What’s YOUR “Strength of Sale?”

In a recent conversation with a sales executive at a global firm, he commented, “our biggest problem in sales is understanding, realistically, what the status of our sales opportunities actually are. The word realistically is hardly understated or anecdotal – annual research conducted by CSO Insights reveals that only about 50% of forecasted opportunities actually close and almost half of salespeople (46.2%) need improvement in qualifying opportunities.
  
Do you know What YOUR Strength of Sale is?In essence, sales organizations are not very good at objectively assessing the probabilities of winning sales opportunities. By default, they spend more that 50% of their precious selling time on opportunities that are lost to competition or to “no decision.” There’s also a subtle, deeper problem with this issue. What the research is really telling us is that sales organizations are not applying process and structure to selling on a consistent basis, so they have no real way to understand where sales “quality” problems exist, and how to address them. The situation is analogous to the old marketing joke, “We waste 50% of our budget on advertising - we’re just not sure what half.”
 
Part of the problem is that the traditional BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) model for assessing sales opportunities is often inadequate for qualification purposes. To that end, we’ve developed a free mobile learning module for smartphones called The Successful Sales Formula™.

The Successful Sales Formula™, a mobile learning module (Solution Selling mlearning) provides an introduction to a more structured approach to realistically qualify your sales opportunities. While this mobile lesson is a simplified version of what is taught in our formal training programs, it provides the starting point for something we call “Strength of Sale” - a  more objective framework for understanding the overall quality of an opportunity. In addition, following this model also encourages proven best practices for navigating and winning sales opportunities (or exiting opportunities that are a waste of time and effort). 

To access the free learning module, sales people can register on their smart phones at www.spisales.com/mobile under the Mobile Learning section. Following registration (or login if you are already registered), you can immediately begin the lesson, and return as often as needed to revisit key concepts. After taking the mobile learning course, you can apply the concepts using a simple “Strength of Sale™” application (Flash-based app usable on your PC or laptop). From your PC, click here to access >>>

This is just the beginning. In early 2012, we’ll be introducing innovative, easy-to-use software and tools that will allow almost any sales organization to learn and apply best practices for selling on a daily basis. In the interim, have fun with the free application - share and compare YOUR Strength of Sale™ with others in the sales community.

CRM Selection Strategies: Basic Guidelines

Currently, in the CRM industry, there are a myriad of potential solutions to pick from (this isn’t a 5 Guy’s style menu, where you can have anything that you want, as long as it is burger or a hotdog); instead there are many options in this crowded and commoditized market. Therefore, you may want to ensure that your search is focused on several key concepts that we will explore, which include:

• Is the solution that you evaluating capable of easily codify Solution Selling®?
• Is the solution simple for your team to use?
• Are there multiple access points or available internal resources available to assist your team?
• Can the solution generate the necessary reports to drive your organization to become Solution-Centric?
• Does the vendor have the ability to offer you a customized trial site to properly evaluate?

Why are these points critical?

First, are the CRM solutions that you are evaluating capable of working with the Solution Selling® methodology?  Ensure that you ask this upfront, do some research, and ask your CRM sales reps if they have experience with implementing their solution with a codified sales process. This is very important to ensure that the concepts that you have invested time and resources in are adopted and become “sticky” with your sales team. You need to ensure that the phases, steps, and most importantly, the verifiable outcomes are easily tracked by the reps – if they can check off a box or use a dropdown to update their progress, you have made it easy for them.  But, again, it is the verifiable outcomes that you need to ensure are simple to enter, access, and report on.

Next, keep it simple for your sales reps. You need to ensure that the solution is easy for your reps to understand and use, and multiple access and data entry points help to drive this principle. Data is king, and how the reps provide this data can determine whether or not they will even use the solution (aka user adoption). For example, as a rep on the road, at the end of the day, do they need to open their laptop in their hotel room, initiate their VPN client, enter their notes, upload their completed tools, and then finally get back to revenue generating activities?
 
Instead, look at CRM options that provide multiple means for your sales team to easily interact with the system and access their clients and prospect’s information. You may want to send in the clouds!  Explore a hosted solution (aka as cloud-based), which can be accessed from anywhere. This type of CRM comes directly over the web and can typically be accessed via a web browser.

