Timothy Riesterer's Blog, page 21

Two Training Contradictions (And How They’re Reshaping Sales Training Today)

By Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer, Corporate Visions

In an ideal world, sales managers would have the power to freeze time, get their whole team in a two-day training workshop, and not lose one crucial second of prospecting or sales calls.

Unfortunately for time-strapped sales managers with ambitious targets, that world doesn’t exist. It’s one reason only 21 percent of companies are able to train as many salespeople on the skills they think they need, according to a joint survey from Corporate Visions and Sales and Marketing Management.

The new survey revealed two contradictions that are driving new requirements for sales training, today and tomorrow.

Contradiction #1: Survey respondents say they primarily rely on sales managers to choose the training options and plans for their salespeople. However, these same sales managers balk at letting their salespeople leave the field for training.

Of the respondents who aren’t able to train as many reps as they’d like, 56 percent identified taking reps out of the field as the biggest reason for not providing the necessary level of sales training. Meanwhile, budget constraints ranked a distant second in the voting.

Main Challenge: Does it make sense to leave training decisions up to managers if they’re reluctant to invest the time?

Contradiction #2: No investment in the most effective training format.

Of the nearly 300 companies responding to the survey, 45 percent declared that instructor-led classroom training is the most effective at changing salespeople’s behavior.

Despite the perceived effectiveness of this training, investment in the instructor-led format will be flat in the coming years.

Meanwhile, 65 percent of companies say they plan to increase their investment in virtual, online training. Ironically, this format registered significantly lower in the effectiveness vote.

Main Challenge: How do the people in charge of delivering training become responsive to these demands despite believing the alternative is less desirable?

These contradictions—and the training challenges they expose—are factors that companies are going to have to contend with when they think about effective training going forward.

Read my follow-up post to discover what’s needed to overcome them — and what singing, acting and dancing have to do with it!

You Only Get the Meetings You Ask For

By Conrad Smith, VP Consulting Services, Corporate Visions

What?

Notch another one for the old ‘stating the obvious’ tally. But, if this is so obvious, why is it that so many sales professionals need to be continually reminded to get out there and prospect?

Some sales professionals may believe the idea of prospecting is dead, due to the Internet and other marketing modalities. It’s called ‘buying’ when you wait for customers to do the initiating. Selling requires you to take the initiative and get the conversation started. That starts with asking for a meeting.

So, here’s a couple quick reminders of how to get a meeting started:

Crafting a great message — Arguably the hardest work you need to do is the research necessary to craft a meaningful message, targeted to the individual who cares and knows about the conversation you want to have. It takes a bit of time. However, the time invested allows you to tailor your message to be on target in a way that increases your chance of getting the cherished meeting you desire. You’ve got to research your customer’s business to craft a message that’s all about the buyer with whom you are trying to get a meeting.


Sending the message — It may sound obvious, but research and writing alone doesn’t build pipeline. You have to send the message and follow up with the frequency required – not the frequency you desire. Take a personal inventory and ask yourself, “What keeps you from sending more messages?” If time is your answer, then you must make the time to craft, send and follow-up more messages because that is a fundamental part of selling.. If that’s not it, take a good strong look at your confidence level. Everyone has a fear of rejection, so if that’s the reason you are not sending more messages, get coaching, work with a peer, practice and build up your messaging muscles.


Using multiple follow-up strategies — There’s a good chance your message may not get the answer you desire on the first try. If your company doesn’t already have one, develop your own personal process for varied, repeated touches with your prospect. Think like a chess master — you’d never win at chess by only moving one player the same way in every game. If your first email doesn’t work, change the message and the modality. But above all, don’t give up. Remember, you are the person selling. Average chess players plan at least three moves at a time; advanced players plan the entire game. Your messaging strategy should be somewhere between six to eight touch points. Your chess game would use every piece on the board, so make sure your plan includes every messaging modality, different message content, and even your senior managers or subject matter experts if needed.

Key messaging considerations:

Keep it short and crisp — The majority of emails are read on smartphones and forcing people to scroll doesn’t help your cause.


Make the subject line stand out — It alone often determines whether your message is read or deleted. Make it all about your customer’s needs. If your customer wanted to know about your products and services, they’d be looking at your website.


Don’t assign work to your buyer — If they wanted to call you they would have – you are the one selling so take the initiative to reach out and schedule a meeting. Don’t ask them to call you back. You have a right to ask for a meeting – you need to confidently own that you and your company create some really great results.


