Sales Best Practices: Enabling a Challenger Sales Team

Paul Liberatore was the Senior Sales Enablement Manager for U.S. and Canada at Welch Allyn, a leading global healthcare solutions company. Liberatore has more than 20 years’ experience managing enablement and e-learning. Force Management began working with Welch Allyn in 2012 in an effort to improve overall sales effectiveness and generate more revenue per seller. 

The competitive medical marketplace is dealing with unprecedented fiscal challenges. As providers of all sizes continue to maneuver through health care reform, keeping your sales team prepared for the next hurdle can be a daunting task.

Best-in-class sales organizations respond to this by developing tools and processes that create opportunity, even in a formidable environment. At Welch Allyn, we see this current healthcare landscape as just that – an incredible opportunity to help our customers succeed in their new reality.

The Need for Change

We’ve always had a high-performing sales team, but the changing marketplace meant we needed to focus on the new challenges our customers were facing. Our sellers wanted tools that enabled them to have more consultative, buyer-centric sales relationships. We wanted consistency, reliability and a sales team that was audible-ready to effectively articulate the value and differentiation of our solutions.

I believe the best sales enablement initiatives “draft-in” to your current best practices. If you wipe the slate clean every time you launch a new program, you’ll be left with one-off achievements rather than long-term success. That’s why our work with Force Management was so successful. They worked with us to build on our current initiatives, while giving us the tools necessary to drive repeatable results.

What We Were Doing: The Challenger Sale

Welch Allyn was one of the early adopters of the Challenger® selling model and acted on it swiftly, rolling it out to our sales team more than six years ago. (The Challenger® sales methodology was pioneered by The Corporate Executive Board Company).

As many of you know, in The Challenger Sale, the key characteristic that distinguishes a Challenger from other types of sellers is their ability to succeed in a struggling economy. A Challenger rep succeeds no matter the economic conditions because they challenge their customers to rethink their business approach. 

As we dealt internally with industry changes, we liked the idea of building this type of sales force. Our Challenger® concepts and practices were well-defined and much more mature than many sales organizations that have simply read the book. Our sales team was already comfortable with it, but we needed a process behind it. We needed a mechanism to operationalize the Challenger concepts with our entire sales team.

Enabling our Sales Team

In order to facilitate the Challenger® Model for the whole sales team, we needed a messaging framework that would help every seller --those who had the characteristics of a Challenger®  seller, as well as those who didn’t naturally have the Challenger DNA. As a sales enablement leader, I needed a way to enable all our sellers to be more Challenger-like.

Regardless of their DNA, we knew that all of our sellers would benefit from the ability to ask great discovery questions, uncover customer problems and articulate the value of Welch Allyn solutions to their prospects.

Command of the Message® was the “how” and the methodology we used to enable our sellers to:

1. Teach customers to see the value in a Welch Allyn solution
2. Tailor conversations that link our solutions to our customer’s biggest pain points 
3. Leverage value and differentiation to control our customer conversations and preserve margins in the final stages of the deal.

The Value Messaging Framework® was the missing link that helped our sellers articulate value drivers, differentiators and proof of tangible results. The framework’s components combined with an adoption mindset, made our initiative a success.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Value Drivers

We brought together a core team of leaders (e.g., sales, marketing, product development), and determined what truly drove value to our buying audience. Because we had this cross-functional agreement, there was immediate buy-in when we rolled our framework out to our sales team. The resulting alignment created a natural consistency in how our sellers were articulating value, and attaching that value to our customer’s goals.

2. Differentiators

In a competitive marketplace, our sellers needed to effectively communicate what made our solutions different and better than other vendors. Tying our differentiators to what was most important to our customers gave our sellers the talking points to use in those three-foot sales conversations.

3. Proof Points

Showing a pattern of measurable results can be the key component to sealing a deal. We launched an initiative to gather proof points to demonstrate our success with current clients, and prove that our products deliver the value we promise. Developing a database of these references helped sellers position value over the entire sales process. By providing the proof of past success, customers could see the positive business outcomes they might also achieve from our solutions.

4. Reinforcement and Coaching

When we began the process of rolling out our Value Messaging Framework®, we had a plan for adoption. We received tremendous buy-in from our marketing and product teams, as well as vigorous support from our executives. This helped us continually reinforce the tools and processes we had put into place around our sales messaging. New hire and on-going manager training helped our front-line managers excel and reinforce our sales enablement initiatives.

5. Sales Consumable Information

Our sales consumable focus was a key component to creating a consistent language that our entire company could use. The tools we developed were practical. Our reps could easily use the value framework in the field and apply its components to different buying audiences, regardless of the sales situation.

Where Strategy Met Execution

We want our customers to look to Welch Allyn for solutions to their most critical problems. Our messaging framework outlines value drivers, differentiators and proof points that tie customer challenges with our solutions. Command of the Message® helped us facilitate best practices, while driving repeatable success.

To be successful, sales enablement leaders have to build on what’s working and have the know-how to fix what isn’t. In your organization, you likely have a number of things you’re facilitating. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Is this initiative giving my sellers the tools they need to consistently articulate the value and differentiation our solutions provide?”

If the answer is no, you need to figure out what will.

Our sellers, across the board, are now audible-ready to articulate the value and differentiation of a Welch Allyn solution. They have higher-level conversations, sell larger deals and are better prepared to meet the demands of selling in the medical marketplace of the future.