Therefore, it eliminates additional time that the reps spend trying to either get their VPN to work, or syncing of data from their laptops to the server based CRM solution. Next, ensure that there is a an easy to use and reliable mobile application – at the same time, don’t expect your sales team to spend a great deal of time tapping away at the tiny screen to enter in notes… Let’s be honest, they are likely only going to use the mobile version to quickly review the history on an account, double check the address, and look up a phone number here and there, which brings us to our next point.

As a culture, we are addicted to our mobile devices, but they are not the best option for entering long and detailed notes and other information. Therefore, explore other options for your team to get the info into the CRM…  A couple of options to consider: 

1. Assess your internal resources. Do you have someone within your organization that could support the sales team by assisting with data entry, updating the progress made in the Solution Selling® process, and ensuring that their verifiable outcomes are tracked, uploaded, and completed? 
2. Explore using technology in this area too. There are options in the market place that allow reps to dictate their notes over their phones, then receive this information back as a transcript either directly into their CRM, or in the form of an email.

Further, have you made a list of the critical reports that you need to be able to generate?  Will they require extensive customization? Are they Solution-Centric reports?  For example, your pipeline reports need to include the yield percentages, completed verifiable steps, and an at a glance summary of the next steps.

Lastly, take it for a test drive. Insist on either a trial or proof of concept before moving forward with the project. You need to explore the CRM with your sales team, and other leaders within the organization to ensure that you have in-fact chosen a CRM that supports your focus on becoming a Solution-Centric organization. Additionally, you will likely not want to move forward with a solution until you have clearly seen Solution Selling® codified within the solution, have worked with the CRM vendor to help you to upload some sample accounts, and have had a chance to work with them to review your necessary reports. Additionally, ensure that you involve a sample of your sales team in the evaluation and provide them with a structured evaluation plan to ensure that you can get highly objective information. For example, provide them with a set of criteria to rate key components such as ease of use, features, mobile functionality, etc. on a scale of 1-10.
 
In the crowded CRM market place, Try not to get swayed by the latest features that present well, but that are unlikely to be used by the sales team. Stay focused on the fact that your chosen CRM should be a tool that helps the team to close more deals, save time, and to run more efficiently. In summary, ensure that Solution Selling® can be codified within the solution, it is easy to use, and is available for you to try before you buy.

Product Marketing's Blind Spot

The fundamental difference between product messaging and solution messaging is the process of breaking down a customer’s problem into its underlying causes. Sales people have been taught this concept for several decades now, yet over 95% of business oriented marketing organizations fail to reflect this fundamental aspect of a solution strategy in the content they produce. 

This reduces the relevancy and impact of three key deliverables:

1. Customer facing collateral
2. Lead generation and nurturing initiatives
3. Sales enablement  tools 

Unfortunately product marketing professionals have difficulty discarding product-feature-benefit thinking and making the transition from a seller-aligned value model to a buyer-aligned value model (see diagram below). As a result they rarely think about or communicate their company’s value and differentiation from the customer’s perspective in terms of problems, causes, and capabilities.

Instead when management decides that “We’re going to sell solutions.” most product marketing organizations adopt a Hybrid Model. This drives a messaging strategy that goes something like this “You have a problem, we have a solution, here’s its features and benefits and here’s how it’s different… what do you think? “

Unfortunately, this doesn’t build buyer confidence, reinforce the way sales people have been taught to sell, or lay the groundwork for translating benefits to value and establishing customer relevant differentiation.

So if you’re a marketing organization that’s serious about supporting a solution strategy, you need to start breaking down customer problems into their causes and formally adopting a Buyer-Aligned-Value Model. It will immediately improve your ability to:

1. Demonstrate your  company’s understanding of the customer’s problem
2. Translate benefits to value, and intelligently discuss that value and differentiation from the customer’s perspective
3. And finally, if you properly define the key causes of the customer’s problem so they leverage and reinforce your company’s strengths you will automatically create sustainable competitive advantage

For more information on Buyer-Aligned Value Models you can listen to our Audio Visual Summary of the white paper.

