Categories: Sales Discovery Process | Sales Enablement Technology | Buyer Alignment | Sales Qualification
One way the most successful organizations outperform their competitors is by equipping customer-facing teams with the tools to navigate modern buying committees. In recent years, the stakeholders in B2B tech and enterprise software purchases have grown, which means increased buyer scrutiny.
Customers are hyper-focused on ROI, and multiple parties approve deals through different criteria. What does this mean for revenue team leaders? In order to maintain timely sales cycles and hit revenue targets, it’s critical that leaders enable their sales teams to navigate these complex deals. Here are three strategies to enable your sales force to consistently communicate ROI in multilevel deals.
1. Enable Great Discovery Through Messaging
In a conversation on the Revenue Builders Podcast, tech leader Michael Cremen discussed how CFOs are now involved in every deal. This means that every seller - not just the top performers - needs to be able to consistently execute at the level of the economic buyer.
We’re increasingly seeing the need for multiple champions in today’s complex deals. Buyer organizations are making decisions by committee, which means sellers are navigating multiple decision makers with cross-departmental interests and criteria. In order to avoid stalled or collapsed deals, sellers need to be able to identify influential players in multiple departments early on in the deal cycle and convert them into champions by communicating value that is relevant to their specific pain.
Sales leaders can ensure consistency of the discovery process in every deal by defining a powerful value message and providing sellers a customer-focused framework for delivering that message. It will be crucial in every deal going forward that sellers can extract high-level insights on the customer organization from just an initial conversation. Discovery should open the door not just to higher-level decision makers, but to stakeholders in other departments early in the deal. When sellers can access these parties and communicate value specific to their decision criteria, they unlock the potential for multiple champions. The top-performing organizations are the ones that have equipped their sellers with a value-messaging framework they can flex up and down based on the multiple personas they'll need to persuade.
2. Encourage Active Qualification
A qualification standard like MEDDICC provides sellers and managers with a unified vision of what good looks like in every stage and element of the deal. Continuous qualification provides visibility into the political landscape of a deal: who has influence, who their connections are, and how their priorities might differ or intersect.
In an increasingly complex sales environment, it’s crucial that potential champions are qualified as they are identified. You can’t afford for sellers to waste time trying to convert non-committal coaches into champions. In the era of multiple high-level decision makers, a successful champion a) has power and influence within their company; b) has a vested interest in the success of the deal and c) actively sells your solution internally. Using the standards outlined in a qualification framework, sellers must determine the eligibility of a champion as well as identify opportunities to convert and enable the champion. When your whole sales team is on the same page about what defines a great deal and champion, they know what to look for when exploring the political landscape of the buyer’s organization.
The power of the MEDDICC approach to qualifying comes partly from the common language it offers for describing deals and the roadmap it provides for manager coaching. The most sophisticated revenue teams have MEDDICC tech-enabled in their CRM, offering visibility that fosters opportunity coaching and helps the post-sale teams who may need to qualify the same network when the time comes to secure the renewal.
3. Utilize Relationship Mapping Technology
The ability of sellers to map the political landscape of the buyer organization is a game changer in today’s sales environment. It enables sellers to identify the following within the buyer organization:
- Who owns the required capabilities
- Who they - and competitors - have leverage with
- Who would rather do nothing or do it internally
When sellers can identify who owns these potential challenges to their deal, they can create a plan to address and influence those criteria. In a complex selling environment, this process is crucial to avoid stalling, maintain forecast accuracy and stay competitive.
How can leaders ensure that relationship mapping is happening in every deal? The most efficient way is technology. Introducing a relationship mapping tool into your team’s sales cadence ensures that the right questions are being asked every time, promoting the collection and sharing of deal data to further enable the manager-seller relationship.
Opportunity Manager® by Force Management is a Salesforce integrated tool that helps ensure consistent application of your core methodologies at every stage of the sales process. The Relationship Mapper feature mitigates blind spots and missed opportunities by facilitating consistency in data collection and helps sales teams visualize what’s missing. Higher availability and transparency of deal data facilitates more productive coaching that progresses deals forward. This podcast discusses how relationship mapping with Opportunity Manager helped project44 accelerate their growth trajectory, achieving bigger wins and shorter sales cycles.
Watch a demo of the Relationship Mapper on Opportunity Manager to see how it can help your customer-facing teams navigate complex buyer landscapes.
Consistently Close More High-Value Deals with Multiple Champions
As deals continue to face higher scrutiny and more sign-offs, sellers who are able to deliver a powerful value message at multiple levels of the buyer organization will command more revenue. Equip your sales team with the language and fact-finding strategies they need to remain competitive in today’s market. Learn how modern messaging tactics can drive more predictable revenue for your organization in today’s unpredictable environment; download this guide to see how other organizations did it.