Can you hear me now? — When you are calling, be ready to talk to a real live human being – and if you get voicemail – be ready to leave an ultra-crisp, succinct message.


Level up your message — Remember, you get delegated to whom you sound like, so keep your message at your buyer’s level.

Above all, remember this. Learn to accept rejection and lean into the ‘no’ responses. Use each ‘no’ as a means to get better. How can you improve on your message?

Get out there and get some meetings. Good luck and good selling.

Think Executives Are Purely Rational Decision-Makers? Think Again.

A myth has long swirled around the topic of executive decision-making, and it stems from the broad and untested perception that executives are strictly rational agents—logical and analytical in their approach to business decisions.

Now that we’ve put that premise to the test, we can also put that perception to its rest. Because it’s not true. New research from Corporate Visions reveals that intuitions and emotions have far more sway over the executive decision-making process than many sellers—or executives, for that matter—realize.

The study—which had 113 executive participants from a wide array of industries, including software, oil, finance and aerospace—yielded many unexpected findings about how much emotions influence executive buying decisions. Perhaps most compelling among them was the idea that you can provide executives with the exact same “math” with respect to a business proposition, but get significantly different results depending on how you frame the situation.

Specifically, the study tested the principle of loss aversion, an idea pioneered by social psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which says that people are more willing to make a change or seek a risk to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain.

The study revealed that executives, across both personal and professional scenarios, are not exempt from this principle. They demonstrate a far greater appetite for the “risky choice” when you simply change the way you frame the scenario.

Words trump math!

Purely rational decision-makers executives are not! To learn more about the study and its findings—and what implications they may have for your message development and delivery—check out this article in CMO.com based on the research we did with our partner, persuasion expert, Dr. Zakary Tormala.

Read the article here.

Why the Best Story Wins

Why do customers choose you?

That’s the question we recently asked the market, hoping to get an idea about what factors actually create differentiation.

So, what is it? Products? Price? Brand reputation?

How about none of the above. Nearly two-thirds of respondents ranked sales conversations as the most important factor in creating competitive differentiation. That’s nearly 20 percentage points higher than product quality/innovation, ranked as the second most important factor.

The implication is clear: Great customer conversations come down to a great story, and the best story, told the best way, wins every time.

A great story stems from an awareness that your prospects are resistant to doing something different from what they’re doing today. In other words, your biggest enemy isn’t your other competitors, but your buyer’s status quo. That means marketers and salespeople need to develop and deliver a “why change” story that gives prospects a pathway to change that’s compelling, actionable, and—most importantly—can help them overcome the business challenges that are hurting them today.

Below are four steps to help structure a great “why change” story across your messaging, content and skills – one that guides prospects on a pathway to a new and safer alternative to their current situation.

Step One: Lead with an Insight – Tell your prospect something they don’t know about a problem or missed opportunity they didn’t know they had, revealing inconsistencies or uncertainties in the way they’re doing business today. This is the basic idea behind a messaging approach based on “unconsidered needs.” Research from Corporate Visions shows that this approach—instead of the traditional “voice of the customer” approach, where you respond only to the needs your prospects tell you they have—can give you a statistically significant advantage in the area of differentiation.


Step Two: Disrupt the status quo – Show your prospects why their status quo situation is unsafe and untenable. Highlight visually—ideally, with a whiteboard-style presentation—how sticking with the status quo could prevent prospects from realizing their most crucial business goals.


Step Three: Tie your prospect’s unsafe current situation to a “new safe scenario – You can do this by depicting a contrasting pathway that resolves the issues you’ve identified. That resolution point is key. Research from Corporate Visions shows that creating risk around your prospect’s current situation isn’t compelling enough to incite buyers to change. To make your message actionable, you need to link the factors that make their current situation risky with a resolution alternative that can solve these business challenges. The Corporate Visions study shows that you can make a bigger impact on the factors that drive buyer action by delivering a story that resolves the risks you’ve identified.


Step Four: Prove it – Finish your story by highlighting a comparable scenario where you helped another company find a “new safe” through your solution. Once again, if you’re in the field, create a sharp visual contrast between the pain that company was experiencing in its status quo situation and the value and relief they gained by switching to yours.

