Timothy Riesterer's Blog, page 9

Can Virtual Sales Training be Better Than Traditional Classroom Training? (Updated July 2019)

The post Can Virtual Sales Training be Better Than Traditional Classroom Training? (Updated July 2019) by Tim Riesterer appeared first on Corporate Visions.

In-classroom limitations are only exacerbated in an online sales training classroom. Is there a better way to get more effective virtual sales training?

Everyone assumes that virtual sales training is a pale imitation of classroom-based training when it comes to behavior change.

Especially if that virtual sales training is a bunch of self-paced online modules where a salesperson can “quiz to complete.” Do you seriously believe a salesperson can demonstrate proficiency in the sales process, presentations or negotiations skills by completing a quiz in a module?

As a result, some companies are pushing for virtual classroom experiences – telepresence, LMS online sales training classrooms or web conferencing – as a replacement for an in-person classroom. And, as an opportunity to include practice and performance beyond watching online modules.

While there are cost advantages to online training, there are three big examples of limitations that actually exist in the so-called “holy grail” of the in-person classroom that only becomes compounded when you go to the virtual classroom:

Virtual Sales Training In The Classroom: 3 Major Limitations
1. Takes time out of the field 

It still requires a salesperson to carve out time in their day to participate. So, it still takes them offline from their work just like an in-person classroom.

But, to make matters worse, since they didn’t have to fly anywhere, it is very easy to simply not show up assuming no cost, no harm, no foul. Or to show up, and put another app like your CRM or Outlook up over the online sales training platform and go about your business day until called on to present.

We’ve seen online classrooms where over 70 percent of the attendees have a different app up on top of the classroom app (little do they know that this can be tracked by the person doing it!)

2. You don’t get adequate practice or coaching

In a classroom, you are always up against a clock to get in the teaching time and practice/coaching time everyone believes is necessary for behavior change. As people try to cram the classroom full of more people, you will find that some people don’t get a chance to get up and stand and deliver, or their time is compressed, along with their coaching.

In an online sales training environment, it’s only worse. Instead of two days, many online events go for two hours. People get to hide or participate in quick team presentations and receive even less involved coaching and feedback.

3. It’s an event, done and gone

Even though people are in a classroom for sometimes two days, give or take, it’s still an event that comes and goes—just like the knowledge imparted and the practice and coaching experience. But, at least you had days and intensive focus, along with the ability to watch your peers do their thing and get their feedback. In the virtual classroom, it’s an even shorter event, that disappears even faster, with less performance requirement and less time to watch your peers…since you are probably doing emails anyways.

Improving Virtual Sales Training with Recording

Recently, we’ve been providing an entirely new way of delivering virtual training with a powerful practice and coaching component. Which will not only provide an improvement of the virtual classroom but may actually be a more effective environment for behavior change than even traditional in-person classroom.

It’s training, practice, and coaching in a recorded environment where salespeople participate in e-learning for knowledge transfer, but perform recorded practice challenges or have their recorded role plays or even their recorded web conferences with prospects reviewed.

Below are the advantages over the virtual classroom or even a regular classroom:

1. Reps can do virtual sales training on their time, not at an assigned time or place that they need to be.

Reps learn, practice and receive coaching when it fits their schedule, without taking them away from their day job.

2. Everyone does a complete stand-and-deliver presentation.

Instead of doing a partial, incomplete presentation, or even getting to skip their presentation as they might in a classroom.

3. Receive an expert, scored assessment

where a coaching expert reviews the content and scores it against a rubric based on the skills taught and expectations set for demonstrated proficiency.

4. Get detailed coaching feedback and tailored remediation.

Beyond just red/yellow/green scoring, your rep gets custom, complete coaching notes identifying specific strengths and weaknesses, along with a pushed set of emails and short remediation videos for improvement in their specific areas of weakness.

5. Virtual sales training provides opportunities for “certification”

When you really need reps to demonstrate proficiency on a skill, product, or new message, you can ask for re-submissions until certification-worthy levels are reached.

6. Watch their peers’ best work

Unlike a classroom where you have to sit through some potentially bad examples, in this environment, you can push the “five-star” examples from their colleagues for reps to review.

Virtual Sales Training: Classroom Or Recording? What Do Sales Leaders Actually Prefer?

