2B sales ROI more than ever before and sustain it for the long haul?

Not only is it true, but unless you change this factor, you’ll never live up to your full sales potential.

The factor I’m talking about is your mindset. By mindset, I’m talking about the way you think about sales. Because, the way that you think about sales frames your entire sales approach, and your sales approach creates the way you sell altogether.

To help you get in the right headspace and prove just how important mindset is, I’m sharing 5 mental shifts that’ll change the way you think about sales.

Go ahead, keep thinking about sales in all the wrong ways, but you’ll:

1. Hit sales plateaus
2. Get run over by competitors
3. Survive instead of thrive

Ready for your mind to be blown? With the right headspace plus action, sales success is inevitable.

Why Most Sales Teams Have a Low Sales ROI

I could write an entire list of reasons why most sales teams have a low B2B sales ROI. By a low ROI, I mean that the amount of effort they put into selling isn’t reflected in their results.

For example, a sales team might spend hours putting together the perfect cold calling strategy only to not generate any new B2B leads.

Sound familiar?

While I could write an entire list of different reasons why most business-to-business sales teams have a low ROI, just about every case traces back to one single factor: The sales representatives don’t approach sales with the correct mindset.

Not having the right mindset is like having a petri dish for other sales-related problems to grow from.

Moreover, as a result of having the wrong mindset, sales teams inevitably manifest a cesspool of other problems for themselves, which ultimately hold them back from having a high ROI that reflects their efforts.

Thoughts Create Your Reality

How does having the wrong mindset inevitably create a cesspool of other sales problems?

Your mindset is the accumulation of your thoughts, and your overwhelming thoughts create the emotions you feel. The emotions you feel direct the actions you take, and the actions you take determine your outcomes.

Therefore, if you’re approaching sales with the wrong mindset, you’ll think about sales incorrectly. Because you don’t think about sales the right way, you’ll feel negative emotions. As a result of those negative emotions, you’ll take improper actions that’ll manifest poor results.

For example, let's say that you approach sales from the mindset of sales being hard and complex (which it certainly isn’t). You’ll start to think thoughts like, “Selling is complex, so I need complex solutions to overcome it”, and as a result of those thoughts, you’ll start to feel overwhelmed. As a result of those feelings you’ll take improper actions, which will ultimately manifest in poor results.

There’s a very real reason why people say that thoughts create your reality, and it couldn’t be more true for B2B sales!

Thoughts Impact the Way That Your Sales Team Functions

As the sales leader you are, your B2B salespeople look to you for guidance on how to act.

If you’re taking the wrong kind of actions thanks to having the wrong mindset, your sales team will follow your poor lead.

As a result, you’ll have an entire team of people taking the wrong actions. What started out as a poor mindset suddenly balloons into an entire sales team making all the wrong moves.

What could possibly go wrong?

Thoughts Impacts the Way That B2B Customers See You

Finally, your mindset is palpable and infectious. You might think that your mindset is something concealed, but you’d be completely wrong to think so.

The hard truth is that the thoughts you think create the emotions you feel, and because your emotions are so infectious, the emotions you feel impact the way that others see you as a sales professional.

How many times have you walked into a sales pitch and the presenting sales rep was so obviously nervous that you could feel their radiating anxious energy in the air? Didn’t their anxiety inevitably infect you and change your perspective on the sale?

The bottom line is that the emotions you feel–which are created by the thoughts circling around in your mind–inevitably impact the way that your potential customers see you. If you want them to see you in the most positive light, then you need to think the right thoughts that’ll create the most positive emotions.

Sales Mindset: How You Should Be Approaching Sales

I’ve used the phrase “the right way to think about sales” several times now, so at this point you’re probably thinking, “what is the so-called right way to think about sales?”

I actually gave the answer away already: The correct and accurate way to think about sales is to think of it as something simple. If you believe that selling is simple, then you’re thinking about sales the right way. Because you think about sales the accurate way, you’ll approach sales the right way and have great results!

On the flip side, if you think about sales the wrong way like most people do, you’ll approach sales the wrong way. By approaching selling the wrong way, you’ll inevitably have poor results.

Anyone who drives a car knows that it’s a simple task. However, if you think of driving as something complex and difficult, stepping into the driver's seat will rev up your anxieties. Instead of relaxing you’ll feel stressed and ultimately not drive as well as you should be driving.

You’re probably thinking, “This all sounds too easy! How can suddenly thinking about the selling process as something simple automatically change my ROI?”

Consider this: Just about every online guru will tell you that selling is complex. They do this to convince you that you need them and their product or service for success. However, what they only end up doing is making selling even more complex than what it already is, which only gets you into an even bigger mess!

I’m telling you that sales is simple and that if you approach it as such, THEN IT WILL BE SIMPLE.

