Categories: Front-line Managers | Sales Conversation
If you're selling in a maturing market, it is difficult to fight the commodity perception. There is a competitor always garnering for your market share. In a complex enterprise organization, the challenge for sales leaders is to pull together content, processes and tools so the sales team can make sense of it all and actually execute.
Without that simplification, aligned to buyer need, sales leaders often find themselves with these challenges:
- Too many reps selling features and functions instead of business value
- Too many deals lost to the competition
- Too much discounting because customers don’t see the value
- Deals stay with a technical buyer, and aren’t elevated high-enough in the organization
- Prospects think they already know what you do
One of the fastest ways you can break away from the commodity conversation is to effectively equip your reps to be audible-ready to focus a sales conversation on solving challenges with widespread business impact.
Build Cross-Functional Alignment
Communicating your value and differentiation in a way that resonates with your buyers, requires a shift in mindset by your entire company. You need cross-functional agreement that you aren’t providing product features, widgets and SKUs. You’re providing value that helps your customers achieve critical positive business outcomes that have bottom-line results.
One of the most critical steps you can take in order to break your account teams away from the continual commodity conversations is to ensure that your team is aligned on the value you provide for your buyers, what makes you different from the competition and how you deliver that value and differentiation.
Every function in your organization should play a role in delivering and articulating that value for your customers, not just sales. When you have that alignment, your entire customer engagement process helps to move your product away from being a commodity and towards being a high-level solution with wide-ranging business impact.
Develop a Messaging Framework
A value messaging framework gives your entire customer-facing team a guide to position value drivers and differentiators during customer conversations. It's a navigational aid that helps sales teams engage in a sales conversation focused on value and differentiation, in a way that has meaning to the buyer. It ensures message alignment because everyone is working off the same talking points. When you're trying to avoid the commodity perception, one sales conversation can blow the deal. Ensure you have a mechanism in place that drives message consistency.
Equip Your Managers to Inspect, Coach and Reinforce
Your front-line managers are pivotal components to your sales teams executing in a way that moves pipeline to closed deals. It’s a scary proposition for a lot of leaders – taking managers away from helping selling to coach, but you need to take the time to teach your managers how to coach. You won’t be able to improve your ability to sell wider and higher if you don’t have people who can coach your reps to do it better.
Managers need to be taught how to break a deal apart, determine gaps and coach a rep how to fill them. It's a very different skill than selling. Don't just tell your managers what to do, provide them with "the how" to do it. That way they can stay "on watch" for the commodity conversations and coach reps to having more consultative sales conversations that increase the impact of the deal.
