Categories: Sales Kickoff | Economic Change
Recent global economic shifts and widespread uncertainty are likely changing the selling landscape for your go-to-market organization. As revenue pressures mount and buyer hesitancy increases, it's mission-critical that you keep your team focused on the skills that will help them cut through the noise. The best companies don't wait for outside factors to correct themselves. They align their strategy to their buyers' current state.
We've worked with hundreds of revenue leaders who have multiplied revenue and increased the valuation of their sales organizations, even during some of the most drastic economic downturns of the past few years. They did so by identifying opportunities to strengthen core selling competencies that enabled their teams to deliver increased customer value and maintain pipeline through seasons of uncertainty and downturn.
These are the three must-have skills your sellers can use to win consistently and drive your core revenue objectives in a challenging economic climate.
1. The Ability to Align the Sales Conversation to Evolving Buyer Problems
When buyers are affected by economic pressure and uncertainty, deals come under additional scrutiny. Successful sellers will be the ones who can articulate the value and differentiation of their solutions in a way that defines a return on investment tied to their buyers' most critical priorities.
Adapting the sales conversation to buyer problems begins with great discovery. It will be imperative that your sellers are able to identify their buyers' most critical goals and problems as they emerge. When early conversations are focused on listening to the buyer, rather than sharing features and functions of your solution, sellers will develop a more complete picture of the buyer’s position.
The sellers who can consistently initiate a customer-centric sales conversation will be able to align their solution’s differentiation to their buyer’s decision criteria. As a leader, you can advance your business goals in this season of uncertainty by giving your reps the knowledge and skills to execute buyer-focused business conversations that lead to demand and urgency for your solution.
2. The Ability to Influence Decision Criteria With Your Differentiation
In a challenging economy, buyers become more protective of their budgets. If your teams are struggling against budget concerns, your organization's sales negotiation strategy may be missing something. Without an early and consistent communication of value, deals will be negotiated at the lowest common denominator: price. That often shows up as losing out to "do nothing," "do it internally," or a competitor undercutting your solution.
Elite selling teams justify a premium price and become a must-have for buyers by aligning the decision criteria with their solution’s differentiation. This skill is critical to minimize discounting and increase wins, regardless of the external selling environment.
To maintain and increase sales velocity, successful leaders align the entire go-to-market team on a negotiation strategy that establishes value early an often. Start by defining how your key value drivers can be applied to the current market context for your buyers. Align your whole organization behind the competitive differentiation of your solution and a value-based messaging framework that enables reps to leverage that differentiation.
To reach cross-functional alignment, everyone in your commercial organization should have a unified buyer-focused answer to these essential questions:
- What mission critical problems do you solve for your customers?
- How do you specifically solve those problems?
- How do you solve those problems in a way that's different or better than competition?
- What’s your proof?
Consider how the answers to these questions may be shifting as economic conditions change and reframe your value message for what's happening right now.
3. The Ability to Qualify Opportunities Early and Accurately
When facing economic uncertainty, your team's ability to prioritize the right opportunities quickly is essential to maintaining momentum. If your team hasn't already operationalized a custom qualification methodology like MEDDICC, now is the time. If you're already leveraging MEDDICC, it may be worth reinforcing those skills with your team to ensure these critical strategies stay top-of-mind.
MEDDICC helps your team quickly identify which opportunities are most aligned to your organization and their propensity to close. But MEDDICC can also help your sales team win with decision-makers. When embedded into your discovery, coaching and opportunity review processes, MEDDICC enables front-line managers and sellers to chart the landscape inside the buyer organization, identifying key players and their individual buying criteria and processes. They can then use MEDDICC to test for gaps in their discovery, highlight potential risks or obstacles and identify the quickest path to close.
Consistency is the key to successfully embedding MEDDICC across your organization in a way that drives results and increases sales velocity. Equip managers with skills to ensure that this consistency is ingrained into the organization and maintained by sales teams, new hires and organizational leaders. When your selling team combines the skills of a customer-focused discovery process, strong value negotiation, and consistent qualification, they'll close bigger deals, they'll close them faster and your organization can achieve sustainable growth - even in the midst of economic uncertainty.
How Companies Grow During Economic Uncertainty
We've partnered with over 140 companies now valued at over $1B. They didn't wait around for the markets to stabalize. Many of them managed to accelerate sales, drive predictable revenue and increase their valuation during some of the most stressful economic seasons of the past few years.
They did it by creating cross-functional consistency in the go-to-market organization, elevating execution and delivering greater value to their customers. We tell three of their stories in our ebook on increasing the enterprise value of your sales organization. Get your copy to get strategies, action items and real results from some of the most successful revenue leaders and organizations today.
