The One Document Every B2B Sales Professional Should Be Reading Right Now

If you are a B2B sales professional who aspires to be more than simply a product-pusher, you already know that you need to be as informed and up-to-date as possible about your customer’s business, including their financial performance, the state of their business, and their strategies and initiatives to compete and make money.

I’ve long advocated the importance of studying your customer’s annual report as an indispensable source document for a lot of this information, but at this current unprecedented stage of our world economy, there is a source that is even more timely and valuable.

This just-finished second quarter from April through June is one of the most consequential and revolutionary three months that any of your customers or prospects have ever experienced. They’ve all had to revise their expectations, reformulate new strategies to compete and survive, change their plans, and radically reconsider investments and purchases. In selling terms, they have different problems, opportunities, changes and risks.

If you’re selling to those companies, wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible about these changes, so that you can speak more intelligently and find ways to address them? Wouldn’t it be great to have an unfair advantage over competitors who are not as well informed as you are?

Fortunately, over the next few weeks there will be trove of documents published that will contain a lot of this incredibly valuable information. I’m referring, of course, to quarterly earnings reports. The most detailed document is the form 10-Q, which for larger companies must be filed within 40 days of the end of the quarter. It contains a narrative description of events that impacted financial results, as well as updated information on business conditions and risks. But most public companies also conduct an earnings conference call with investors and analysts well in advance of the release of the 10-Q, and these may contain a lot of valuable additional detail.

If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get an appointment with your dream customer, turmoil may be your friend, because they may be open to new ideas, especially if you are the first to show you know what they’re going through. If you’re working with established customers, your competitors may be trying to do the same thing to you, so it pays to stay ahead of them. Just like any treasure map, the first to get there wins.

P.S. If you only deal with private companies, you might think this article is not helpful. However, I would strongly recommend that you read at least one quarterly statement from your customers’ competitors who are public. If they’re in the same industry, most of the same information will apply.