Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Qualification | MEDDICC
Most sales organizations have been affected by the economic downturn, which has resulted in rapid changes in buyer behavior, business priorities and decision criteria. You may be experiencing stagnation of growth, declining win rates or struggles with inconsistency in sales performance.
Depending on your organization's current challenges, a sales qualification and/or messaging transformation can improve your sales teams’ ability to increase average deal size and win rates consistently. One initiative complements the other, and the true power of each is maximized when they’re executed together.
We’ll break down the potential positive outcomes of each type of initiative below, then explore how using them in conjunction can multiply their impact.
Why Sales Messaging:
In order to consistently meet and exceed revenue goals, sales organizations need their reps to execute effective sales conversations that focus on more than just features and functions. To stand out in today’s economic environment, it’s critical for sellers to convey the big-picture ROI of their solution in every sales conversation. Consistent, high-value deals are achieved by a powerful and scalable messaging strategy. Without it, your sales organization may suffer from these challenges:
- Unable to repeatedly gain access to key decision-makers
- Sales reps are constantly being delegated down to someone they sound like (lower in the organization)
- Sales reps are too focused on selling features and functions instead of aligning solutions to the buyer’s biggest problem
- Sales reps are consistently unable to determine the buyer’s biggest problems
- Sales teams have inconsistent or low win rates
- Sales teams often fail to preserve margin and resort to discounting
- Sales teams are stuck at a maintenance level, unable to grow deal sizes by upselling or cross-selling offerings
When established and implemented correctly, value-based sales messaging can solve these problems for an entire sales organization. Creating a buyer-focused messaging framework can enable sales reps to speak in the terms of solving the most pressing business problems for their buyer. Today’s buyer isn’t motivated by bells and whistles; they’re motivated by clear ROI for their business goals. Having a value-based messaging framework allows sales reps to structure their conversations in a way that focuses on the ROI of your solution.
During discovery, a custom messaging framework should enable reps to uncover a buyer’s biggest problems and align the differentiation of your solution with what’s important to that buyer.
Through a sales messaging initiative, organizations create sales messaging frameworks and resources that enable their sales teams to create high-value opportunities and move them into the pipeline. But, in order to efficiently qualify, progress and close these opportunities, sales reps will need effective sales qualification tools and coaching to help them keep value in the final deal at close.
Why Sales Qualification:
Sales qualification tools like MEDDICC help organizations solve the following challenges:
- Sales reps spend too much time in deals that they don’t belong in and are likely to be lost to competition or “do nothing/do it internally”
- Sales teams spend too much time trying to establish accurate forecasts and not enough time spent on uncovering new opportunities and building pipeline
- Sales teams frequently end up discounting at the end of the quarter to save deals and make forecast
- Forecast changes throughout the quarter and is often wrong, revenue is not predictable
- Missed opportunities for higher-value deals because managers and reps lack criteria to strategize early on for how to maximize value and influence
- Reps struggle to find champions who have the influence to sell their solution internally
- Insufficient ways to test the strength of deals
For MEDDICC to successfully enable sales organizations to get as close as they can to 100% forecast accuracy and maintain a healthy pipeline, managers and sales leaders need to instill consistent use of the custom qualification criteria.
Customizing MEDDICC to your sales organization enables it to establish the consistency needed to provide a clear view of the pipeline at any given time. From there, managers and sales leaders play the largest role in ensuring that this consistency is ingrained into the organization and maintained by sales teams, new hires, and organizational leaders.
Through ongoing training, customized tools, and manager deal coaching, sales organizations can build consistency around their qualification criteria. Using these criteria, reps can perform more efficiently and focus all of their time on the highest-value opportunities.
How MEDDICC & Value-Based Sales Messaging Work Together to Secure High-Value Deals Consistently:
In a budget-conscious economy, messaging and qualification work together to provide a clear picture of the buyer organization throughout the sales process. Great value-based messaging provides access to the customer’s biggest problems, while qualification helps to determine the strongest path forward.
Once deals are in the pipeline, sales teams use MEDDICC as a qualification overlay to identify new (and important) buyer decision criteria from multiple stakeholders, drive consistent discovery and qualify in the highest value opportunities. With MEDDICC, sales teams can constantly evaluate where they are in the deal, fill in gaps, maneuver multiple decision makers, and test champions in a way that drives accurate revenue forecasts, improving sales leader confidence in the pipeline.
As qualification identifies gaps in deals, sales reps can use value-based messaging to fill them and stay audible-ready for new buyer concerns. We define ‘audible-ready’ as being ready to respond and adapt to what the customer communicates about their genuine business needs. This ability is crucial to move deals forward at a high value. This is especially true now, when multiple high-level decision-makers are involved due to economic concerns and tighter budget constraints. Sales reps can avoid their negotiations coming down to just price by instilling relevant value into their sales conversations from the beginning.
A rigorous qualification methodology allows your reps to successfully charge a premium and provides a repeatable process they can use to perform similar sales activities in their other deals. Soon, sales teams will be earning more revenue per rep, and increasing their average deal size. The repeatable framework of messaging and qualification enables a high level of efficiency, enabling your sales team to make the most of every deal and ensuring every resource is spent on revenue-driving activities.
Make Revenue-Driving Changes & Make Sure They Stick.
The ROI value your organization will receive from moving forward with a sales initiative will directly relate into how well it was implemented into your organization. The best solutions draft into your sales process and support your reps ability to execute in every conversation. Find a partner that will not only help you move forward, but help you drive the consistent and repeatable outcomes you need to scale revenue growth across your organization.