Thankfully, each of the 5 mindset shifts below will help you get in the correct headspace of “selling is simple!”

Why Is B2B Sales Hard?

As I said before, approaching sales with the wrong mindset creates a petri dish of other problems to potentially manifest. Hence, why sales feels so hard for most sales representatives.

If only they knew that the key to increasing their ROI and making sales easier had nothing to do with changing up their sales techniques and everything to do with the way that they think about sales!

How to Make B2B Sales Easier

Making B2B sales easier is another mindset matter. Thankfully, the same mindset shifts that increase your sales ROI also help make selling easier for you.

There are two keys to making sales easier by shifting your mindset, including:

1. Creating habitual thought patterns; and
2. Combining thoughts and actions.

First, most of our thought patterns are tightly wired into our brains. Therefore, making mindset shifts is a matter of rewiring your brain. The way that you rewire your brain is by being consistent with your thoughts until they become automatic.

Second, having the right thought patterns isn’t enough. What is enough is combining the right thoughts, patterns, and actions together. At the end of the day, you can have the best mindset in the world, but it doesn’t matter unless you put it to work.

Furthermore, if you work to increase your sales ROI by applying the mindset shifts below, sales will also naturally get easier for you. The key to success though is making the mindset shifts habitual while combining them with action!

5 Mental Shifts to Increase Your B2B Strategy ROI

If you’re ready to increase your B2B sales ROI and make selling easier in the process, start here with these 5 mental shifts. These shifts are important because they’ll change the way you think about sales, from seeing it as something difficult to believing the truth that it is simple!

With the right mindset, your sales approach will naturally shift to help you increase your ROI.

The key to making these mental shifts work for you is by making them habitual thoughts and combining them with action.

The correct way to think about sales is to see it as something simple! If you think selling is hard, then it is hard. On the other hand, if you think that selling is simple, then it’s simple. 

And if you want to increase your sales ROI while making selling easier for yourself, then I suggest believing the truth that sales is simple!

1. B2B Buyers Want You to Be the Expert

Your B2B buyers want YOU to be the expert who tells them what they need to do to solve their pain points.

The reasoning behind this is simple: They’re paying you for your expertise to solve their problems, not the other way around.

Many salespeople totally overthink this. They believe that stepping up as the expert who they are and telling prospects like it is will somehow turn them off.

From now on, think of yourself as an expert doctor who listens attentively to a patient’s concerns, asks in-depth questions about their pain points, and then diagnoses their problems while offering no-brainer treatments.

Instead of seeing yourself as just a sales rep, start seeing yourself as an expert who prospects rely on for business success.

Prospects Don’t Understand Their Pain Points

Contrary to popular belief, your qualified leads don’t understand their own pain points. If they did, they would have already addressed and solved them.

Therefore, if you don’t step up as the expert who you are to help them, then they’ll never get the help they need!

From now on, instead of acting as if prospects know what they need to overcome their pain points, you must step up to the plate and tell them like it is! Unless you do that, then their pain points will eventually lead to their demise.

2. B2B Buyers Want You to Make Their Life Easy

Your B2B leads want to have the fastest, easiest buying process possible.

Why?

Because, why wouldn’t they?

They know they have a pain point that, if left unfixed, will wreak havoc on their business, so of course they would want to pick a solution as soon as possible.

Unfortunately though, sales reps overcomplicate selling which only makes the buying process longer and more complicated than it needs to be. All this does is turn potential customers off from making buying decisions.

Instead of making your potential customer’s life more difficult than it needs to be, make it easier on them. The way to do that is to start seeing selling for what it is: simple!

Customize the Buyer’s Journey

A recent Salesforce survey revealed that 69% of decision-makers expect Amazon-like buying experiences, such as personalized recommendations.

A better way of putting this is that your prospects want you to make their life easier by telling them exactly what they need in their special circumstances.

Rather than thinking that it’s your job to ask prospects what they need, it’s your job to understand their unique problem and then come up with a customized solution for them!

Just like how Amazon curates special recommendations for individual consumers, you need to pay personal attention to customers in the same way.

Speed Up the B2B Sales Process

Finally, longer sales cycles are bad sales cycles. If you want to make your potential customer’s life as easy as possible, then make the B2B sales cycle as short and sweet as possible.

Because many sales teams believe that selling is complicated, they curate the most long-winded sales cycles ever.

In the end, all this ends up doing is making the buying process longer for customers which turns them off.

Rather than developing long-winded cycles, keep your cycle short and sweet while leaving room to cater to each prospect’s specific needs.

