The Vision: You and your team exhibit at an important trade show, you schedule and have lots of quality meetings with customers and prospects, and generate lots of new business.
B2B marketing advice can be found everywhere, but some of it is outdated and misguided when it comes to achieving its most important goal -- closing the sale. Today’s B2B marketing approach requires attention to three critical certainties in order to improve sales revenue.
Value selling tools are an essential part of the B2B sales process. When built properly and used consistently, they can strengthen your sales message, improve the credibility of your sales reps (and by extension, your organization). Additionally, they can help close more sales in less time. Some consultants dispute their potential because homegrown and generic tools typically struggle to meet expectations.
Today’s buyers drive the sales process by contacting select vendors only after they conduct their own research. Vendors who want to be in the running must increase both visibility and credibility early on. Many vendors use inbound marketing to proactively raise brand awareness and capture buyers’ attention. Those most successful, incorporate value selling principles into targeted marketing campaigns that are supported by accurate and compelling data.
What does it mean to be a successful salesperson, whether inside sales or otherwise?
Certainly, the ability to persuade is as important as is the knowledge of the solution for sale. However, the most successful salespeople approach each sale as though it were a battle; not in the negative sense, but in the strategic and tactical sense, from gathering intelligence and building a pathway, to partnership between your company and the customer’s business.
According to a recent study, nearly 50% of sales leaders are shifting from the field to inside sales. This shift, along with shorter sales cycles and easier access to competitor information, makes it more important than ever to ensure your inside sales team is well equipped to hold its ground against the competition with a value message, a value selling approach, and the tools (and reports) to back it up.
Let’s just say it: You can’t survive in this hyper-competitive selling environment without the right tools to generate and qualify leads, gather customer data, and prove your product’s value.
But where should those sales tools come from? Should you build your own or invest in a third-party solution?
Let’s compare building a homebrew tool and investing in tools from a vendor who exclusively focuses on Value Selling.
If your company recently launched a new product or service, or is competing in a new category, you may be wondering how to convince prospects to consider your solution.
You haven’t had the opportunity to build up much evidence yet; you lack testimonials, and don’t have the data to show potential buyers how your solution can save money, build revenue, or help solve a problem.
The underlying challenge is that buyers don’t know how or why to buy your solution. Since it’s new, it’s different. Buyers are unsure where to start, especially if the value your solution delivers falls outside of traditional metrics and thinking.
How many sales techniques and methods have you trained in, read about, or considered for your sales team? There are lots of them out there, each purporting to help you get in there and lock down that sale.
Recently, I ran across a review of well-known sales methodologies for closing complex sales by David Peralta, the content marketing manager at iSEEit. He talks about several methods into which I believe value selling tools would neatly fit.
Read on for an overview of six sales methods from Mr. Peralta’s guide and how value selling tools and calculators can enhance these practices.
The data driven buyer is the one who makes decisions based on concrete metrics and financial arguments rather than something that seems fuzzy, like an improved user interface or a list of features. This buyer wants to have a firm basis from which to choose the solution with the best value expressed in dollar signs or productivity numbers.
When it comes to winning over this type of buyer, assessment tools, Value Calculators, and ROI Tools contribute the information he or she craves. In turn, these tools provide your sales representatives with the data they need to clinch the sale.
Buyers make data-driven decisions. That’s why the vendor that can present a convincing business case showing the value of making a change has the advantage.
At every stage of the sales funnel, your company and sales representatives will need to convince a different group of people with different agendas. That’s where data driven content comes in.
