<img alt="" src="https://secure.half1hell.com/195196.png" style="display:none;">

Adding More Value to the Year's Key Selling Trends

Posted by Barbra Schwartz on Feb 21, 2019 11:42:00 AM
Barbra Schwartz

Key Selling TrendsHave you had a chance to read the new ebook written by Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power -- 5 Trends That Will Impact Your Sales Team in 2019?  It does a great job of highlighting how B2B sales and marketing leaders can develop strategies that align with these trends.

Value selling tools and concepts correlate nicely with the trends outlined in this ebook.  Let's take a look at how they can work together to help you better meet your sales targets:

1. Boosting Revenue with Artificial Intelligence

Real-time artificial intelligence (AI) insights are a game changer when it comes to increasing the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of your sales teams. AI leverages data to accurately score inbound leads and provide actionable intelligence to help close more sales.

Value selling tools create easy and organic opportunities to capture key prospect information throughout the sales cycle. Prospects that populate these tools quickly learn the value of your solution and often warrant a higher lead score that prompts fast action from your sales team.

The tools are also helpful for capturing demographic data such as company size, industry and location. These can be analyzed to better define your ideal customer segments, thus increasing your opportunities to find better prospects and boost revenue.

2. Adding More Value to Your Sales Cycle

We definitely agree that focusing on solution value throughout the sales process is key to creating and advancing more opportunities. Instead of talking about product features, Gschwandtner suggests starting with simple questions that naturally incline prospects to reveal what’s most important to them.

Value selling tools can support this trend, readily capturing information and guiding the sales team’s efforts to show how your product or service can help each customer become more successful. Because the tools are focused on the customer’s problems, sales reps don’t have to think as much about what questions to ask. And as they develop a greater comfort level, they will be able to include these questions more conversationally.

Since value selling helps improve margins and increase wallet share within your existing accounts, why not just make it easy for your sales team to incorporate value into their sales conversations?

3. Delivering Value across All Channels

This trend emphasizes the importance of leveraging the multi-channel experience to make your value messaging accessible to your prospects and sales reps. We recommend making web-based value selling tools available on all your social media channels and pinning them to the top, whenever possible.

Why? Because more than 60 percent of customer transactions are initiated online, and half of B2B customers start their research using social media.

By following this strategy, you can ensure that your multi-channel sales and marketing efforts effectively promote your offering’s value proposition before the prospect even commits to an initial sales conversation. More importantly, it increases the odds that you will make their short list for more serious consideration.

4. Investing in More Engaging Sales Training

Sales reps need interactive tools and training to learn how to fully engage buyers in the sales process. According to Gschwandtner, prospects have different needs, personalities and requirements, which means reps need to be ready to convey value to unique individuals.

To truly improve sales skills, training should include content that’s new, relevant and experiential. If you can’t engage your own reps during sales training, how can they engage your prospects? Engagement is at the core of value selling tools and messaging, and should be part of all sales training.

Hands-on experience in a training environment is the best way for sales reps to appreciate the two-way benefits of value selling tools. As prospects, they will enter information that helps define the underlying problems and quantify the value of your solution. As reps, they will use that data and its results to better understand the prospect’s needs and develop a relevant sales message.

5. Facilitating Conversational Intelligence

If your sales reps can figure out where a conversation is heading and predict its potential outcome, they will be better prepared to share the right messaging and solution value with the prospect. But this can be difficult with digital communications, which lack visual and verbal clues. Value selling tools are ideal for helping bridge this gap because they capture important customer-centric data about their business challenges and goals.

Data can be saved and referenced throughout the sales cycle, and easily updated as you gather input from different influencers and decision makers. If you determine that results are shifting, you can also update the back-end to reflect more accurate outcomes that prospects will appreciate.

Conclusion

As you focus on Gschwandtner’s five B2B trends for 2019, you can ensure your sales team’s success by incorporating value selling and supporting tools into your sales efforts. To learn more about how value selling can work for your organization, sign up here for a complimentary consultation.

Try out an assessment tool from ROI Selling www.roi-selling.com

Topics: B2B Selling, ROI Tools, Value Selling

Comment