3. Targeting Decision-Makers During Lead Generation Is Best

How often does this happen to you: You do an initial round of cold call outreach during the lead generation phase of the selling process. You get a representative of one of your target B2B companies on the phone. They like what you have to say, but instead of setting up a formal sales meeting right away, they say to you, “I’ll have to check with my superior and then get back to you.”

Suddenly, the sales meeting goes into limbo.

Here’s the thing: You can easily avoid situations like this if you target decision-makers at your target B2B companies.

While this makes simple sense, many sales representatives avoid connecting with these top stakeholders because they believe that it’s improper conduct to do so. They’ve bought into the social construct of, ‘You can’t just go knocking on an important person’s door and expect them to respond!”

Unfortunately for the sales rep, that bottom-up mentality does them nothing good.

That said, if you find yourself with a bottom-up mentality, it’s time to shift over to the top-down mentality.

Have a Top-Down Mentality Instead of a Bottom-Up Mentality

When you were a kid and wanted to have a sleepover with a friend, who would you go to first? More likely than not, you would go to the person in charge of the decision-making: your parents.

This same logic applies to sales, but like I said, most salespeople have bought into the preposterous narrative that going directly to the decision-makers is somehow improper.

However, I’m here to tell you that if you have a bottom-up approach, then you’re just overthinking.

At the end of the day, decision-makers are just people; they’re not on some higher, untouchable level, and if you think they are, then you’re just overthinking. This is what having a top-down approach is all about!

If you want to increase your ROI and make your sales life easier, shift to a top-down mentality by establishing touchpoints of communication with decision-makers right off the bat of the selling process.

4. B2B Selling Is Challenging, Not Complicated

If B2B selling feels complicated, it’s not because selling is complicated. Rather, it’s because you’re making it complicated!

As I said before, the truth about sales is that it is simple, and believing this truth paves the pathway for it to be simple.

On the other hand, believing the opposite of the truth that selling is complicated paves the pathway for it to be complicated.

Moreover, if selling turns out to be a complicated mess, it’s because you believed it was complicated and, thus, made it complicated for yourself.

This isn’t to say that sales isn’t challenging. The truth is that while sales is simple, it is challenging.

By this, I mean that while the pathway towards sales success is certainly straightforward, that doesn’t mean that you won’t have to deal with challenges along the way, such as filling your sales pipeline with great leads and hitting quota every month.

From now on whenever you run into a sales-related challenge, don’t sit back to yourself and think, “Dang, this is complicated.” Instead, think to yourself, “This is just another challenge along the pathway.”

It’s these small shifts in the way that you think that make all the difference in your outcomes.

5. Shoot for Greatness, Not Perfection

Perfection doesn’t exist, yet many sales teams consistently demand perfection from themselves.

Ultimately, striving for perfection gets them into a mess: When they realize that they haven’t achieved perfection, they feel as if they’ve failed. Because they feel as if they’ve failed, their demeanor changes and they become a worse salesperson.

Instead of demanding something that doesn’t exist, what you should demand of yourself is greatness. Once you start striving for greatness, you will mind success from it.

Success Comes From Greatness

Greatness comes from setting standards for yourself that are realistic to your abilities and then doing the absolute most you can to reach those standards.

Greatness is gradual while perfection is a final destination; when you strive for greatness, what you’re doing is striving for continuous improvement!

Once you start striving for continuous improvement, you’re committing yourself to steady, gradual improvement that is sustainable.

While it sounds cool on paper to say that you want to be perfect, it only ends up backfiring. 

Instead of choosing to believe in something that doesn’t exist, shift your mindset to one of greatness. Doing so will not only increase your sales ROI, but also make you much happier in the process.

BONUS: My Prospects Aren’t the Reason Why I Can’t Close Deals

How often do you think to yourself, “If only my prospects weren’t so distracted, then I would have closed the deal,” or, “If only my prospects would have responded sooner, then I would have closed the deal!”

News flash: If you find closing deals extremely difficult, it’s because it’s your fault, not the prospect’s fault.

While it’s initially a hard pill to swallow, the truth is that there’s power in taking accountability for your losses.

How?

The moment you take accountability for your losses is the moment you take back your power. Instead of being at the mercy of your prospects, you’re in control of your outcomes.

On the other hand, if all you do is blame prospects for your losses, then your potential rests in their hands.

If only salespeople knew that failing to close deals was their own fault, then they might take back their power to become better sales professionals and increase their ROI. There is power in accountability!

Final Thoughts on Mental Shifts to Increase Sales Strategy ROI

Contrary to popular belief, you are not at the constant mercy of your potential customers because you have control over your mindset. Because you have control over your mindset, you control your sales approach, which ultimately influences your customers to make purchasing decisions.

Bottom line: Combining these 5 mental shifts + action is a simple shot to a higher B2B sales ROI that’s sustainable for the long run.