THREE SUREFIRE WAYS TO MISS YOUR QUOTA THIS YEAR

(And Three Skills You Must Master to Make Sure You Don’t!)

TWO-THIRDS OF B2B MARKETING AND SALES PROS BELIEVE THE QUALITY OF THEIR CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN DRIVING COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATION.

Literally, salespeople with their lips moving ranked way higher than product, pricing, and brand, according to a Corporate Visions survey.

In our recent award-winning book, The Three Value Conversations, we identified three messaging moments of truth in every buying cycle that your salespeople must master to deliver on your growth targets and outperform your competitors.

Your reps need to be able to:

• Build qualified pipeline – creating value in a way that overcomes status quo bias and convinces prospects to change, and differentiates your solutions enough to get them to choose you

• Deliver winning proposals – elevating value in a way that builds a meaningful business case for your solutions and justifies a decision with executive business and financial buyers

• Produce more profits – capturing value by defeating perceived commoditization, expanding deal size and plugging value leaks that help avoid unnecessary discounting

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Read on to find out the three sure-fire misses your B2B sales pros may be facing this year – in each of these three critical conversation skills areas:

SING, ACT, AND DANCEThe classic “triple threat” of show business could perform all three of the skills above at a world-class level. If reps can master the three value conversations outlined on this page, they can become sales triple threats, outperforming your competition in the conversations that matter most to your success (building pipeline, delivering great proposals, protecting your profits).

#3 Trying to match buyer power – getting stuck in the commodity trap

#2 Dropping the ball in the C-suite – getting stuck in no decision

#1 Sounding like everyone else – getting stuck in the status quo

Imagine it’s your first meeting with a prospect in the field. There you are, face-to-face with a potential buyer, about to launch into your presentation.

So far, so good. Why wouldn’t it be? You know what your prospect’s needs are—you asked the right questions and she stated them clearly. And, you know your portfolio has the right stuff to help her tackle them head-on – you matched the right capabilities to those needs.

Feeling confident, you do a point-by-point takedown of her stated challenges, responding to each one with your “best-in-class” capabilities. Just tack on some value-added services at the end for differentiation and you have a winning value proposition. Right?

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Wrong. The conventional approach sketched out above might not seem so bad at first glance—until you consider it’s the exact same conversation your competitors will be having. Far from differentiating you, a sales conversation like the one above puts you at parity with your competition (not to mention your buyer’s existing, status quo approach) and reinforces the perception that you’re a commodity provider, no different from the other leaders in your industry.

This forces you to grapple with two selling challenges:

• The sales cycle expands, the customer feels no urgency to change, and deals end up stalling or fizzling out in no decision.

• If the deal somehow survives and staggers on, the conversation shifts to price instead of value, eliminating whatever claim to uniqueness you might’ve had and eroding your margins.

SUREFIRE WAY TO MISS YOUR QUOTA THIS YEAR: Sound Exactly Like Everyone Else#1

Responding to your prospect’s stated needs with matching capabilities—the conventional approach to value propositions—puts you in a tight spot when it comes to differentiation. On the next page, you’ll learn three tips for breaking the parity and convincing your prospects to change.

THREE WAYS TO TELL A DIFFERENTIATED STORY

Deliver a Distinct Point of View – Tell a “why change” story that starts out by identifying your prospect’s unconsidered needs—the challenges or missed opportunities he or she doesn’t already know about. By leading off by telling them something about a problem they didn’t know they had, you put yourself in pole position to create the buying vision, helping you win more than your fair share of deals. The “unconsidered needs” approach is proven in research to make your message more urgent and differentiated.

Find your value wedge – Once you’ve made a compelling case for change, your responsibilities shift to convincing them why they should choose you. For that “why you” story, you need to deliver a message based on your “power positions,” which link your prospect’s challenges to your unique capabilities. The three unique differentiators you base your “why you” story on should be 1) important to your customer (why are the challenges you’re helping to solve urgent?); 2) unique (how do your solutions do something different and better?); 3) defensible (back up the claims you’re making with proof).

Use visual storytelling techniques – Visual stories—preferably whiteboarded—are the best way to deliver your “why change” and “why you” stories, because they get remembered and have the biggest impact on emotions. A Corporate Visions study found that whiteboard-style visuals trounced PowerPoint presentations in some of the most important areas of influence in the customer conversation, including credibility, recall and uniqueness.