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 4 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 1 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 2 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 3 of 4

It Takes Vision, Leadership, & Process

Like all cultural transformations, the transition from product-aligned thinking and messaging to solution-aligned thinking and messaging requires management vision, leadership, and process.

The good news is that just like implementing a buyer-aligned sales process, it’s not rocket science, it doesn’t create traumatic culture shock, and it doesn’t take a lot of time, cost, or effort to get started.
 
All management needs to do to get the ball rolling is to decide that they’re going to get serious about supporting a solution oriented strategy. Then they need to make that decision transparent and insure that everybody understands the differences between the hybrid model and buyer-aligned model.

Once the new direction is announced, the next step is to get their best product managers and marketers to develop preliminary problem-solution maps for each solution. It should only take them a couple of hours to do this, and while it may push some of them outside of their comfort zone a bit, I promise that everybody involved  will learn a lot about their solution’s true value and their organization’s ability to actually sell solutions in the process. 

Once the problem-solution map is complete the key thought leaders in the sales organization need to validate it. This validation process is important because it gets marketing and sales on the same page when it comes to the messaging strategy, thereby eliminating a key issue in the marketing-sales disconnect. 

And finally, after sales has validated the problem-solution map, the final step in the transformation process, as shown in Figure 2, is for the marketing organization to make that map the intellectual foundation for all new marketing deliverables.

Figure 3: Make Your Map the Foundation 
Adopting a buyer-aligned value model and implementing a formal problem-solution mapping process is one of the best things a marketing organization can to do increase its strategic relevance to the enterprise and its impact on sales. It will allow them to:

• Create more relevant and impactful customer facing content that demonstrates that their company truly understands the customer’s problem as well as the best way to  fix it
• Do a better job of generating, cultivating, and nurturing  leads through richer interactions and targeted messages by problem, stakeholder, and market segment
• Improve their alignment with sales and deliver tools that enable salespeople to have more meaningful  business and value conversations with their customers so that they accelerate the transition from product sellers to problem solvers to trusted partners

Finally, one of the key collateral benefits of a buyer-aligned value model and a well constructed problem-solution map is that they create an additional filter for evaluating and prioritizing new product development requests. In other words, if something doesn’t improve the value and differentiation from our customer’s perspective why build it?

Conclusion

Making the transition from products to solutions requires both a marketing and sales transformation, and for a lot of companies, two pieces of the puzzle are already in place.  Sales organizations have been trained and they’ve implemented buyer-aligned sales processes. The final piece of the puzzle is a buyer-aligned value model, and only marketing can make that happen.

In the end it comes down to what kind of marketing organization you want to be. For years CEOs have been saying that they want to create a more customer focused culture that provides solutions to customer problems. Marketing organizations now have a unique opportunity to increase their strategic relevance and their impact on sales by becoming the catalyst that finally makes the CEO’s vision a reality.  

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 3 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 1 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 2 of 4

In Part 1 and 2, I suggested that it’s time for B-to-B marketing executives and their product marketing organizations to get serious about supporting a solution oriented sales process. The first step in making this transition is to formally adopt a buyer-aligned value model. As a refresher:

• Seller-aligned value models reflect the vendor’s point of view where purpose, value, and differentiation are defined in the context of the seller’s product or service
• Buyer-aligned value models  reflect the customer’s point of view where purpose, value, and differentiation are defined in the context of the customer’s problem

I also described the three different kinds of value models and why two (center & right in Figure 1) can support a solution oriented messaging strategy. So, what are the key differences between a hybrid and a buyer-aligned value model?

Figure 1: Three Different Value Models to Choose From
The Hybrid Value Model

An overwhelming majority of marketing organizations adopt the Hybrid Value Model when they decide to support a solution oriented sales strategy. The hybrid model combines both buyer-aligned and seller-aligned perspectives and it supports high level problem-solution messages along with more tactical and explicit feature-function messages.
 
