You’ve read the statistics. You know that 69% of sellers are missing their quota, and win rates are down by 18%. Your sellers likely know your product inside and out and know how to sell on your features and functions, but your buying committee isn’t interested in your features and functions. They want to know what outcomes they will achieve with an investment in your solution. Easy to say, but tough to do. Even tougher to do at scale.
In a recent Customer Value Community workshop, we gathered together progressive leaders in value from top B2B brands to discuss expanding field enablement and democratizing value selling across their organizations. Below we summarized their top 5 proven tactics for enabling sellers.
1. It Starts at the Top: Gain Buy-In From Leadership
To align your entire organization around value and gain buy-in from your sellers, start first with your executive leadership team. Go to leadership first to explain the benefits of why democratizing value selling is beneficial for your business. Show them the statistics first-hand. If you have executive support from the beginning, sellers are more likely to gain buy-in as the message will be coming from the top of the funnel first. Consider aligning around the Value Blueprint and having your Leadership team take the Value Maturity Assessment to easily see where to focus.
2. To Be Clear is to Be Kind: Define Clear Objectives
Brene Brown said it. We believe it. It is easy for sales enablement teams to get bogged down by the amount of content at play. Before going to your sellers and sales enablement teams directly, make sure you are taking a step back and looking at your value framework strategically. Define clear and actionable objectives before going to your teams to ensure it is digestible and less overwhelming.
3. Get 1% Better Every Day: Focus on What’s Familiar
If you go to your sellers and sales enablement teams with what feels like a drastic change to their current selling strategy, there is most likely going to be pushback to such a large change. Focus on improving the familiar little by little. Use familiarity to your advantage and instead focus on how your new value-selling framework ties in to their current strategies. By making the changes feel less drastic, gaining buy-in amongst your sellers will be more likely.
4. Tailor-Made Training Sessions
When building your training sessions, take each person's role into account. Break sessions down by department to ensure your team is only getting the information crucial to their role. It is easy to lose people when they are thrown into a training session they feel doesn’t apply to them. People get bored, and their attention wanes.
Instead, break down training sessions by department where applicable and let them know the training sessions were created specifically for them to best utilize their time. Sellers are more likely to listen if they don’t feel their time is being wasted.
5. Role-Based Certifications and Office Hours
Allow your sellers and sales enablement team to practice in a “risk-free” environment, taking the pressure away from getting everything right the first time. Allow sellers to role-play selling on business value to your team so they can receive feedback before trying to practice live on a customer.
You can take training a step further by offering role-based certifications that help your sellers develop talk tracks around value and feel confident in the areas of value they own. For example, create certifications for Account Executives around the qualitative elements of value, such as discovery and benefits, and train Sales Enablement around the quantification of value.
Democratize Value Selling with Ecosystems Value Platform
Ecosystems Value Platform transforms sellers into proficient practitioners of value-selling by optimizing business case content and coaching sales execution. And, with our best-practices templates, a library of 5,000+ value drivers, and ViViEN, our virtual value engineer, creating winning best-practice business cases makes the democratization of value-selling that much easier. Interested in learning more? Schedule time with our team.