For more on how to tell a “why change” story that disrupts the status quo with principles rooted in decision-making science, check out this eBook at http://cvi.to/SellWithScience

CVI Perspectives: ‘Chunking:’ Why Everyone is “end to end, innovative, and world-class”

By Rob Perrilleon, VP Consulting, Corporate Visions

In my last post, you heard about the Curse of Knowledge, and how it can lead to overly technical language that confuses the audience. There is another communication trap where you think you are using clear, easy to understand business language, but the message is as unclear to the customer as the technical-speak.

When we talk to clients about their differentiation, certain terms come up almost every time: “comprehensive (or end-to-end) solutions,” “our experience and expertise,” “focus on client’s success,” or “our people.” These are not complex or technical terms, so why are they still meaningless to the customer? Ask yourself, do any of your competitors say, “We have limited capabilities, we’re new to this business, we hire anyone with a pulse, and we don’t really care about your success”? Of course not! Everyone makes those claims, so they all sound the same to the customer. What’s interesting is how passionately most people defend those empty statements. “I know, but we really mean it!” is the typical response.

So what’s going on here? Why do people want to make these claims, even when they admit that they don’t convey any differentiation? The answer is a term called “chunking,” originally coined by the psychologist George Miller. Miller established that humans have a fixed number of slots in working memory to store information. Chunking is simply combining pieces of information, so they occupy fewer slots. Anyone who learned to remember the names of the Great Lakes with the mnemonic “HOMES” chunked five pieces of information into one.

Chunking works great in communications, but only when both parties understand what’s being chunked. The question “Can you give me a ride to the airport for my 6:00 flight?” has a lot of chunking going on. How do you get to the airport? How long does it take? Is there traffic at that time of day? How far in advance do you need to get there? Depending on who you’re talking to, the original question may be fine, but some people will need it all explained to them.

And that’s the connection to those meaningless differentiation claims. I have no doubt that the person who says “end to end solutions,” is not only sincere, but also has a very clear picture of what ‘end to end’ means, how that differs from their competition, and what value it delivers to the customer. The problem is that the customer doesn’t have that depth of knowledge, so they don’t know the underlying chunked information, and all that meaning is lost on them. Recall one of the key principles of the Curse of Knowledge: Most people will overestimate how much their customers know about them.

How do you overcome this? Just like with the Curse of Knowledge, don’t overestimate your customers’ understanding of your capabilities. Then, ‘unpack’ some of that chunked information. Even better, draw some contrast to your competitors. For example, instead of saying “end to end,” try something like, “Since A, B, C and D are so interrelated, it’s important to get them all from one place. You’ll only get in-house capabilities in all four areas, fully integrated, with successful implementations, from one place – us. Other providers have gaps, or rely on third party integrations, but that’s not the end to end solution you really need.”

It’s a little longer, but it means a lot more than just “end to end.”

 

Corporate Visions Survey Reveals Companies Aren’t Updating Their Market Messages as Often as They Believe They Should

Survey Also Finds That Shifts in Customer Needs is the Factor Most Often Motivating Messaging Updates

PLEASANTON, Calif., May 18, 2016 — Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, today announced results from a new survey revealing a contradiction between how often companies feel they should be updating their messaging and how often they’re actually doing it. With more than 350 marketers and salespeople responding, the survey found that nearly half of respondents (48 percent) say they refresh their messages annually or every two years. However, 65 percent believe they should be updating their market messages quarterly or at least twice a year to stay differentiated.

“What’s evident from the data is that companies want to be more responsive when it comes to updating their go-to market messages, but they don’t have a messaging system or framework in place to build, update and maintain messages that are consistent, sales-ready, and distinct in their point of view,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer for Corporate Visions. “To make sure your key shifts in message resound in your marketing and sales content, as well as your field sales conversations, you need to update your messages with a plan, using a consistent, repeatable messaging methodology to stay out in front of your industry.”

The survey also looked at which messaging areas companies update most often. The top three areas indicated by respondents were:

Product/service/portfolio messaging: 30 percent
Topical issue/insight messaging: 25 percent
Enterprise solutions messaging: 18 percent

Additionally, survey data showed what the key factors motivating message updates are. Respondents indicated the top three areas driving message changes were:

Shifts in customer needs and need response: 37 percent
Major changes in market trends and new issues arising: 21 percent
New product launches or product modifications: 19 percent

“Messaging updates are the reality for marketers and sales leaders, and the speed and frequency of updating is only going to pick up,” Riesterer said. “The companies who stand to make the biggest impact are those with a consistent process and skillset in place to help them create high-quality customer-centric, demand gen campaigns and sales-ready content.”

