There’s two sides to this equation. On the one side it’s through the eyes of the customer. What’s your story, how does your story paint a picture of the growing problem your solution solves, speaking to both the emotional and logical sides of your buyers brain. See my previous blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/b2c-martech-growth-value-creation-alex-abbott-f-isp-
And on the other side it’s through the eyes of your people, sales, marketing, consulting and customer success, those people that spend time with your customers, prospects and partners. They must be able to tell the story effectively, at the same time tailor it to convince stakeholders of the differentiating value your business provides.
Bring these two things together in harmony and you have a winning combination of positioning value and driving a winning sales (buying) process that delivers predictable results.
So let’s explore this through the eyes of the rep, delivering on an experience that differentiates you from the competition. After all, 53% of the B2B purchase decision is weighted towards the experience the buyer receives. It’s as much about how you make your buyer feel, do they trust you, do they believe you and have you done a good enough job to quantify the differentiating commercial value you and your team will deliver to them, post signature.
I’ve found to do this most effectively, there’s a series of activities you must do. However, before we get to those if you are already following a Social Interaction & Influence methodology and using off-site sales intent data to identify which of your target accounts are expressing interest in what you do, you are half way to achieving your objectives!
Developing your personal brand prior to engaging your prospect shows you are an expert in your field and therefore more likely to earn trusted advisor status, and knowing which accounts are showing intent, qualifies where you and your team should spend their time - to increase speed to pipeline, these are table stakes!
Getting your prospect excited enough to mobilise a change within their organisation, isn’t easy. It requires a robust process tailored to both the internal rep and sales team behaviours as well as the buyers behaviours.
Some considerations to bear in mind when developing your buyer centric sales approach.
- Personal brand - walking digital corridors will be the #1 skill brands must hire for in 2023, to be successful. No longer do buyers want to be sold to, they want information from experts they feel they know and can trust. Encourage your buyers to walk towards you by empowering your team to take ownership of their personal brand, both passive and active versions of themselves, whichever platforms your buyers are on.
- Network growth - build your strategy for network growth and motivate your teams to get behind it. People buy from people, and any revenue facing person knows the value of their ‘black book’ so why not encourage the growth of business networks across your teams, consistently building relationships at scale for your organisation.
- Create and curate content - be visible within your target accounts & audience, and not because you’ve hounded your prospect so many times they avoid you, but because you write about topics they care about, you make an effort to share information about yourself, that helps your audience get to know you better, without having met you. And when they do meet you, they feel like they know you, and more importantly, feel like they can trust you!
- Define your success milestones - there are a few key elements of any deal, that if you focus on, will increase your close rate and ARR. Qualifying your buyers ability to mobilise change, defining purchase criteria effectively and building consensus, to name just a few. Teaching your buyer how to navigate these steps effectively will pay dividends.
- Tools to teach effectively - it’s not easy for a rep to teach a buyer a new perspective, learning new techniques and practising them will give them confidence to do this successfully. Storytelling, whiteboards, directional questioning are all important techniques to support doing this effectively.
- Guided sales path - define your rep and buyer behaviours against each stage in your process, include behaviours across other teams influencing the deal, internally and externally, this could well be a long list, so map them out and ensure each one is supporting the intended objective, driving action that increases probability of success.
- Measurement - it’s too easy to get caught up measuring the wrong things for sales performance, aka lag measures. Ensure you identify the lead measures, the high impact activities that will increase your teams probability of success. Don’t feel like Sisyphus, and feel the eternal punishment of doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. Your milestones, if chosen correctly, will make for good measures on a leaderboard. The same goes for any performance based activity, for social selling, measure the things you / your team are in control of, that have the greatest impact on achieving the outcome.
- Coaching - if your guided sales path is designed well, then there’s your coaching tool for your reps. Coaching to high impact behaviours, behaviours that increase the probability of success. Things like, qualifying your buyer type effectively, are they they type of person that wants to drive change, that wants to deliver success to the organisation and be the hero. Do they have enough human capital within the organisation to be heard, to be supported to drive change within a certain time frame. Does your guided sales path ask the right questions to guide the sales rep and the buyer through this qualification? Does your rep know what to do to qualify this buyer effectively and provide a differentiating experience at the same time?
Managing and coaching to buyer and rep behaviour is the biggest predictor of close rates for MarTech and Marketing Services businesses, and threading qualification through-out the sales process - qualifying-in more than qualifying-out, having an approach, that should the initial qualification of the buyer be successful, the experience that follows is one based on teaching, guiding and supporting the buyer through their complex purchase process, whatever might be required to achieve a successful commercial outcome for both parties.
For a friendly chat or to swap notes on the above, DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter.com/Alex_Supero or drop me a call/WhatsApp +44 7951 220113
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