When selling to well-informed buyers, your sales team needs to skip the “features and functions” pitch and get straight to the point: the value your solution delivers relative to the problems it solves. Do they have the right tools and training? Do they understand what’s most important to buyers?
Have 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.
I was recently interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague, Bruce Scheer, CEO of SalesConversation.com. It was great fun being part of Bruce’s podcast series, which covers a broad range of topics that can help sellers be more successful. Before I summarize what we discussed, consider subscribing to The Sales Conversation Podcast on iTunes and listening to the entire podcast on Bruce’s website.
If you are marketing and selling a complex B2B solution, it is critical to differentiate your offering’s value proposition for each market segment. Markets are often segmented using geographic attributes (e.g., continent, country, region, state and dispersion) and / or business attributes (e.g., size, industry, product mix and legal structure). That said, the key factor in your segmentation analysis is how your customers use your solution.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying, “There is nothing permanent except change.” This adage is certainly true centuries later, especially with regard to technology and its impact on today’s sales and marketing organizations.
I’ve been reading the now-classic business book, “The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation" by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. As I continue to read, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that value selling can help every sales rep perform like a Challenger by helping them adopt the complementary attributes that make up the profile of this likely sales leader.
Some deals are simple, like selling a solitary product to a single buyer. Other deals can be more involved with offerings that include multiple products, phased timelines, and deployments for multiple departments, locations, or processes across an enterprise.
I recently spoke with Mike Serulneck, an accomplished value engineer who has successfully developed and managed business value engineering and sales proposal teams at Tier 1 technology companies. During our conversation, Mike shared his experience using value selling methodologies to sell technology solutions, as well as his perspective on how value selling has changed over the last decade.
Value selling? Aristotle? The link between one of the greatest thinkers of the Western world and value-based sales processes is stronger than you would think!
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.