To learn more about the survey and its findings, download the infographic.

New Study Reveals Insights That Combine Risk and Resolution Have Greatest Impact on Behavior and Emotions

Joint experiment between Corporate Visions and expert in persuasion shows significant advantage to insights approach that includes risk and resolution

PLEASANTON, Calif., April 27, 2016 — Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, announced results of an experiment that casts doubt on traditional approaches to insights development and delivery. For the experiment, Corporate Visions contracted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, an expert in persuasion and messaging who created the research and conducted the study. Separately, Tormala is a social psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The online experiment, involving 324 participants, aimed to measure the behavioral and emotional impact of three different sales messaging sequences that employed the properties of “risk” and “resolution” in various ways. The study found that participants—by a statistically significant margin—were most positively influenced by a message that introduces risk to create urgency, then resolves that risk by linking it to a new and safer scenario.

Specifically, the study revealed that participants were more persuaded by an insights-based message containing novel risk information tied to possible resolution alternatives, versus a message that just presents risk alone.

“Surprising figures and data points can excite prospects and create some uncertainty around their status quo, but as these results demonstrate, that’s only half the battle when it comes to delivering a great insights-based message,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer for Corporate Visions. “Our research confirms that a message that pairs risk and resolution both excites potential customers and incites them to take action. That’s because you’ve shown them how your solutions can lead them from a challenging, unsafe position to a new and better one with you.

“You still need to deliver compelling stats and ‘grabbers’ to create the urgency to change,” Riesterer adds. “But, to make that change actionable, the research clearly shows that you need to show how the change scenario you’re presenting can resolve the risks in their status quo.”

To learn more about the study and its findings, download the research brief.

Webcast: Sales and Marketing Content That Challenges the Status Quo

Did you know the types of insights marketers and salespeople feel are most effective are exactly the opposite of the insights they believe their companies are delivering in their marketing and sales content?

It’s time to reverse that trend and start delivering the types of distinct, forward-looking insights that make the biggest impact on positive selling outcomes—and help you defeat your prospect’s status quo.

Join Tim Riesterer and Jamie Shanks (Sales For Life) as they discuss how to create messaging and content that smash engagement benchmarks and compel prospects to consider doing something different than what they’re doing today.

Date: Tuesday, May 31  

Time: 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST

REGISTER HERE: http://cvi.to/InsightsWebcast

CVI Perspectives: Two Things a Salesperson Never Wants to Hear—and How to Respond When You Do

By Conrad Smith, VP Consulting Services, Corporate Visions

“We see you as a commodity.”

Ouch. Painful words after years of great service. The first time I heard a customer say those words, I was indignant until I realized how they saw me was far more important than how I saw myself.

Take a discerning look at your competitors and yourselves. There’s probably a lot of sameness. Change is a lot easier when your customer sees your product or solution as the same product or solution they can get someplace else. Take a look at your products and solutions through your customer’s eyes. How does your product or solution interact with your customer’s business? What ideas can you bring to improve how your product or solution affects inflection points and latencies within your customer’s business? What if you could improve the order to cash flow for your customers? What if you could reposition your solution to bring value not only to your customer, but your customer’s customer? If your customers believe they can buy your solution and products somewhere else, it’s incumbent on you to sell the value that you bring beyond the product and service.

“It’s not you, really, it’s me.”

Of course it’s not you. It’s never been you. It’s always been the customer. A mistake that a lot of salespeople make is losing focus on the customer, and particularly, the right customer. It’s very easy to become complacent with your day-to-day, long-term relationships. These relationships are fed by the status quo. These are the people who need your product or service and they give you the next purchase order. You may be surprised to find out you haven’t been having the right conversation with the right person. Quantifying business value means measuring the impact that your ideas are creating for your customer. You need to have that business conversation with the right person in the organization who understands and appreciates the business value you create. This means more than making sure that your product or service delivers to the specified requirements. This means going beyond to measure business impact created and expanding relationships to make sure that people throughout your customer’s organization know that value has been created and quantified.

