Five ways to know if your organization is ready to elevate sales.
In our first post, we discussed why senior buyers want salespeople to help them think differently about business innovation and competition. This selling relationship is based on developing compelling points of view, rather than hinging on personal rapport, to seal the deal.
We previously shared an example from Siemens about installing LED lighting in a major city to contain spiraling energy consumption. This next example illustrates how a Point of View Selling method can solve multiple municipal problems with one comprehensive approach.
The city was in the early stages of planning an event that was expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors from many countries. The city’s aging transportation infrastructure struggled to handle the current demand—let alone the influx of visitors. The federal government previously agreed to fund a light rail project to serve the city, but had recently withdrawn its commitment. Without relief, the city faced gridlock during the event’s height, diminishing the visitors’ and residents’ enjoyments, as well as increasing public safety risks and fears of creating negative publicity.
Siemens successfully engaged senior city decision makers by reframing the problem and providing a comprehensive vision for a computer-controlled, integrated traffic management system that incorporated new, less-expensive fleets of hybrid buses. After thorough analysis, city leaders implemented the new transportation infrastructure in time for the event.
Point of View Selling is more demanding to employ than traditional strategies and requires sales organizations to address five critical categories before implementation.
- Business fit. Your sales strategy and value proposition must adequately focus on both engaging senior-level decision makers and guiding their thinking. Senior executives will act to capture new business value and find the necessary budget to do so when salespeople bring them ideas that can significantly impact their business. Consider the degree to which your products and services impact customers’ key business drivers, and not merely meet purchasing specs.
- Compelling points of view. These are essential for salespeople to educate and engage senior-level buyers about how to generate new value or mitigate significant risks. These also increase salespeople’s credibility and enable them to demonstrate executive-level business expertise.
- Foundational skills. Salespeople need basic abilities and knowledge in business acumen, their industries, customer business intelligence, their own products and services and consultative or solution selling. These capabilities aid in developing points of view and engaging customers in dialogue.
- Advanced selling skills. Critical skills include generating insight, educating customers using concise narratives and simple illustrations, and framing an investment decision. These advanced skills distinguish salespeople as thinking partners and trusted advisors.
- Sales support, structures, and processes. Compelling points of view that deliver game-changing advantages to customers will put new demands on organizations to create and deliver innovations. Salespeople will need support to develop, refine, and test new points of view for their customers. Sales managers must learn to teach these advanced skills and be prepared to manage a different selling cadence.
Organizations that take realistic views of where they are today and invest in building the necessary capabilities across these five categories are the most likely to gain competitive selling advantage when adopting high-level selling approaches, such as Forum’s Point of View Selling.
In our final piece, we will discuss why knowing customers’ businesses and industries positions salespeople to seal deals more than personal relationships.