Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Enablement Technology | Sales Leadership | Sales Productivity
With a new year comes a clean slate – our once-annual fresh start. For revenue team leaders, today’s decisions will help define where the company ends up in twelve months. As budgets get approved and your annual kickoff approaches, give your organization an edge by making sure your plan for the coming year incorporates digital tools and technology that drive results and power today’s top teams. Recent survey research examined the mindsets of B2B technology sales professionals, collecting data from across diverse roles, ages, and company sizes. One question asked respondents, “What would help you and your organization have greater sales success?” The number one answer: Sales Tools, Platforms & Software (44%). Keep this reality top-of-mind as you identify and gather the building blocks for executing your strategy. Revenue team members are hungry for sales technology and platforms that can be harnessed for success. They’re eager to reach professional goals, determined to help their organization meet this year’s goals, and confident that the right digital tools will support these efforts in their everyday selling activities. Help your team step up their game by providing them with tech tools built to boost performance, keep morale high, and sustain long-term success.
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Categories: Partners | Sales Leadership | Sales Productivity | Scaling Sales
A channel program is an effective way to increase your capacity and expand market share, helping you reach your growth goals faster. When executed well, your channel program will decrease the cost of a sale, improve reach into new markets, and grow overall seller capacity without increasing internal headcount. However, backing your program with the right resources will be critical to its success. To expand market share, you'll need Productivity x Capacity to drive growth. A robust channel partner program will take focus and attention to develop both sides of this equation. For today, we'll set aside the capacity piece of the formula and dig into the actions leaders can take to boost productivity from channel partners. Increasing Channel Partner Productivity When it comes to channel sales, your ability to control the sales process is limited. You have to accept that your partner controls the time frame, message to the customer, and, ultimately, your forecast. What you can control is the tools you provide to help that partner sell your solution. It's important to put time and resources into helping your channel sellers understand your company's value and differentiation as well as your internal revenue teams do. Successful channel execution starts with clearly defined practices that drive bottom-line impact. Five steps to secure channel partner success: 1. Ensure that your company's message and your partner’s message are consistent Driving consistency between your organization's message and your partner's message is critical to align with your customer's buying process. The amount of digital content available today means customers are educating themselves about your offerings prior to any conversation with an actual salesperson. If your partner's message is misaligned with your content, you could miss opportunities to move good deals forward. The best channel enablement programs equip their partners with the ability to communicate their value proposition and give them the ability to answer essential questions on their behalf: • What problems do we solve for our customers? • How do we specifically solve these problems with your solution? • How do we do it differently from the competition? • What is our proof? These questions are simple, but the answers typically are not. Most companies don’t have internal alignment on these questions. If you asked executive leaders in your company these four questions, how much would their answers differ? Align internally on the answers, and then make sure your partners are aligned in the same way. Does your message support the channel buyer’s journey? Can your partners execute that message? Do their marketing materials, sales tools, and presentation decks all have that same unified message? 2. Educate the partner community on the critical skills to be successful in today’s markets Your partners won’t be successful in selling your solutions if they can’t effectively execute in front of the customer. Secure a plan to make sure that every person selling your solution can execute these three critical sales skills: 1. Uncover customer needs by executing an effective discovery session 2. Articulate value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to the buyer 3. Position and negotiate value, preserving margin and avoiding price cuts 3. Implement and inspect what channel leadership adopts in the field Ensuring that your channel leaders are driving enablement and adoption in the field will help produce greater success rates. Just as you do with your internal managers, make sure you provide the how, not just the what. Give partners the tools and processes that help drive the right behaviors and coach them on the desired sales motion. Actions like pre-call planning, asking deep discovery questions and role playing all help increase transaction sizes across the board. 4. Arm partners with competitive intelligence to accelerate the sales process How does your solution differ from the competition? How is that differentiation tied to what drives value for your buyer? Provide partners with competitive information that outlines how your solution is: • UNIQUE — your competition doesn’t have the same features or capabilities • COMPARATIVELY DIFFERENT — features or capabilities that are similar, but are delivered in ways that are more valuable to the buyer • HOLISTICALLY BETTER — qualities about your company that would mitigate risk in the buying decision (e.g., years in business) 5. Provide the channel with proof points that demonstrate your success Customer testimonials are an asset to any sales conversation. Providing tangible and consumable points of reference on the results your solution provides will strengthen your message and put evidence behind your claims. If your solution saved another customer X% of revenue, then that’s valuable information for a channel partner to have. Develop a way for channel partners to easily tap into case studies, testimonial quotes, and proof points for use in their own sales conversations.
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Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Messaging | Sales Transformation
Today's leaders have an uphill battle to successfully tackle revenue growth goals. Externally, marketplace dynamics have shifted and buyers have redefined why and how they buy. Internally, revenue organizations have to adapt and align their message in a way that communicates their value in today's dynamic selling environment. Strategies for growth and evolution should drive alignment across all your revenue teams. Start with a buyer-focused messaging framework that’s proven to help revenue teams align behind company goals and support front-line sales success. Everyone in your organization should have the same answers to four essential questions. Alignment around these answers will help equip your revenue teams with a consistent message around the value you bring to the market. Aligning the sales organization around new ways buyers are purchasing your solution requires a shift in the sales approach, one that equips sellers to focus on their buyers and be relevant in sales conversations. One of the most critical ways to align customer-facing teams on a new GTM approach is by ensuring the entire sales organization has a consistent understanding of the business value their solution provides and their competitive differentiation in their marketplace. This alignment starts with the executive team. When leaders generate cross-functional agreement on the value drivers and differentiators that are top-of-mind for their most influential buying audiences, they lay the groundwork for creating a consistent, buyer-focused sales message.
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Categories: Company Alignment | MEDDICC | Sales Leadership | Sales Qualification
How do you help your organization to evolve and grow? Economic indicators suggest that the sluggish economy is taking a positive turn. Now may be the time to shift your strategy from hold-the-line to a focus on growth and transformation. The organizations that come out on top will be the ones who embrace this new era with a strategic plan to hit the ground running.
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Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Planning | Sales Transformation
A new quarter is upon us, and it’s time to strategize on how you can make this one even better than the last. Often, sales leaders know where their sales team falls short – but it can be a challenge to identify the root of these problems and determine what action will have the greatest impact in solving them.
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Categories: Economic Change | Partners | Sales Leadership | Scaling Sales
Channel organizations are an often overlooked, but critical component to increasing market share for complex B2B sales organizations. During my time as VP of PTC’s Worldwide Channel Program, I leaned on a core formula: Productivity x Capacity = Growth. In this article, we will focus on capacity, but stay tuned for part two in this series for the other side of the equation: How to Increase Channel Partner Productivity.
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