Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Conversation | Company Alignment
If you’re leading an organization that’s selling a solution, whether in an established market or a new vertical, you’re competing for your buyers’ attention. The competition is high – we are all faced with hundreds of sales messages each day. Successful sales organizations know how to consistently rise above the noise and command greater market share.
These organizations ensure that the entire customer-facing team understands how to communicate the value of their solution in a way that’s meaningful to the buyer’s needs and outcomes. The customer journey no longer begins and ends with the salesperson; to stay competitive, it's critical to ensure that value is being created and captured at every stage of the buyer experience. Start by equipping every member of your go-to-market team with the customer-first mindset associated with the business conversation.
Why The Business Conversation Matters
When you’re chasing revenue growth for your organization, your team is likely sourcing leads who are not actively looking to purchase something. In these cases, the traditional sales approach of pitching your product and demonstrating features and functions is simply not enough to drive the commitment for your solution that your organization needs to meet its goals. Even when customers are actively seeking a solution or have already engaged with a freemium offer, the traditional sales conversation often falls short on differentiating you from the competition, resulting in frequent discounting, low urgency to close, and an inability to access high-level decision-makers.
In contrast, the business conversation centers on uncovering and attaching your solution to the buyer’s biggest business problems. When your revenue team is having business conversations, every meeting is geared towards understanding the customer’s desired outcomes - and demonstrating how your solution can get them to that future state. This approach is more than just a checklist or process - it’s a total mindset shift that gets your team entering every customer interaction thinking ‘how do I create and deliver value for this buyer,’ as opposed to just ‘how do I win this deal.’
When revenue teams communicate your solution in terms of business problems and outcomes, they will more consistently win meetings with Economic Buyers and C-Suite decision-makers because they speak the language of influence. They’ll create more urgency for your solution and successfully validate a premium price because they can put a price tag on the cost of not solving that biggest business problem.
Create a Culture of Curiosity
In many traditional sales approaches, discovery is a phase in the beginning of the customer engagement. In the business conversation, discovery is a fundamental tool your entire revenue team should use to continuously and consistently align with the unique needs of your buyer. We call this an outside-in mindset: at every stage of interaction, each member of your revenue team is gathering data about the buyer’s most pressing needs. This mindset is critical to ensuring a consistent customer-first approach across your organization.
Effective discovery doesn’t just uncover problems and solutions; it paints a picture of the buyer’s purchasing process and helps your team qualify the budget, timeline, and influencers of the deal. An outside-in mindset can help your team map the landscape of the buyer organization to better understand each decision-maker and champion and tailor a value message to their priorities.
Check out some of our most popular content on executing great discovery to help jumpstart this mindset with your team.
Align on Value
The customer journey is evolving; there are so many touchpoints for the customer to learn about and interact with your brand beyond a conversation with a salesperson. In fact, only 17% of the B2B purchasing decision process happens in meetings with the sales team. You can’t control the buyer’s journey, but you can ensure that every single interaction, outreach, and piece of content delivers a consistent message of value and differentiation. That means getting your entire commercial team aligned behind the value you provide to customers, how exactly you provide that value, and how you do it better than the competition. The best way to communicate and operationalize that message is by using a tool we call a Value Framework.
Aligning cross-functional teams on messaging starts with aligning your executive leaders on your message of value and what conveying that value looks like for each team. Here are a few examples of how cross-functional teams can support the business conversation:
- Sales: Focus on uncovering key pain points and solution requirements for each decision-maker and communicating that information at key handoff points with other teams
- Marketing: Leverage an customer-first mindset to communicate on key buyer outcomes from the first interaction.
- Customer Success: Leverage an understanding of the buyer’s business goals to ensure follow-through on value and promote cross-sell/upsell opportunities.
- Administrative Team: Keep the customer’s business goals top-of-mind when executing on deals.
Get even more in-depth strategies with our guide on how to align cross-functional teams behind the right mindset for execution.
Get Your Team Aligned on a Value Mindset
One of a revenue leader's greatest challenges is getting their team aligned to execute on the company's biggest priorities at the individual level. The business conversation is only the beginning. Today's top go-to-market teams have a unified cross-functional approach that drives value across the customer lifecycle to generate consistent, repeatable revenue. We call that approach a Revenue Mindset, and we're discussing how leaders can implement that mindset with their teams in our upcoming webinar. Sign up to join us for applicable leadership strategies that will help you level-up your team's operating rhythm and drive results.
