Scott Santucci, Principal Analyst with Forrester Research started off his workshop, The Business Impact of Scaling Valuable Conversations, by asking:
A salesperson with a valuable conversation.
Scott stated, "How you sell is becoming more important than what you sell."
He repeated the theme John Aiello started with the comment that our customers' world is becoming more complex. With that comes different selling states. Your buyers don't feel the incremental changes that are happening all around them until one day they wake up and things are different.
As a result, their dynamics for buying have shifted from "buying" to "achieving outcomes together." Buyers don't want products, they want what the products provide.
Scott shared some Forrester research that shows responses of buyers when asked how prepared salespeople are when they meet with them:
- 88% said they know their company and products well
- 55% said they know the buyers' industry
- 34% said they understand the buyers' role and responsibilities
- 29% said they know the buyers' business and specific problems
The important thing to remember with these statistics, Scott reminds us, is that these percentages are only representative of the sales reps who could actually get an initial meeting.
According to buyers, the meeting would be considered effective 65% of the time if the salesperson was capable of addressing the problem. Unfortunately, this only happens 15% of the time.
The top 3 things that buyers want from a vendor they consider strategic are:
- Understand our business.
- Help us achieve an end result we need.
- Be extremely responsive.
Here's the kicker: 80% of buyers said they would pay more to get those 3 things!
What's happening in the market, Scott shared, is that buyers only consider 5 - 10% of their vendors strategic. Everyone else is seen as a commodity provider and is being moved to procurement to do battle over price.
Scott predicts that in the next 3 - 5 years we'll see a vendor caste system. The time to take steps to avoid that by becoming strategic is now. Marketing has the great, untapped potential to help sales achieve this strategic value add that's becoming an imperative. I agree, as you knew I would. The point is that sales can't do it alone.
Companies need to perfect the handoff between demand management and sales collaboration. We need to consider packaging as a modular construct to focus on increasing the perception of value.
A valuable conversation has 3 dimensions:
- Timeliness
- Relevance
- Context
A conversational program includes:
- Content
- Structure
- Delivery
- Utilization
Scott has a few suggestions about how to get started:
- Determine down to the granular level:
- What do you sell?
- Who do you sell it to?
- What do you have to do to sell more?
- Define your customers
- What problems do they have?
- Who gets fired for the wrong decisions?
- What do they need to do?
- Develop content skills tools defined by customer outcomes.
- Measure business results
- Iterate - fix and tune while the plane is flying
- Lock down gains and make sure a solid foundation is in place before you scale.
More Summit posts coming, stay tuned.
Read the first post on John Aiello's introduction to the summit.
