What’s Important to Your Buyer?

Companies that drive significant growth in their markets all have one thing in common — cross-functional alignment around buyer value and solution differentiation.

Through a conversation on the Revenue Builders podcast, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions, Meagen Eisenberg shares why generating this company-wide alignment is critical, “To fight for larger players and enterprise deals, the entire company needs to know the value your solutions drive for your customers and understand how to develop and sustain that value for customers.”

As you work closely with company leaders to define opportunities to improve sales performance, you may find there is a lack of agreement cross-functionally on what's important to your buyer. These gaps and misunderstandings are not uncommon, especially as companies mature into their B,C, or even D-level rounds and new executives join the business. However, misalignment can significantly impact your sales organization's ability to land high-value accounts. When you correct this misalignment, it can lead to increased margins and market share.

Own the responsibility of generating alignment around what's important to your buyer, and operationalize this value message across your sales organization. Enable your team to develop and sustain value for your customers so you can power a revenue-driving sales organization that takes your company to the next level.

Generate Agreement on What’s Important to Your Buyer

Many organizations say they're buyer-focused and may often hear that “buyers love their product.” While a great product is key to success, so too is a solid understanding of why buyers find business value in your solutions, and why they invest in your solutions over the competition (including a do-nothing or do-it-internally competitor). On the Revenue Builders podcast, Eisenberg shares,

“If you're selling to an entire company, your salespeople need to know how to articulate the value behind your solutions. You have to think about your messaging. What's your value proposition? What business pains do you solve for your buyers?"

Every department should be crystal clear on what’s important to your buyers and how those business needs coincide with the solutions you offer. Generating and maintaining this alignment on your own, as a sales leader, can be difficult. One of the best ways to show that you need to get your executive team aligned behind buyer value drivers is to demonstrate possible misalignment and its impact across the organization.

Review the four essential questions every company should be able to answer with your company's 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?

How would your cross-functional executive team answer these questions? Often when there’s inconsistency at the executive level, there’s inconsistency on the front-line, meaning your reps don't have clarity around what's important to the buyer and how to map buyer pains to your solution.

Get on the same page at the executive level, around the value and differentiation your solutions provide to your most influential buying audiences. Build alignment with your cross-functional leadership team around the four essential questions and ensure this agreement is clearly understood by the entire customer-facing organization.

Once you've generated cross-functional agreement on answers to the four essential questions, document them and embed them into sales processes, content and tools. Operationalize a sales consumable framework. Equip your salespeople with a buyer-focused methodology that enables them to map buyer pains to your solution and pull that value into the final sale.

Take Your Sales Organization to the Next Level

Improving buyer alignment is often one of the first steps sales leaders take to help their sales organization sell higher and increase margins. If you want to take your sales organization to the next level, and leave an impact as a sales leader - take insight from those who've been there, done that and delivered results.

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