In a recent industry survey, we asked our respondents which approach they’re currently using or most strongly considering using, in the future. The split was essentially 50-50 between a virtual classroom and a virtual recording experience.

This even divide raises an important question: What do sales leaders actually value most when it comes to virtual training?

When asked to stack-rank the importance of six key considerations, respondents rated the following three areas most crucial:

Ability of salespeople to learn and train on their own time, rather than at an appointed time
Amount of time a salesperson actually gets to practice
Ability to see peers’ best practice examples

Concern about time out of the field is the major reason sales leaders are turning to virtual environments in the first place. A previous industry survey found that 56 percent of companies are struggling to train as many reps as they want because they’re concerned about them losing valuable time in the field during training days.

No surprise, then, that as companies make the switch to virtual environments, time-based considerations are foremost on their minds. I’d like to break down the top three virtual sales training needs as revealed by the survey and discuss each in terms of which virtual sales training environment best addresses them.

Gives reps the ability to learn and train on their own time

This need breaks heavily in favor of the virtual recorded environment. Clearly, sales and enablement leaders are keen on liberating reps from having to train within a pre-established timeframe. A virtual classroom might allow reps to train from anywhere, but it doesn’t allow them to train at any time. In an era where self-pacing, flexibility and individualized learning are increasingly favored, that can be a major restriction.

The amount of time a salesperson actually gets to practice.

One of the most profound factors in creating behavior changes and instilling deep skills knowledge is the opportunity to practice in a stand-and-deliver environment. One of the biggest limitations of traditional classroom-based formats is that not every rep gets ample opportunities to practice—and master—the story and skills they need to deliver. Unfortunately, the virtual classroom model again comes up short here, because it doesn’t sufficiently alter the traditional workshop environment enough to allow for more practice opportunities. The virtual recorded environment, on the other hand, presents more chances to practice and refine your delivery—while providing precise, individualized coaching and feedback. From an accountability and message ownership standpoint, the recorded format wins. 

The ability to see peers’ best practice examples

In a virtual classroom, you may well be witness to a bang-up example of how to deliver your story. You might also not be. That’s the risk of a live environment, classroom or virtual, and it’s a risk that a recorded virtual environment completely eliminates. In the latter, you’re guaranteed to have access to the most outstanding example of your story in action. From a skills acquisition standpoint, that’s huge.

There’s no doubt a live virtual environment has its merits—just as a live classroom-based event does. But a big reason you’re making the switch to virtual sales training is to minimize the inherent flaws of classroom-based learning. Based on what sales leaders value in that transition, it seems that live virtual classrooms may not deliver on that promise—and could even exacerbate some of the limitations of traditional, classroom-based training that companies are most eager to see gone.

Want to learn more about an alternative approach to virtual sales training that’s not a pale imitation of the in-person classroom? Check out our report.

A version of this article originally appeared in Sales & Marketing Management Magazine.

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What You Need to Know About the Challenger Sales Model

The post What You Need to Know About the Challenger Sales Model by Anton Rius appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Challenging buyers to disrupt their status quo, change, and choose you. This strategy, as popularized by the Challenger Sales Model, is one of the most recognized sales training methods today.

But where did it come from? And is it effective for every selling
and buying situation?

What is the Challenger Sales Model?

The Challenger sales model is based on the idea that your
sales reps can teach your customers something new about their company. Salespeople
engage in disruptive two-way conversations with customers, provoking buyers to
move away from their status quo approach and choose your solution.

Challenger is one of several sales training models inspired by Geoffrey Moore’s original idea of Provocation-based Selling, as popularized by his HBR article, In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers. In his article, Moore argues that salespeople must help customers “see their competitive challenges in a new light that makes addressing specific painful problems unmistakably urgent.”

Written in 2009, Moore’s provocative methodology was a startling
revelation for many companies who were desperately trying to understand how to
salvage their business during the “Great Recession.” A decade later, Challenger
remains a popular adaptation of Moore’s methodology, encouraging sales teams to
develop three essential skills:

Teach customers something new and
valuable about how to compete in their market.Tailor their sales pitch to resonate with
the decision-makers’ specific issues and get buy-in from the entire
organization.Take control of the discussions around
pricing by focusing on value and applying pressure to persuade buyers to close.

Provoking buyers with an urgent imperative may have
persuaded them to open their wallets and take action in the midst of an
economic downturn. But is this approach still relevant ten years later?

