Categories: Sales Transformation
A growing company, particularly at the startup stage, faces specific and unique business challenges on its path to repeatable and profitable revenue growth. Often times, sales teams selling a less-than-established solution find themselves discounting on price, running pilot programs that fail to turn into revenue and trying to differentiate unsucessfully against the "do nothing" competitor.
At the same time, startup founders or chief technology officers are often great at selling the value of their solution. There is no one more passionate at demonstrating a compelling need for a solution than someone who has made it his/her life work to make a product successful. They have the vision. What they need is a road map for execution. The challenge for the sales organization is that the vision needs to be translated into practicality and repeatability. We call that taking something"out of the heads of the few, into the heads of the many". The best sales leaders take those seemingly lofty goals and turn them into something they can teach their sales teams to execute.
How do they do it? By creating tools, processes and content that equip their sales teams to be successful at the buyer-level. It starts with ensuring every person in your organization has the same answers to these essential questions:
- What problems do you solve?
- How do you specifically solve them?
- How do you solve them differently or better than the competition?
- What's your proof?
We aren't talking about developing scripts and canned responses to buyer. Effective sales messaging starts with building alignment across your company around these essential questions. You cannot grow your sales revenues without defining these answers for your reps. It's critical when you're trying to educate a market where a market may not exist. Bottom line - your reps need to be able to effectively articulate the key business problems you're solving.
The companies we've worked with have had the most success when the executive leadership team clarifies the answers to those questions and puts them in a repeatable framework that guides the customer conversation face-to- face, over the phone and digitally, throughout the customer engagement process. You don't need to create a script. What you need is a navigational aid that helps sales teams engage in a consultative sales conversation focused on value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to the buyer.
Organizations that succeed with sales transformation are able to align a company, cross-functionally, with executing the business strategy at the point of sale. This is fundamental especially in a startup. Take the steps necessary to align your company behind those value drivers and differentiators and you'll be well on your way to enabling effective sales execution and achieving aggressive growth goals.