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Now that you’ve made a pipeline impact, it’s time to convince your prospects to release the budget. Read on to learn how to create more powerful proposals, with a business case that justifies decisions from business and financial executives.

Customer

Value Wedge

Value Parity

You Competition

Eighty percent of B2B deals now require the signoff of decision makers with VP or higher titles, according to analyst firm IDC. That finding corroborates what many seasoned sales pros already know: Getting executive buy-in is vital to the success of your customer conversations. It’s also easier said than done.

The following figures, also from a pair of analyst firms, shed light on why securing executive buy-in is so hard to come by:

• Executive buyers value business expertise four times more than conversations about products and services. (Source: Sirius Decisions)

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But...

• Less than a quarter of sales professionals are knowledgeable about the industry trends, key business issues, and financial metrics that inform business objectives and buying decisions.**

• Meanwhile, executive buyers report that 88 percent of salespeople are knowledgeable about their own products and services. (Source: Forrester Research)

SUREFIRE WAY TO MISS YOUR QUOTA THIS YEAR: Drop the Ball in the C-Suite#2

TAKEN TOGETHER, THESE DATA POINTS PAINT AN ALARMING PICTURE ABOUT EXECUTIVE CONVERSATIONS TODAY: BASICALLY, TODAY’S SALESPEOPLE ARE FOUR TIMES LESS LIKELY TO BE GOOD AT THE TYPES OF BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS EXECUTIVES VALUE FOUR TIMES MORE THAN PRODUCT CONVERSATIONS.

At the risk of piling on, just go take a look at your CRM system. There’s a pretty good chance that only a small fraction of the active opportunities listed have a VP- or higher-level contact on them. Your salespeople either have a “fear of heights” or they’re “getting delegated to who they sound like.”

IF YOU DON’T DELIVER PROPOSALS THAT ARE CXO-RELEVANT, YOU RISK PIPELINE “CONSTIPATION,” WHERE TOO MANY OF YOUR DEALS GET STUCK IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SALES PROCESS. Below are three competencies you need to master to come at your customer conversations from an executive perspective:

Take an executive buyer perspective – Identify key external factors—trends, events, and industry-wide changes—and link them to your buyer’s strategic initiatives. Once you do, you can contrast their current state (the problems holding them back now) with the future state/business change scenario. This paints a vivid picture of how change can help them overcome their existing challenges and drive better performance.

Address the money flow – Show which parts of your buyer’s financial metrics your solution impacts. This will help you demonstrate how your solutions can free up cash flow and improve performance.

Justify your impact – Quantify your impact with a business case that passes muster with business and financial buyers. Consider these three types of returns: (1) the returns you can fully quantify (“hard returns”); (2) the strategic advantages that can influence the investment decision (“strategic returns”), and; (3) the subjective returns that are difficult to measure but that you may be able to convert into quantifiable value (“soft returns”).

If you are effective in the competencies above, you’ll bridge the gap between the product-oriented conversations your team is having today and the business conversations C-level buyers are demanding.

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Read on to learn about the third key skills area reps need to master to hit high targets and drive growth: Protecting your profitability.

Assets• Current• Long-term

Capital• Equity• Debt

Revenue

Profit/Loss

Costs• Direct• Indirect

Balance Sheet

Income Statement

MONEY FLOW

You’ve probably heard that we’re in an era of buying and selling where it’s all about the buyer’s journey, not the sales process. As a result of this shift, the buyer has all the power today.

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The good news for salespeople is that your low-power position doesn’t have to be a problem. But it will be if you’re relying on the negotiating techniques of yesterday, when deals were less complex, more transactional, and salespeople were expected to simply show up, fill an order, and meet the buyer’s price.

To use a war analogy, that means buying committees expect you to wage battle on their terms, using their weapons of choice, following their rules of engagement. The thing is, negotiations research shows this is precisely the wrong approach to take in your customer conversations. When the low-power party in a negotiation tries to match power with the higher-power party, the outcomes are much worse for both of them, and deals are more likely to end in no decision.

SUREFIRE WAY TO MISS YOUR QUOTA THIS YEAR: Try and Match Your Buyer’s Power in Your Negotiations #3

THE QUESTION SELLERS FACE TODAY IS THIS: HOW CAN YOU STILL BE SUCCESSFUL FROM A LOW-POWER POSITION? READ ON TO FIND OUT.