What The Challenger Sales Model Gets Wrong

The economy has fundamentally transformed over the last
decade since Moore’s article. Most companies have moved away from a one-time
sale of products and services to subscription-based business models. Today, the vast majority of a business’ revenue (70-80
percent) comes from existing customers.

Provoking your prospects and leading with unexpected insights are effective tactics when you’re trying to convince your buyer to change their status quo. But research shows that using a provocative, challenging message with existing customers—when you’re trying to renew or expand business with them—will actually backfire, increasing your risk of losing them to your competitors by at least 10-16 percent.

This begs the question: If challenging your existing
customers isn’t effective; what is?

3 Sales Strategies for Customer Expansion

The Challenger sales and training model doesn’t account for the unique pressures and demands of generating revenue through customer expansion. The buyer psychology is different, so your stories and skills need to be different. You need to shift your approach to include these sales strategies for keeping and growing revenue with your existing customers.

1. Know when to reinforce the status quo

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using a provocative message or introducing unconsidered needs to disrupt your buyer’s status quo. But this messaging approach only works when you’re an outsider trying to acquire new customers. Status Quo Bias is your competitive advantage when convincing customers to renew or pay more for your solutions, and it’s foundational to your all-important upsell conversations.

2. Train your team for situational fluency

Situational fluency means being able to engage differently with prospects versus customers, knowing how to adjust for the different decision moments across the customer lifecycle. Unfortunately, most Marketing and Sales teams take a one-size-fits-all approach to every encounter. Instead, you need stories and skills specifically designed for customer expansion conversations to maximize your company’s ability to keep and grow your business.

3. Work closely with Customer Success

Renewals and upsells require unique alignment between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success organizations. All three teams play an important role in winning critical commercial moments with your existing customers. The right messaging, content, and skills training will greatly improve your ability to align these departments for better retention and expansion results.

Think Beyond The Challenger Sales Model

There’s no doubt that challenging your buyer to take
decisive action works in specific sales situations. But you don’t want to
provoke your hard-won customers so much that you accidently open the door for
your competition. Research proves that the Challenger model is only effective
for new logo acquisition—just 20-30 percent of the customer journey.

Only with Corporate Visions do you get tested and proven sales messaging and training approaches for enabling buyers to choose you—on both the acquisition and the expansion sides of the customer lifecycle.

Check out our eBook, Four Must-Win Commercial Moments in Customer Success , to learn research-backed messaging approaches for winning more customer expansion conversations.

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What Kind of B2B Marketing Personalization Gets Results?

The post What Kind of B2B Marketing Personalization Gets Results? by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

In today’s world of big data
and hyper-targeted marketing campaigns, most B2B marketers believe the more personalized
your message, the better your results.

Our research backs this up. 58 percent of B2B marketers we surveyed believed the highest effort personalization method is the most effective approach.

This means marketers are
spending countless hours researching every detail about their
prospects—everything from industry trends to company challenges to what they
ate for lunch.

But is all that personalization
truly necessary? And, more importantly, is it working?

All that account research comes at a cost, after all. Response rates for your email campaign should justify or, best case, outweigh your effort. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time, resources, and dollars on personalization that shows little to no return.

So, where’s the sweet spot? How
much personalization is too much? And what kind of personalization actually
drives action?

That’s what we set out to
discover in our latest study.

The Marketing Personalization Study

In a live field test using our
own prospects and messages, we targeted 7000 names in our database that met the
following conditions:

Each prospect was an ice-cold prospect; that is, an individual who had had no prior interaction with Corporate VisionsEach prospect fit our ideal client profile in terms of vertical market, company size, and title

Next, we constructed a set of
emails that contained identical offers and calls to action, but different
subject lines and openings based on the personalization method.

The conditions for this
experiment were as follows:

Industry only: We modified the subject line and opening to include a relevant industry insightCompany only: We researched the company’s annual report and press releases to find a unique anglePersonal + Industry: We added personal details to the industry-specific emailPersonal + Company: We added personal details to the company-specific email

Get
our latest eBook to see examples of the four emails we sent.

The Most Successful B2B Marketing Personalization

We tracked the results of these
email campaigns over the course of one quarter, with surprising results.