To accomplish this, product marketing simply adds some form of problem statement or description to their existing feature-function list and then calls their product a solution. In fact the hybrid value model is often called “Marketecture” because it’s really just a cosmetic wrapper that’s applied to existing product oriented positioning and messaging.
 
As I mentioned earlier, in the hybrid model, the resulting flow of the message is both buyer centric and seller centric. The buyer centric portion is pretty superficial and goes something like this; “You have a problem, we have a solution”. This customer point of view however, is quickly followed by; “These are its features, here’s how they work, here’s the benefits, and here’s how they’re different from the competition.”  

Since the seller centric part of the model focuses on communicating value and differentiation, it’s just like all other product messaging. The customer has to connect the dots between the feature and the problem they’re trying to solve which forces the customer to translate the benefit into value.  Since value is always contextual, this lack of context in traditional product messaging is why “benefits” are different and a lot less customer relevant than “value”. More importantly, why would you want to leave that value translation in the hands of the customer?

Marketing organizations adopt the hybrid model because they don’t know any better, it comes naturally, it’s expedient, it doesn’t require much intellectual lifting, and it doesn’t force them out of their feature-function comfort zone. Unfortunately, as the symptoms below indicate, overly simplistic and superficial approaches to solution messaging have not been effective, and have had little, if any, impact on sales. They are also why most sales enablement initiatives fail to produce the desired results.

• 73% of CMOs say solution value messages are not reaching customers
• 92% of product marketers have difficulty defining the customer’s problem and it’s causes
• 90% of sales people fumble the business / solution  conversation
• 80% to 90% of marketing collateral is considered useless by sales
• 70% of the leads generated by marketing are never followed up on

Sources:  Sales & Marketing Management - American Marketing Association - B-to-B Marketing - Escaping The Black Hole - SPI International - Value Mapping Consortium

The Buyer-Aligned Value Model

The Buyer-Aligned Value Model (right in Figure 1) is the only value model that truly supports a solution-aligned strategy because it enables high-level problem-solution messages as well as explicit cause-capability messages. Explicitly aligning causes with capabilities is the most effective way to communicate an understanding of the problem as well as your value and differentiation from the customer’s perspective. This is why as I mentioned in Part 1 & 2, the buyer-aligned value model has been universally embraced by what are arguably the most solution-aligned organizations in the world…pharmaceutical companies.

The buyer-aligned value model is based on a clearly defined problem-solution map. The problem-solution mapping process requires product marketing to identify the key customer problems their solutions solve. Then they segment those customer problems by market and stakeholder and break each one down into its key underlying causes.
 
Once the underlying causes of each problem have been defined they are explicitly aligned with one or more capabilities of the company’s solutions.  When the map is completed you have two perfectly balanced hierarchies; one for your customer’s problems and one for your solutions. The resulting message flow goes something like this; “You have a problem, we understand that problem as well as its underlying causes, here’s how our capabilities solve those causes, here’s how we solve them better than our competitors, and here’s the value we deliver to your business.”  

Well constructed problem-solution maps help marketing and salespeople do a better job of communicating their understanding of the customer’s problem and how their solution can help fix it. And more importantly, by connecting the dots between causes and capabilities marketing and salespeople are able to more clearly communicate two kinds of value from the customer’s perspective:

1. A  solution’s “Generic  Value”; which is the business impact of solving specific causes in a way that’s  similar to the  competition
2. And more importantly, a solution’s “Differentiated Value”; which is the business impact of solving specific causes better, cheaper, or faster than the competition

Finally, even though they’re rarely adopted by marketing organizations, buyer-aligned value models are not a new idea for B-to-B companies. For the last several decades sales performance organizations like SPI have been teaching sales people to frame their company’s value and differentiation using cause-capability conversations. So in effect, salespeople have been taught to use the buyer-aligned model while marketing has been using the hybrid model. No wonder that ineffective messaging continues to be one of the biggest drivers of the marketing-sales disconnect.

So, if adopting a buyer-aligned value model will go a long way in closing the gap between marketing and sales and fix a lot of the symptoms mentioned earlier, what’s the best way to get started?

To be continued… The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models Part 4 of 4 will post Thursday, March 18.