It is easy to focus a lot of your time and attention on bigger deals, as that is where a big portion of revenue comes from. However, more often than not, mid-market deals make a large portion of your pipeline.
According to the Harvard Business Review, mid-market companies account for only 20% of the revenue of most B2B companies. However, they purchase upwards of $6 trillion in goods and services each year and account for over a third of the economy’s revenue. The mid-market is a resource that often goes unnoticed as many companies fail to have a strategy to address them.
In a recent Customer Value Community Sandbox where B2B professionals workshop topics around B2B sales, customer success, and value, our members workshopped best practices to extend value selling resources to mid-market opportunities. During this event, value selling experts led a discussion around the challenges of scaling value for sellers and customers in the mid-market segment.
With attendees from top B2B companies like ServiceNow, Zuora, Saviynt, and more, we explored tactics to combat these challenges. Keep reading to learn the top 5 tips for unlocking mid-market value for sellers.
1. Shift seller focus from Return on Investment (ROI) to Cost of Inaction (COI)
Arm sellers to collaborate on the Cost of Inaction (COI) with customers. The cost of Inaction refers to the expenses and losses incurred by failing to act to resolve problems. Different from ROI, COI is a defined metric, not a potential benefit calculation. Enabling mid-market sellers with a framework to help customers quantify the expense of the status quo empowers sellers and their customers with a way to define and calculate the true problem they are trying to solve. Jen Allen-Knuth, who was a full-cycle enterprise sales rep for 18 years at CEB, Gartner, and Challenger and now leads DemandJen, led a session for our members on called The True Cost of Doing Nothing. Check it out to learn more about COI.
2. Align on Business Outcomes
Start by ensuring your customers are truly aligned on their business outcomes to ensure internal alignment. Ecosystems Value Validation Framework™ helps align your customers around value through tactics, metrics, targets, and timelines. With face-to-face time with customers often being limited, it can be easy to want to speed through the process in mid-market sales. However, making space for alignment during every conversation, not just in the beginning is crucial to success.
3. Meet Customers at Their Level
We can easily fall into the trap of coming to all stakeholders with the same approach. However, it is crucial you approach your customers at their level to help gain buy-in and close more mid-market deals. For example, some stakeholders may be at an educational phase around the value of a product/service like yours and may need more thought leadership resources. Others, however, may be well versed and you can jump right into higher-level discussions. Additionally, different departments may need different approaches to tailor to their business objectives. Take the time to determine the best approach for your stakeholders.
4. Keep Business Cases Clear and Concise
In an effort to demonstrate your full value to your customers, it can be easy to accidentally overwhelm them with information within the business case. Instead, limit your business case to 3-5 benefit categories (ex: accelerating the sales cycle, improved productivity, reduced costs, etc) that are tailored to your customer's desired business outcomes.s. This will help drive the conversation and ensure you do not get off track. Remember, the ultimate goal of your business case is to unlock mid-market value by empowering your customer to internally have the value conversion on your products or services. To do this, the business case needs to be clear and concise.
5. Customers are Better Editors than Writers
Be sure to come to the conversation with your customer armed with a business case and point of view already built with 3-5 benefit categories based on the desired business outcomes of the customer. This makes the process much smoother for your customers to jump in with edits, helping you to reach a desired business case much more quickly.
Be sure to also be clear on what is needed/expected of your customer. Often, when sales reps ask customers if they want a business case, it can quickly lead to a no as customers can see it as additional work. Instead frame business cases in a more positive light, explaining that this is a test process to demonstrate the value delivered based on our customer's business objectives. Be more direct in explaining this is the typical process for your customers.
Unlocking mid-market value for sellers and customers can be challenging. However,
Ecosystems value selling SaaS platform allows for joint collaboration between sellers and customers to seamlessly ensure you are fully aligned on value. Learn more here.