Open rates showed a clear winner: individually personalized content. The emails that combined personal and company information clearly outperformed all other categories with a 26.17 percent open rate. And the industry-only personalization came in last, with a 20.11 percent open rate.

Now, as any savvy marketer knows, open rates are not the most valuable metric to track. Click-through rate is a better indicator of interest, attention, and lead quality. And those numbers told a very different story.

In fact, the click-through results were reversed. Personalizing by industry (without personal details) returned a 24 percent higher click-through rate than the company + personal details treatment.

Meaning Behind the Numbers

These numbers pose a fascinating question: Why would someone be interested enough to open an email, but then be turned off enough to not click through?

We have a theory.

People may initially open an email that appears personal. But when they discover it’s only a clever gimmick to grab their attention, they become skeptical, and the let-down factor is enough to prevent them from taking any further action.

On the other hand, most businesspeople are curious about what the competition is doing. When you share a story about how a similar company struggled and solved a common industry concern, you activate their voyeurism, and they’re better able to project themselves into the story. They may even be eager to find out what happened next.

In other words, you can never really be an expert about the inner workings of someone else’s company. But when you position yourself as an expert in their industry, you’re offering new knowledge and insights in a way that avoids any feelings of skepticism.

It’s easy to spend your time on
granular research that never turns into revenue. But don’t lose sight of the
goal of your personalization strategy: to win more business.

As this study proves, you may not need to hyper-personalize every piece of communication. When you focus on the approach that drives the most meaningful results, you’re able to scale more quickly and effortlessly—while delivering even better results to your sales teams.

Get our latest eBook, It’s Not Business… it’s Personal: Putting Personalization to the (Field) Test, to see the full results and example emails from the study.

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Sales Strategy: What’s Most Effective? A Great Message! (Updated May 2019)

The post Sales Strategy: What’s Most Effective? A Great Message! (Updated May 2019) by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

When you think about it, an effective sales strategy is all about making sure that your reps hit their quota, right? Consider the following insights:

Research performed by SiriusDecisions shows that the number-one inhibitor to sales achieving quota is “inability to communicate value message.” In other words, if your sales force cannot communicate why your solution is different, better and worth more, there’s nothing your sales strategy can do to fix that.
In corresponding research in which SiriusDecisions asked executive customers about the quality of interactions with salespeople, only 10 percent said sales calls provide enough value to warrant the time they spent on them.
A Forrester Research study revealed that only 15 percent of sales calls add enough value, according to executives surveyed.
The Forrester study also showed that just 7 percent of surveyed executives say they would probably schedule a follow-up.

The lesson from these statistics is that the messaging element – what salespeople say, do, and write in order to create perceived customer value – is far from adequate. To be effective, your company sales strategy needs to focus on customer conversations as a way to create a distinctive purchase experience and separate your company from the competition.

To do that, your sales strategy needs to focus on 10 key areas.

10 Keys To Developing A Successful Sales Strategy
1. Demonstrate Value In Your Messaging

Even if you sell a truly remarkable product, prospects aren’t likely to recognize the full value you offer. In fact, most prospects either don’t recognize or can’t articulate the root of the challenges they struggle with on a daily basis. That’s why you need to create your own opportunities. And to help prospects understand the benefits of your offering, you need to demonstrate your value with powerful and persuasive messaging.

Crafting this message means successfully differentiating your solution from competitors, creating contrast and urgency using stories and insights, and taking an empathetic approach to answer key questions your buyers are asking at each stage of their Deciding Journey. At the end of the day, your messaging — the story you tell and how you tell it — sets you apart from the competition.

2. Position and Differentiate In Your Sales Strategy

Most technology companies position themselves for a competitive bake-off of features and benefits. They talk about “why us?” — why the prospect should choose them over their competitors. But the real questions that customers are considering are “why should I change?” and “why should I do it now?”

Successful sales strategy requires a new approach for positioning and differentiating your offering. To stand out from the crowd, you need to understand that your real competitor is the status quo and you need to help your prospects make the decision to change before you help them make the decision to choose you.

3. Tell a Compelling and Memorable Story

When salespeople prepare for conversations with prospects, they usually focus on getting all the facts straight about their offerings. But the most accurate information in the world won’t resonate if you can’t connect with your customers.