TODAY, WHEN IT COMES TO THE SHARE OF POWER IN YOUR DEALS, YOU’RE DAVID, AND YOUR BUYER IS GOLIATH. SO HOW DO YOU DO YOUR BEST DAVID IMPRESSION AND WIN FROM YOUR LOW-POWER POSITION? Here are three competencies salespeople can master to turn your low-power position into a low-power advantage:

Expand the value of—and need for—your solution – To do this, you need to escape the “commodity trap,” which you fall into when you respond only to the customer’s known needs with capabilities similar to your competitors. Instead, you need to introduce unconsidered needs that extend beyond the identified, known needs, and solve for those with distinct capabilities. This allows you to create “pricing uncertainty,” which in turn gives you an opening to expand the size of your deals.

Lead with insights, not “discovery” questions – Corporate Visions research found that the traditional “diagnose-then-prescribe” model is less effective at creating urgency than leading with a provocative insight (and then asking provocative questions). By sharing an insight first, you make prospects more uncertain about their current situation, thereby anchoring them to a position more favorable to changing to your solution.

Execute pivotal agreements – Instead of resorting to costly freebies and giveaways to move your deals forward (while leaking value), develop and execute pivotal agreements. These are milestones that function as value-based exchanges, and you can use them to advance your deals while protecting your value.

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You’ve covered the essentials of building pipeline, delivering executive-level proposals, and negotiating in a way that differentiates you and protects your margins. But how do you actually guarantee your reps get access to the training they need to win in these areas, without losing valuable time in the field? Read on.

14% more persuasive

9% more persuasive

Information Only

Questions then Information

Information then Questions

Message Impact

FOUR OUT OF FIVE COMPANIES AREN’T ABLE TO TRAIN AS MANY SALESPEOPLE AS THEY NEED, a Corporate Visions survey found.

But the major training challenges today aren’t just about efficiency. They’re also about effectiveness. Companies are still relying heavily on what might be called arbitrary learning paths. In other words, generic training plans based on rep tenure or role/responsibility, rather than on performance indicators or in-the-field behaviors.

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On the next page, you’ll learn about a flexible, online training system designed to support blended, flipped or completely virtual learning. This approach can help you increase training access and replace arbitrary learning plans with custom learning paths.

arbitrary learning paths

The biggest limitation to training access, according to 57 percent of respondents: pressure not to take reps out of the field for training.

EFFICIENCY OR EFFECTIVENESS? HOW ABOUT BOTH.

Here are four possibilities for custom learning paths, which can help you train more efficiently and effectively, while meeting your reps’ specific learning and selling needs:

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Performance-based training – Information in your sales systems can help you identify reps who are struggling in certain triple threat skills areas. (Are they not creating enough pipeline? Are their proposals getting stuck? Are they discounting unscrupulously?) Once you know if reps are struggling with pipeline, proposals or profits, you can push targeted, online training modules with competencies designed to improve their performance challenges.

Needs-based training – Replace sales rep or manager intuition, which is often too subjective, with fluency assessments, or surveys designed to identify strengths and weaknesses in sales rep behaviors. You can then match salespeople with specific competency modules that can be kitted up for a personalized learning journey tailored to their needs.

Situationally relevant training – Just putting a sales process in place doesn’t guarantee salespeople will execute each stage well. What if you could align specific training modules to each step of your sales process and present them online at each opportunity stage of your CRM?

Integrated play-based training – When you launch products and promote go-to-market strategies, you create a huge opportunity for embedded skills training. In addition to the sales messages and content in a sales play, imagine being able to offer the appropriate skills training modules right in the play. Different sales plays require different selling skills. This will enable you to provide the precise skills needed to sell different types of solutions.

CONCLUSION

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Don’t miss your growth numbers this year because you can’t get your salespeople the training they need, when and where they need it. The companies that are able to get reps trained in the competencies they need to win will be in the best position to build what every sales leader wants: a team full of sales triple threats, fluent in the conversations that matter most to your success.

RESOURCES:

For more information about the training access challenges companies face, and how just-in-time, situational training can help solve them, check out Corporate Visions’ State of the Conversation Report.

© Corporate Visions, Inc. | 1.800.360.SELL | CONVERSATION.com

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