In the current era of sales where reps are selling to better informed, empowered customers that are able to diagnose their needs, identify potential solutions, and decide what they’re willing to pay without ever having to contact a supplier, the ability to effectively lead with insight and reframe customer thinking has become an absolute necessity. That said, developing an organizational capability to effectively deliver commercial insight is no easy task.
Once companies have taken the time to develop solid, scalable insights that are ultimately tied to their unique capabilities as a supplier, they still face another hurdle: upskilling their sellers to successfully Challenge customers with this new messaging. This means going beyond simply training reps to speak to the new pitch deck’s prescribed talking points to commercially teaching customers. Companies must also ensure that reps can tailor their pitch to the individual customer stakeholders they engage while leveraging constructive tension to take control of the buying process as a whole.
But left to their own devices, reps tend to spend a lot of time memorizing their pitch, and then re-using that pitch with all customer stakeholders, regardless of the individual’s role or function. But given that customer stakeholders have different functional responsibilities, goals, and day-to-day worries, even the best insight, if positioned poorly, will fail to resonate and will therefore have little commercial impact.
So how can you help reps deliver more resonant messages? Solae, LLC overcomes this challenge by helping its sales force better understand customers by providing reps with “cheat sheets” of role-specific goals and concerns. Understanding the outcomes each customer contact is trying to accomplish helps reps to tailor their pitches in-the-moment and speak the customer’s language.
Mainly, Solae’s cheat sheets expose the following factors that underlie each influencer’s decision-making, better equipping reps to articulate the implications of action or inaction in customer terms:
- Decision Criteria: Knowing the high-level business outcomes for which customers are responsible leads reps to speak to the metrics a solution must impact to drive urgency.
- Focus: Understanding which parts of the business a customer cares about enables reps to frame their offering in terms of its impact on these areas.
- Concerns: What does the customer personally worry about day-to-day? Having this context enables reps to build empathy and credibility by appealing to fears and doubts.
- Potential Values: Knowing specific levers to drive business outcomes helps focus reps on supplier capabilities most likely to create value for that particular individual.
In addition to the cheat sheets, Solae provides reps with simple “solutions” documents that explain how Solae’s differentiators map to each contact’s function. With these tools, sales reps are better able to tailor their approach by predicting a narrow set of outcomes and benefits a customer stakeholder will care about which enables them to better align their messaging to the underappreciated Solae capabilities best suited to impact those outcomes.
SLC Members, to learn more, read the full case study on Solae, LLC’s message-tailoring approach or view the webinar replay, Tailoring Sales Messages to Customer Stakeholders.
