Uncover Hidden B2B Sales Insights Within Your Organization

Unlock the secret sales potential hidden within your company's walls.

If you want to be a highly successful salesperson, you will need to find information and insights by reading and conducting research. This approach will enable you to build a strong set of insights you can share with your contacts, creating value in the sales conversation. But you may find an equally powerful set of internal insights inside your four walls. Too few salespeople do the work to mine these insights and use them to help their clients learn what they need to ensure their change initiative and the decisions they make to improve their business results.

Leveraging Internal Resources for Sales Success

The idea of resources inside your walls suggests that your sales organization has information and insights that are available to anyone who is willing to do the work to mine it. Very few sales leaders or sales enablement teams do the work to provide their sales force with the massive amount of knowledge and experience strewn across the organization’s computer networks, CRM, and the minds of the people that work there.

If you are a sales leader or a sales manager leading a sales force using an insight-based sales methodology, you may want to write a list of all the assets that contain information that could be useful for a salesperson to help their client make a significant change. After that, comb through each one to see what insights you can find.

Extracting Knowledge from Your Sales Team

You may not have ever mined your sales force to learn what they know through their experience of selling every day. You will learn much by doing this work, as your salespeople are often closest to the client. A few common insights can include the following:

• You might start by asking your sales force about the false assumptions that your team will need to address and what facts to replace them with. This can make it easier for your team to address and dispatch these outdated beliefs should your clients hold them.
• Your sales force can also provide you with the common questions their contacts ask. Some of your sales force will have already found excellent answers to these questions. If one or more salespeople have found responses that help the client, you can hand those off to the rest of your sales force.
• You may be able to find the most common root causes of client problems. If you have a list of these problems, asking your sales force to add the root causes of each one can make it easier to engage with clients and providing advice about how to improve results. This can help the salesperson prove they are an expert on the client’s problem, increasing their credibility.
• If you are able to sit down with your sales force to share what they are noticing, you will find other internal insights.

Utilizing CRM Data for Sales Insights

You have a set of insights inside your CRM. Your CRM is capable of being a strategic asset, but only if you do the work to set it up to be more than a place to list opportunities and count activity.

• Start by looking at the industries you serve and the reasons the client was compelled to change. If a number of clients are compelled to change, knowing the reason can make it easier to engage the laggards in a conversation about how.
• As a follow-up to the industry, you might make a list of competitors that had the client and lost it to your sales force. By knowing why your competitors lose clients to you, you can enable your sales force to mention that some companies are not getting the results they need—without ever mentioning the competitor’s name out loud (or even under your breath).
• If you are interested in beating your competitor for a contested deal, make a list of each of your major competitors' delivery models. To make this easy to do, start with the low-investment, low-results model; followed by the scaled-up, low-investment model; followed by a good-enough model; followed by best in class. This will allow your sales force to triangulate your competitors by explaining the advantages of each model and the concessions the client will experience after they buy.

If I were your sales leader, I would tell you that you should do the research and reading that will provide you with insights you can cite and use in an executive briefing to help your client make the rare decision they are pursuing. But after that, I would ask you to spend as much time as it takes to mine what is inside your four walls. I would ask you to sit down with your sales force every quarter to discuss new trends or changes in the environment that might cause you to need to change something you are doing and replace it with a better talk track or sales strategy.

Before you leave this article, make a list of assets and schedule a meeting to start mining your internal insights, especially any insights that can help you be a more consultative seller. If you are a salesperson, you can do this work yourself, even though you would be better off doing this with a handful of salespeople.