We hear CXOs and sales leaders complain about the fact that they invested thousands of dollars in MEDDIC/MEDDPICC training, Force Management, and other outcome or value selling methodologies, but when their sales reps go back to work, they are not doing any of the things they learned.
Why? Because they think it is going to take too much time, it will be too difficult, they don’t fully understand it themselves and don’t want to lose credibility with the customer. The list goes on.
With 69% of sellers missing their quotas according to the Pavillion 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarking report, it is clear that the adoption of a new way to sell on value is crucial.
This was the main topic of discussion in a recent Customer Value Community Sandbox workshop, where we gathered practitioners in value selling, customer success, sales enablement, and revenue operations together to share their proven strategies that worked.
Below are their top 5 best practices for driving the adoption of value selling at their organizations.
- Gain Executive Buy-In: The key to success for adoption begins with your executive leadership team. The organization looks for guidance from their leadership, and if they can tell leadership is not bought in, it will be difficult to make any headway on adoption for sellers. Go to the leadership team with your program first and explain what is expected of the sellers to gain their support in expectations.
- Workshops, Office Hours, & Hands-On Learning: To achieve successful adoption, sellers need to feel confident when utilizing their value selling program, and the best way to do this is through hands-on learning. Create workshops in your kick-off sessions that not only present the material to your sellers but allow them to get hands-on practice. For example, consider requiring all sellers to create a practice business case that must be shared back and presented to you in a risk-free environment such as office hours. This will take the pressure off of getting it right the first time while creating first-hand practice that will allow them to feel more confident and receive coaching.
For example, in the Ecosystems platform, in-app coaching is embedded right into the platform to help your sellers create winning business cases. This self-service model enables your sellers to adopt your value-selling program with ease with our user-friendly UI.
- Make It Easy - Align to Their Current Tools & Process: Sellers spend all day in Salesforce (or another CRM) and they already (should) understand the steps for their sales process. It is best to introduce your value-selling initiative within this environment. Put the business cases and discovery guides right in Salesforce. Align your recommendations on value selling directly to the existing sales process, so that they understand what to do and when to do it. Differentiate between what they should be doing themselves and when they may want to engage a value team to help.
Do your best to make your new program as familiar as possible, rather than formatting it as a brand-new program. Go the extra mile by adopting the common language of each department to customize your training to increase the likelihood of adoption.
- Set Clear Expectations: Once your sellers have been enabled in the value-selling framework or platform and are confident in utilizing value selling in the field, be sure to set clear expectations going forward. Without clear guidelines, it can be easy for sellers to slip back into old ways. This is where buy-in from the leadership team early on becomes highly beneficial. If leadership is ready to support your efforts and set expectations, it will be more likely to receive more widespread adoption.
- Create Resource Guides & Share Wins: When adopting any new change, it is unlikely someone will get the hang of it from the start and not have questions. To combat this, arm your sellers with a resource guide that includes examples of winning business cases, resources for frequently asked questions, templates to work off of, and more. Curate this to your team and the questions that seem most frequent. If you have a large team of sellers, it may not be possible to get to all of their questions at once, but this resource guide can be a great aid.
Further, the best value programs celebrate success stories. Some examples from Ecosystems’ customers include competition boards, Slack channels, and value newsletters that capture the stories of sellers who won using value. Tracking your metrics on impact in Salesforce or another tool will also help with this—once sellers understand that value selling will increase win rates by 3.4 times, especially when implementing Ecosystems Value Validation Framework, , you may have the opposite problem of too much interest and demand.
These insights were derived from events held by Ecosystems, the leading platform in value selling. Our collaborative platform arms your sellers with a library of 5,000+ value drivers, winning business case templates, and in-app coaching to enable your team on value selling.
