Categories: Company Alignment | Economic Change | Mission Critical Success Series
This blog is part of our Mission Critical Success Series, where we dive into the strategies leaders are using to execute on mission critical sales objectives during times of economic change. Each week, we will cover a different essential area of sales effectiveness. Check our blog next week for the newest installment, or subscribe for updates straight to your inbox.
With recent uncertainty and shifts in the economy, price-based decisions are becoming more common. More sales organizations are competing for less budget, creating a challenging market for sellers. Leaders can support their sales teams by providing them with a repeatable value-based framework for sales messaging and elite customer care that will intrinsically link their solution to the customer’s success.
This guide explores the actions that sales leaders are taking to fortify the pipeline, increase sales resiliency and gain a greater understanding of the value they provide to customers. Below are three focus areas for leaders who want to help their sales teams become indispensable to buyers to continue hitting critical objectives, even through economic change.
Align your Sales and Delivery Teams
Start by aligning your organization behind a common goal: tangible success outcomes for the customer. This could require a mindset shift for sellers who are often zeroed in on getting the contract. Leaders can develop this customer-focused culture by implementing a value framework that is rooted in customer ROI. When budgets are tight, customers aren’t buying based on features and functions. Implement a process for Delivery teams to collect and package results that sellers can use to tie your solution to reduced cost or increased revenue.
Once your team is aligned on value-based messaging, ensure that your content and processes support that alignment. From the first sales conversation, there should be a consistent story about what value is being provided to the customer, and that story should continue throughout the engagement. FM Managing Director Brian Walsh explores this topic in a recent conversation:
Focus on creating a seamless handoff between Sales and Delivery teams. Customer Success should be equipped with thorough sales discovery and ready to pick up where they left off. Something as simple as maintaining this forward momentum ensures efficiency, adds value and improves the buyer experience.
Create Regular Client Touchpoints
Enable your sales team to stay as close to customers as possible during times of economic change by establishing a cadence for QBR’s and check-ins that actually provide value to the customer.
When buyer challenges are rapidly evolving, increasing the frequency of these touch-bases can help your team better understand what the customer and other similar organizations are facing. Not only is each meeting with the customer an opportunity to remind them of the value you provide and build the foundation for an upsell to help address new needs, it also provides you with data and proof points to use to close new deals.
As you know, customer relationships aren’t developed overnight. Integrating these behaviors into your organization’s sales cycle is a process, but is vital to remaining top of mind for customers during this time. You don’t want to be reduced to a line item when budget conversations are happening.
Continue to Provide Value
Along with increased customer interaction, elite sales leaders are incorporating continuous learning into their product offering. The sale doesn’t end after the initial purchase, and continuous discovery should play a role in maintaining customer relationships. Training, product updates and technical support all allow the sales team to interact with different roles at the customer organization and determine how they use their product. These interactions can reveal inroads to new levels of value for existing deals and help continuously evolve your value offering.
Force Management has implemented a continuous learning journey, which enables our partners to get extended value from their engagement as well as provides a deeper level of insight into how to better serve them. Whether you provide an integration tool or simply make your Customer Success team available for learning opportunities, continuous learning is instrumental in ensuring the success of engagements by driving adoption and providing future opportunities for value.
Make Customer Care a Competitive Advantage
Elite leaders track and align to changing buyer priorities by getting hands-on with uncovering challenges felt by existing customer organizations. Start by creating an intentional cadence around nurturing those relationships and consistently elevating your value. The result is a more robust pipeline, more customer-focused discovery and a sales process that provides top-notch customer experience from start to finish. Getting serious about taking great care of customers isn’t an overnight process. Learn how elite sales organizations identify opportunities to improve customer connection and further differentiate their value. This guide gives top strategies for making your solution indispensable in a shifting economy.
