In the past couple of weeks of sales kickoffs, I have come to realize that sales organizations don't spend time talking about sales. Naturally, they talk about opportunities and pipelines and what must happen for the client to buy from the salesperson. Even though most sales organizations should know better, they still talk about their solutions, as if that is what the buyer wants. People don't buy solutions; they buy the outcomes they need.
You are never going to win a client without having a conversation, and more likely in this environment, a good number of conversations with them. Despite this, sales organizations don't talk much about the execution of the sales conversation and its role in securing deals. This fails to prioritize the only vehicle salespeople have for winning the relationship and acquiring a new client.
The Increasing Value of the Sales Conversation
This challenging environment makes it difficult for buyers and decision makers to have the confidence and certainty they need to pursue their change initiatives. This trend has been building over the last two decades, as the world continues accelerating at a blistering pace, making it difficult to know what the future holds.
You may have noticed that more people on the client side are invited to participate in the change initiative. This gives stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in on the decision and raise concerns or practical issues. This is also why it takes more time to win deals. Fighting against this trend, sales leaders demand velocity, while at the same time decision makers are worried about making a mistake that will make things worse.
The value of the sales conversation is increasing because buyers are tentative to make a decision they face only rarely. To prepare themselves, they try to acquire the information and insights they need to succeed in their change initiative.
The Reason Salespeople Lose Deals
Salespeople don’t lose deals because their contacts don’t trust their company. Nor is it because clients don’t believe the salesperson’s solution can help them improve their business and achieve the better results they need. Much of the time, the reason the salesperson loses is because they didn’t perform well enough to be considered.
The salesperson may take some of the blame for the lost opportunity, but sales leaders share in the loss, as they spend more time and energy building a pipeline without developing the sales team’s ability to manage the sales conversation well enough to win the client by helping them understand their problems and the changes they will need to make to reach their business goals.
Sales leaders would improve their team’s win rates if they spent more time enabling their sales teams to master the sales conversation.
Making the Decision You Would Make
No one knows what they don’t know. Smart buyers and decision makers realize that they don’t know enough to make an informed decision without acquiring an education that will reduce their level of risk. This means that the salesperson must transfer their experience, their knowledge base, and the insights that will remove the client’s risk.
Imagine your client asks you to make the decision for them because you have greater experience making this type of decision. You could easily make the decision. But instead, we use the sales conversation to create value by transferring what you know to your contacts, providing the help they need to get the better results they are pursuing.
How to Spend Your Weekly Meeting
You know how you sometimes struggle to come up with something to share with your team in your weekly meeting? One way you might use that time to level up your sales force is working on creating value for your prospective clients in the sales conversation. You can build this plan by sitting in front of a whiteboard and making a list of what your buyer needs to know to decide without fear. With a smart group of sales reps, ask the question what your prospective clients need to know that would help them better understand their decision.
You will also do well by making a list of factors that your clients need to consider in their decision, with the salesperson sharing their own experience of how to weight each one.
In the end, you will have an exhaustive list of the mistakes your clients and prospective clients have made and what they need to learn from you. You work on this by having your sales team practice value-creation strategies and talk tracks based on their experience, improving their performance over time.
If It Isn’t the Sales Conversation
If it isn’t the sales conversation that is the variable of winning and losing, what else would it be? If you believe your competitor beat you, it means their sales rep had a better conversation. If you believe your solution failed, you may want to notice that most of your competitors sell something that is on par with your solution, including those who sometimes beat you. Your competitors are good companies, and you can be certain that they lose deals when their salesperson bombs the first meeting by failing the client in the sales conversation.
Leaving this important article, start to work on improving your sales team’s ability to master the sales conversation. There is nothing more important for you, your team, your company, your prospective clients, and the people who are trying to improve their results. Your team must lead the client to the success they need.
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