Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Transformation | Sales Leadership
Today's leaders have an uphill battle to successfully tackle revenue growth goals. Externally, marketplace dynamics have shifted and buyers have redefined why and how they buy. Internally, revenue organizations have to adapt and align their message in a way that communicates their value in today's dynamic selling environment.
Strategies for growth and evolution should drive alignment across all your revenue teams. Start with a buyer-focused messaging framework that’s proven to help revenue teams align behind company goals and support front-line sales success.
Everyone in your organization should have the same answers to four essential questions. Alignment around these answers will help equip your revenue teams with a consistent message around the value you bring to the market.
Aligning the sales organization around new ways buyers are purchasing your solution requires a shift in the sales approach, one that equips sellers to focus on their buyers and be relevant in sales conversations.
One of the most critical ways to align customer-facing teams on a new GTM approach is by ensuring the entire sales organization has a consistent understanding of the business value their solution provides and their competitive differentiation in their marketplace. This alignment starts with the executive team. When leaders generate cross-functional agreement on the value drivers and differentiators that are top-of-mind for their most influential buying audiences, they lay the groundwork for creating a consistent, buyer-focused sales message.
Four Questions Your Revenue Teams Should Answer Consistently
Creating company-wide alignment on a custom sales message requires everyone to have consistent answers to these four essential questions:
1. What problems do you solve for your customers?
To close high-value accounts and meet the KPIs of a strategic GTM shift, what business problems will your customer-facing teams need to uncover and attach to? Can your leadership team and middle managers provide consistent answers to this question? Any shift that requires salespeople to get their buyers to see an additional or evolved value in a solution starts with sales leaders enabling their revenue teams to focus on their buyer’s complex business problems.
For example, if a company shifts to a consumption-based pricing model, how are they equipping sales to land high-consumption accounts and ensuring successful adoption within them? If your company is launching new solutions, how are they equipping reps to sell on the business value of those solutions to ensure they can sell high in buyer organizations and increase cross-sells, up-sells, etc?
When salespeople don’t have a defined way to uncover high-level business problems and map them to your company’s solution, they will likely leave money on the table or lose forecasted opportunities altogether.
Elite sales organizations are aligned across the company on the problems they solve for their customers. As a result, marketing messages, sales messages, and delivery messages are all customized to the critical business challenges that your solution addresses. Leadership teams who put in the work to gain executive agreement on the business problems their solution solves for customers can equip their revenue teams with a buyer-focused message to repeatedly increase margins and win rates.
2. How do you specifically solve those problems?
As leaders generate agreement on the business problems their solution solves, they also need to gain agreement on the specifics. For example, saying their solutions protect data throughout a customer lifecycle is good, but it is likely similar to other messages from competing organizations. How specifically do their solutions safeguard data? How do they do it in a way that is meaningful for the customer?
Clearly defining the specifics around how a company’s solution solves business problems and how the solution will be implemented into a customer’s organization supports the sales team's ability to:
- Increase win rates, margins and long-term account success
- Ensure successful adoption after the sale, reducing loss of market share and costly setbacks for the company (i.e., customer success challenges, returns, price cuts, bad reviews, etc.)
- Generate long-term monetization within each account (i.e., renewals, cross-sells, up-sells, higher consumption rates, etc.)
Alignment on how your company can deliver its solution ensures consistency in front of a buyer and drives efficiency as opportunities move through the customer engagement process.
3. How do you do it differently than your competition?
A salesperson’s ability to prove the value of your solution is what gets buyers to sign a deal with a high price tag.
Every company today probably competes against another company with similar offerings. No matter how strong your products are in the market, if your revenue teams can't show how you are better or different than your competition, you'll struggle to win deals and validate a premium price.
Elite sales organizations know what makes their solutions better and different from their competitors. These organizations equip their reps to articulate their solution’s differentiation in a way that has meaning to the economic buyers. Building a solution’s competitive differentiation into a sales messaging framework also supports salespeople in influencing buyer decision criteria in a way that favors their solution over a competitor’s.
4. What is your proof?
This point may seem obvious to any C-suite executive leader, but there are major differences between companies that maximize the effectiveness of their proof points and companies that don’t have a process to support sales in validating their solution’s success.
Elite sales organizations have a defined process around capturing the value they create for customers – because they understand the need to validate results in a way that resonates with customers. These companies have a system for measuring success. That system typically centers around creating proof points that tell the story of how the company's customers achieved positive business outcomes and KPIs directly tied to their solution. While your leadership team works to align on these four essential questions, consider setting aside time to refine your proof point process.
Generate Alignment on a Buyer-Focused Messaging Framework
When company leaders commit to generating consistent answers to the four essential questions, they reap great rewards.
Agreement on the fundamental components of a value-based sales conversation lays the groundwork for your revenue teams to be successful. But the work doesn’t stop with alignment on your messaging. The organizations that dominate the market have top-down alignment on the desired activities throughout the sales process.
Our latest eBook, Command What’s Next: A Guide to Sales Evolution, breaks down the three crucial areas for alignment in the current market and what leaders can expect through each company growth stage. Get new strategies for designing your next growth initiative.
