B2B Sales - NPS Fallacy For Growth

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B2B Sales - Services
NPS Fallacy for Growth
Upside
LowRiskHigh
Growth
CAPEX $
Digital IT
Status Quo
OPEX $
Traditional IT
Downside Potential Growth Service AboveBelow
Sellers Drive
Reality
Zone of
Wasted Sales
& Effort
or Diminishing
Returns
RetentionLoss
NPS Fallacy for Growth
• B2B sales for services has become complex, with reduced OPEX and longer sales
cycle.
• Sales conversation is primarily around price, functionality and risk mitigation,
sales win/loss conversion ratio is high as BATNA for buyer is minimal.
• NPS or CSAT is seen as the benchmark to drive retention and new growth in sales
portfolio.
Today
Conclusion
• Retention Business is about status quo or risk averse for reasons like buyers own complexity, lack of confidence in sellers, longer
decision making process, information overload, their own biases and others.
• NPS is a good measure to drive risk averse retention business, but every incremental effort for retention will lead to wasted sales
effort and will drive diminishing returns with no upside potential.
• Growing sales portfolio, means driving change (sales triggers) in buyers domain, which could mean change in supplier, venture in
risk prone territory, making sense of information overload shared as thought leadership (not commercial insight) and removing
their own (buyer) biases and breaking thier territorial mindset.
• In Nutshell NPS is a good measure for retention business. For growing business, that needs different mindset, different information
sharing and different selling approach and sales training. Product centric sellers are ahead of service centric sellers in this game.