EMM Group recently covered the best definition of sales enablement and how changing your thinking on what it means can have an impact on your entire commercial success framework.
Today, we’re going to continue that discussion with some tried and true tactics that will help you implement this new sales enablement framework in your own company. Again, this information was covered in our recent webinar on sales enablement, which we recommend you take the time to listen to if you haven’t had the opportunity yet.
Understanding industry and customer segment knowledge
The marketing team generally understands customer segmentation and focuses various marketing campaigns or tactics on the segment(s) most likely to respond to them. However, once a lead makes it to sales, there’s often a disconnect in which the sales team is not necessarily viewing the incoming lead from marketing as being from the same – or any – known customer segment. Instead, the lead falls into a one-size-fits-all approach that simply won’t work.
This results in misaligned and unfocused sales efforts as illustrated by the slide below.
On the other hand, a thorough understanding of both the industry and the customer segments as they apply to the sales process enables the sales team to speak more effectively to each lead that comes to them from marketing.
A high level view of the industry sets the tone for the sales discussion and provides a common ground on which to build a productive relationship. Fully realized segmentation highlights the key differences in how customers view various aspects of the value proposition. And this knowledge then informs the sales team, allowing them to discern which direction the discussion needs to head to end in a mutually beneficial sale.
Learning to sell on value rather than just on relationships
Relationship selling is valuable and necessary in today’s marketplace. But it’s not a growth strategy or even a sustainable strategy in the long run. Why? Because customer relationships are necessarily transitory in the fast-paced, highly competitive environment in which we do business. No one’s loyalty is strong enough to stick with a company who is no longer providing them the very best value for their money.
Modern sales team need to learn to sell based on a strong value promise (which promotes a healthy customer relationship) rather than just on the relationship itself.
Doing so requires that your value proposition be appropriately quantified. The slide below shows an example of that.
This interactive online tool was actually developed for one of our clients for the express purpose of illustrating the dollars and cents value being provided for our client’s customers based on various parameters. As the sales team discussed various arrangements with their customers, they could see – in real time – how various features under discussion would affect the ROI the customer realized.
This is a powerful example of selling on a strong value proposition rather than simply on relationship.
Creating a clear and understandable trade-off strategy
Inevitably – especially if the customer relationship is still the most important factor in the discussion – the sales team is going to have to address discount requests. It’s part of doing business in a competitive environment: everyone wants to spend less if they can.
The simplest – and most dangerous – response to this request is to slash a set percentage off the top in order to save sales volume or maintain a relationship. This percentage comes straight out of your profit margin and discounts like that are going to kill you in the end.
But what else can the sales team do if there’s no structured trade-off strategy in place?
On the other hand, designing a structured trade-off strategy that clearly outlines where the value promise itself can be adjusted to allow for a lower price empowers the sales team to discuss discounts productively with the customer by explaining exactly what needs to change to meet the price point they’re demanding, while protecting margins in the process.
The trade-off strategy outlined above is an example from one of our clients for whom we identified three unique variations in their product delivery and supply chain that allowed for price point variations to meet various customer needs.
As you start at the Base Package at the top and work your way down the list of variations and a la carte services to arrive at the Full Service Package at the bottom, you can see the vastly improved negotiating power the client’s sales team had with this strategy in their back pocket.
Again, if you haven’t had the chance yet to experience the Sales Enablement webinar from October, we encourage you to watch it now. And, if you’d like to see how sales enablement fits into the overall Integrated Commercial Strategy, download our free ebook using the link below.
