Right now, most sales leaders are frustrated with inaccurate forecasts and a team of reps that isn’t making quota. They’re struggling to create more efficiency in their sales organization.
Are you in a similar situation?
Adapting to the current market requires focus, discipline, and best-in-class sales execution. This calls for sales leaders to start prioritizing the processes, tools, and actions that consistently support the sales teams in doing the right things. There is no better time than now to get back to basics and create a strong culture of value selling, especially for your enterprise customers.
Here are five things you should do to build resilience:
A Value Map helps your sellers use a structured approach to win buyers’ attention, position your solution most compellingly, and drive urgency by capturing critical pieces of information about each essential buyer in the buyer group, such as their primary objectives, challenges, pain points, and desired future state—and align that to their solution’s unique differentiators and quantified value. Your sellers should do this with each decision-maker and the economic buyer and drive consensus on where they want to add value.
This also helps sellers weigh the competitiveness of their solution against alternatives and address weaknesses, if any.
While the high-level buying and sales journey could look and feel similar, not aligning on the details may lead to a risk of deal slippage. A well-articulated value summary document co-created with the champion/mobilizer can be vital in driving alignment with the buying group.
Sales are like a team sport. And any team sport needs to have a clear strategy, team collaboration, and excellent execution. But every deal team has its approach to running deals. This leads to confusion, lost productivity, and poor buyer experience.
A clear definition of “who” does “what” in a deal ensures the deal runs smoothly. Questions like - what is the multi-threading strategy? Who is responsible for executing a task to overcome a detractor objection? How to build a relationship with the economic buyer? Etc, needs to be answered.
Relationship mapping and a clear plan to win each decision-makers trust, along with clear ownership of who does what can help you keep the deal velocity in an acceptable range.
If you randomly pick two sales managers in your team and assess their deal review and coaching methodology, chances are they have very different approaches. Some managers might just ask, “what is the next step? Who is the champion? Where is the close plan? Etc”. Another extreme could be a hands-on manager who may even execute for the rep.
While we may have well-defined sales processes and methodologies to guide sellers, we need a transparent approach to deal review and coaching.
A lot of tools given to sellers are meant to track their behavior - cases in point are sales enablement, CRM, and forecasting tools. But the tools sellers need to win buyer confidence and deals are left to individual preferences, and more needs to be done to enable sellers with best practices. For example, champion decks, mutual success plans, multi-threading strategy collaboration, etc., require more GTM strategy.
Realign sales enablement focuses on training and coaching programs to build tools sellers can use in deals. This becomes even more important in the current environment.
In managing and winning deals in the current market conditions, the sales team must clearly understand the diminishing returns of a short-sighted sales strategy. Buyers are more reluctant and need sellers to go the extra mile to make decisions. Focussing on aligning with the buyer on value, the risk of not realizing the value, and showing them how they can understand that value is critical to winning deals.
