With win rates down by 18% and 69% of enterprise reps missing their quota, according to Pavillion’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarking report, there currently is added pressure for many front-line sales teams to create better value selling stories as well as winning business cases with excellent ROIs to deliver value. But what if you found out that the biggest correlation for winning deals was not impactful ROIs? According to Ecosystems’ research, the number one correlation for winning deals was customer collaboration. When a business case involves external collaborators, the odds of winning that deal are up to 3.4x times higher.
This statistic is compelling and seems logical, right? Collaborating with your customer produces better results. But common sense isn’t always common practice, and collaborating without a winning framework can be unwieldy.
During Ecosystems’ on-demand webinar, Co-Creating a Compelling Value Story, our speakers, Nate Nasralla, Co-Founder of Fluint and author of Selling With, and Alex Schrager, Vice President of Ecosystems.io, discussed how to transform your approach to customer collaboration and create business cases that not only resonate but also drive action. Below are their top strategies from the event.
1. Start Early in the Sales Process
In order to establish a collaborative relationship with your customer, you need to start early. This should begin as early as the first and second sales calls. Approach the collaboration conversation at the end of the first sales meeting, telling your customer you will provide a summary of the meeting over email and would like their input and feedback on any key points you may have missed. Then, begin that second sales meeting by pulling up the summary and editing it live with the customer to ensure it is up to date. This live editing process gets them involved and establishes a collaborative relationship with the customer. Then, once you introduce a business case, the collaboration process will feel more familiar to them. The sooner you introduce collaboration, the more likely you will be successful in delivering value.
2. “Sell With” the Customer
In most sales processes, over 90% of internal selling for your stakeholders occurs when you are not even in the room, according to a recent blog by Nate Nasralla, Co-Founder of Fluint.
This means the bulk of influence for a sale lies on the internal stakeholder you have been working with during the sales process. To ensure that your stakeholders are prepared, you need to first identify who would be an excellent champion for your product or service internally. Determine who is truly interested in your value and what you have to offer, and who is willing to collaborate with you on a business case for them to present internally.
“You’ve got to find the right person who’s a true mobilizer.”
The key to a successful sale is ensuring your customer feels confident in themselves to present their reasoning and desire for purchasing your product/service back to their internal teams. Check out our blog to learn more about boosting customer confidence and strategies to improve.
3. Focus First on the Problem (Cost of Inaction), Not the Outcome
A mistake often made in sales is wanting to immediately focus on the outcome and solution, as it is common to want to deliver value as soon as possible to get potential customers interested in the sales conversation. However, focusing on a future outcome that is not currently guaranteed can be challenging without first identifying the problem your customer needs solved.
Once you determine what challenges your customer is currently facing, demonstrate how continuing to not implement a solution is a detriment to their organization. In other words, you need to define the cost of inaction first to demonstrate the need for a solution. Alex Schrager, Vice President of Sales at Ecosystems, and Jen-Allen Knuth, Founder of DemandJen, showed you how to quantify the cost of the problem in a recent Cutomer Value Community on-demand webinar.
Focusing first on demonstrating the costs customers are facing by not acting will make them more interested in hearing how your product or service will provide a meaningful outcome. Once they are bought into how your product or service could help them solve their challenges, customers will be more inclined to collaborate.
4. Align on the Value Validation Framework
A recent Gartner report shared that 60% of buyers regret a purchase within 12-18 months and are at risk of churn. A big challenge and reason for purchaser regret is a lack of internal alignment and leadership engagement with a purchase. The best way to solve this is to collaborate with your customer around Ecosystems’ Value Validation Framework, which consists of six essential components:
- Objectives: The overarching goals the organization aims to achieve.
- Tactics: Specific programs or projects to be employed in pursuit of the objectives.
- Problems: Clear identification of the root cause challenge to be addressed.
- Metrics: Quantifiable measures used to assess progress and success.
- Targets: Specific, measurable outcomes to be achieved.
- Timelines: Defined periods for achieving the set targets.
By collaborating with your customers around these six elements, you are able to improve internal stakeholder alignment and confidence that your product/solution aligns with their internal business objectives.
4. Close the Loop
“A business case is not something that is one and done. Be prepared to change it.”
It is important to remember that for a successful customer partnership, collaboration does not end once the sales cycle is completed and the deal is won. You need to work with your customer to iterate and improve upon your process and business case to further strengthen your customer relationship. This will help reduce the risk of churn and increase your chances for expansion. The more confident your customers are that you care about their business objectives and want to strive for continual alignment, the more they will trust your partnership.
Ecosystems’ enterprise platform is a fully collaborative environment that allows you to align with your customer across tactics, metrics, targets, and timelines, with best-practice business case templates. To learn more, contact our team.
