Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Transformation
How can you grow sales revenue when you’re selling a product that simply isn’t a line item in most buyer budgets? Selling a product that represents a new way of doing business demands that salespeople are equipped to be relevant to their buyers’ business-level challenges. When groundbreaking high-tech companies aim to scale sales success, solidifying alignment with their buyer is a key first step and one that can drive company-wide benefits in the process.
Use these insights to shift your company’s mindset with a buyer focus and equip your salespeople to win more, faster.
Empower your sales organization to sell on business value:
When you’re selling relatively new, groundbreaking technology, it’s important to get beyond the bells and whistles of the product. Buyer business value may not be widely understood throughout your company. To grow a company, you need everyone to sell as well as your founder. In these companies, the technical conversation can unintentionally dominate the sales process. While your salespeople (and even your buyers) may be eager to jump into demos about your technology — that jump will likely result in reps missing an opportunity to attach to relevant business pains that demand urgency, funding and long-term solutions.
Without the right mindset and sales consumable tools, reps can repeatedly miss the value-based justification for business purchases in their sales conversations. Not only does this result in losses and low margins for the initial sale, but this missing justification can impact Customer Success’s ability to hit post-sales benchmarks that are critical to scaling the business.
Selling “the art of the possible” demands salespeople find ways to make their solution relevant to their buyer’s business challenges and desired outcomes. Ensure your entire customer-facing organization can map these customer outcomes to your technical solutions in a way that’s meaningful to their buyers. Operationalize a buyer-focused sales language that is agreed upon and used by your entire company.
There are four essential questions every elite sales organization can answer. This consistency lays the foundation for a buyer-focused messaging framework. Review these four essential questions with your cross-functional leaders. Test for consistency and opportunities to improve alignment:
- What business problems do you solve?
- How do you solve them?
- How do you do it better or differently than the competition?
- Where have you done it before?
Answering these questions can help companies generate consistent agreement around the business problems their solutions solve and ensure this agreement is clearly understood by the entire customer-facing organization.
Implement a tool that enables reps to keep the focus on their buyer:
Generating alignment on your executive team’s answers to the four essential questions is the key to operationalizing a consistent language that reps can use to get beyond the technical sale and sell higher.
When shifting salespeople toward a buyer focus, and away from conversations centering on features and functions, your salespeople need easy-to-use tools that enable them to execute. If you’re facing the same challenge, a Value Framework is the proven tool that you’ll want to consider. The Value Framework isn't a script, and it doesn’t take away from your salespeople’s selling style. It’s a navigational aid that helps sales teams engage in consultative conversations focused on value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to their buyer. When the framework is customized to your industry, buyer and sales organization, individual reps can tailor it to their own selling style and leverage it to discover and attach to big business problems. When it’s built in this way, reps can use the framework repeatedly to get their buyers to anchor on a need that opens up a line item and large funding for your solution.
Since it’s critical that you customize the framework, it’s pertinent that before you start to build it, you commit to aligning with your buyer and generating cross-functional agreement on the essential questions.
Sysdig solidified a buyer focus and grew conversion rates by 2x
Sysdig has a unique challenge: they are not just a startup with a new product offering, they are operating in a new market segment altogether. Their solutions empower organizations to confidently secure containers, Kubernetes and cloud data. Given that many firms are in the early days of this platform shift, many of Sysdig's economic buyers are not yet aware of the visibility and security problems they will need to solve.
Sysdig’s Chief Revenue Officer Keegan Riley saw the impacts of this challenge across his global sales organization. To course correct, his team changed their mindset, focusing on executing a buyer-focused sales message and disciplined qualification process. That work drove benefits across the entire company, including:
- Increasing conversion rates by more than 2x
- Cutting ramp-up time by 50%
- Generating skyrocketed gross and net retention revenues
- Driving clear ROI from the engagement
Riley shares how the initiative drove significant results. Watch the story here.