After you create great ideas that drive improvements throughout your customer’s organization, and after you quantify those impacts and communicate them to the right people, the process will start all over again. Your customers are far more likely to remember any part of the relationship that did not go well than they are to remember the value you create. Being consistently focused on bringing new ideas, that are all about your customer and their business, and making sure the right executive decision makers hear those ideas, are ways you can do your best to make sure you aren’t on the receiving end of the call that ends the big relationship.

Good luck and good selling.

To learn more about making a compelling business case to executives in your existing accounts—and about making an impact in new ones—check out this short whiteboard video: http://cvi.to/ElevateValue

CVI Perspectives: Why Your Pipeline Problem is Actually a Conversation Problem

By Eric Nitschke, Director of Product Marketing and Sales Enablement, Corporate Visions

Baseball season is upon us—it’s an exciting time in my household, but it also comes with discouragement since this doesn’t seem to be “the year” for my team. The coach’s explanation for the team’s lackluster play? The players are young, the team is still coming together—and in the end, we get the answer no sports fan ever wants to hear: It’s a process.

Unfortunately, I often hear the same answer from sales organizations looking to improve the conversion of leads and opportunities to billable revenue. A client recently noted that their deals either close right away, or take forever to close—if at all.

Naturally they want to know how and why that happens, so they embarked on an exhaustive pipeline progression analysis to find out why. They looked at marketing and sales qualification of leads, broke down the timelines, determined how long leads were in the pipeline, and calculated the quote-to close-ratio.

Their result? Reps weren’t following “the process”—they weren’t developing their engagement plans, filling out their opportunity sheets, or checking off all the boxes in their CRM system.

That’s all important, but it misses the point. Studies show that 89 percent of first sales meetings fail to get a second meeting because the seller hasn’t shown business value. And business executives value that level of expertise and four times more than just having a great relationship with a seller. In fact, 74 percent of executive buyers will choose to work with the company that creates a buying vision.

Fixing sales process issues only helps fix the few deals that manage to get to the second call. And often those opportunities are doomed for reduced prices and squeezed margins because they didn’t start from a position of differentiation.

Even sellers who are “leading with insight” could be hurting their pipeline progression. One recent study by Corporate Visions and Dr. Zakary Tormala revealed that asking diagnostic questions and providing insights requires a very specific cadence and timing if you want to get prospects to admit their pain. Similarly, another study by the same team found that creating risk with a great insight is only the start of a status quo-busting conversation. To actually open prospects up to change, you need to also show how you can resolve the risks you’ve identified with the alternative, safe scenario you’re proposing.

Solving the challenges in pipeline progression isn’t a process problem—it’s a conversation problem. If you want sellers to close long-term business, you have to help them succeed in the first sales call. Here are a few tips to help:

Defeat the status quo with neuroscience: Sellers that jump right to the conversation about why your company and products can help solve buyer challenges miss the fact that many buyers still haven’t committed to doing anything different. That’s called the “status quo bias,” and as sellers, it’s a bigger enemy than the competitors in your market. The good news: You can overcome buyer inaction with a “why change” story that reveals inconsistencies or uncertainties in the way your prospect is doing business today. By making prospects aware of the costs of doing nothing, you’ll bring about a shift in the way they perceive change, and make them more open to the possibility of doing something different with you.


Create a buying vision with social psychology: Researcher Daniel Kahneman noted that people are two to three times more motivated to make a change to avoid a loss than they are to achieve a gain. Sellers can inject uniqueness and urgency into customer conversations by messaging to prospects’ unconsidered needs—challenges or issues they’ve overlooked or underestimated. By basing your selling message around unconsidered needs, you can show prospects how the pain of doing nothing is actually far greater than the pain of change. That will create the buying vision you need to get to a second meeting.


Use behavioral economics to tell visual stories: The Picture Superiority Effect points to the profound impact that simple visuals can have on a customer conversation, and speaks to the idea that prospects process change emotionally, not rationally. Visual storytelling through a simple “why change” story provides the insights and contrast you need to convince your prospect that he or she is unsafe in their current situation, and that you are uniquely qualified to guide them to a new and better change scenario.

In baseball, teams and managers who ask fans to “trust the process” may be glossing over a weak farm system and clear skills gaps in their current players. And much like those managers, companies that think the sales process is the key to fixing pipeline progress may be missing the point. Pipeline progression can only be successful if reps are equipped to nail the first conversation—it’s the only way to get customers to “play ball.”