Measuring your effectiveness as a sales organization is a critical component to becoming best-in-class. One of the most important ways to benchmark the success of an entire sales organization is to gauge your sales team’s preparation for high-level business conversations with prospects.
In fact, recent research by Steve W. Martin published in Harvard Business Review’s blog demonstrates the importance of sales preparedness. Martin found that more than 80 percent of those surveyed thought their outside sales teams were well-equipped to exceed quota, compared to 57% of their inside sales team and just 40% of their channel sales.
Inside Sales and Channel Sales provide critical support to the success of a sales organization. If one of these departments doesn’t drive their revenue numbers, the whole organization suffers. The salespeople in these areas need to be just as prepared to communicate value and articulate differentiation, as their field sales counterparts.
How does your sales team articulate the value and differentiation of your offerings?
The ability of your sales team to effectively tie your solutions to business problems and demonstrate how those solutions are better than your competitors’ is a critical component to driving success in complex B2B sales. A fortified value message enables your sales team to uncover complex needs and effectively articulate how your solutions meet those needs, no matter what type of customer they encounter.
Tight alignment behind that value message across a company’s various departments enables consistency during the customer conversation, and throughout the sales process. It lays the groundwork for success within the entire sales organization.
The best way to drive alignment is to make the value message sales consumable and demonstrated in a way that sellers can readily use it in real-world customer conversations, whether they be outside, inside or channel salespeople. If you don’t have a mechanism that enables your sales team to repeatedly articulate value and differentiation, your sellers will falter in a complex sales environment.
Is there consistency in your value message across your sales teams?
How audible-ready are your inside, outside and channel sales teams to answer the following questions?
- What problems do you solve for your customers?
- How do you specifically solve these problems?
- How do you do it differently than your competition?
- What’s your proof?
If you’re not confident that your salespeople can deliver consistent answers to these questions, it’s time to make a change. Drive impactful sales conversations by investing in the preparedness of your sales team.