Telling personal stories and using metaphors and analogies helps bring your message alive in a more compelling way than simply reciting facts and data. Effective storytelling paints a vivid picture, illustrating the contrast between your prospect’s current situation versus what’s possible, and connecting what you can offer directly to their unique situation. Once you start sharing stories in your sales conversations, your customer relationships will become deeper and more rewarding.

Corporate Visions can help your company create a sales strategy on a solid foundation of effective sales messages. Power Messaging helps you execute the most remarkable, memorable and compelling sales strategy, creating buying experiences that convince prospects to choose you.

4. Speak to the Deciding Journey, Not Your Sales Process

A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that a salesperson uses to lead a prospect to purchase. Typically, the sales process involves several steps like prospecting, qualifying, discovering needs, negotiating, and closing. This would be an ideal checklist to follow if all your buyers were robots being taken through an assembly line. But that’s just not the reality.

Marketing and selling today isn’t a predictable progression that you’ve decided is how your prospects and customers should buy. What you’re really up against today is a Deciding Journey—a series of key questions your buyers are asking as they look to address specific business goals. Instead of being “program-centric” with a one-size-fits-all design, you can be problem-centric, addressing specific needs as they arise with situationally relevant messages, content, and skills.

5. Don’t Rely on Personas or Customer Profiles In Your Sales Strategy

Customer profiles and personas sound good in theory. The idea is to collect common demographic attributes, attitudes, and behaviors of your target audience to help frame and target your messages. But when used as a superficial profiling approach, personas can lead your messaging astray.

Persona-based selling assumes that the behaviors or actions of your target buyer are motivated by their internal characteristics. In reality, buyers are motivated by outside influences that challenge their status quo and convince them to change. These outside influences might include rapid growth within the company, inefficient or unsustainable processes, or broader changes that affect their industry as a whole. So, instead of focusing on your prospect’s disposition, speak to their situation.

6. Avoid the “Commodity Trap” In Your Sales Strategy

Too often, marketers and salespeople base their messaging on the needs prospects tell them they have. Then, they connect those identified needs to corresponding capabilities, in standard “solution selling” fashion.

The problem with this approach? You fall into the trap of commodity messaging along with your competitors, who are likely constructing their value message in response to the same set of inputs. As a result, you sound just like everyone else, leaving your prospects indecisive and without any real urgency to change.

Instead, you need to introduce unconsidered needs that extend beyond the identified, known needs and solve for those. Introduce prospects to problems or missed opportunities they’ve underappreciated or don’t even know about. Then, connect the unconsidered needs you’ve identified to your differentiated strengths, which are uniquely suited to resolve those risks.

7. Lead with Insights, Not Discovery Questions

To be of value to your buyers, it’s no longer sufficient to say, “Tell me what you want, I’ll get it for you.” Buyers now want salespeople who will tell them what they should want. They want you to do the heavy lifting of sifting through the overwhelming amount of information that’s out there, and to deliver insight into what they’re missing out on that can improve their performance.

This means more than simply finding data and statistics on the internet. A fact without a story is just a data point. To make it real for your buyer, wrap your insights in a story that connects the dots for them and provides the context within their world.

8. Align Sales and Marketing

Too often, sales and marketing are siloed departments, each with individual goals that appear compatible. Marketing creates sales messaging and tools and generates leads for the sales team. Sales teams use the messaging and tools to transform those leads into revenue. But a lack of alignment and gaps in your process can damage the effectiveness of your efforts.

You hear the following complaint from both sides: “we’re doing our job, but they just don’t get it.” The problem with these goals is that they foster an us-versus-them attitude and miss the big picture. Sales is a design point for better marketing. If Sales is the storyteller of your organization, then Marketing is the story builder. Ultimately, these two teams share — and must be aligned to achieve — one purpose: to persuade customers to choose you.

9. Tap into the Potential of Customer Retention and Expansion

Most sales and marketing teams spend the majority of their budgets and effort on customer acquisition and demand generation. Meanwhile, the majority of your annual revenue likely comes from your existing customers, through renewals and upsells.

Nearly half of the companies surveyed by Corporate Visions invest less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets in these key Customer Success situations. Clearly, customer retention and expansion are highly underrated yet powerful growth engines within your company. And you shouldn’t overlook the potential of this untapped revenue stream.

The challenge is, retention and expansion require a distinct messaging and customer conversation approach. Existing customers have their own unique buying psychology. While customer acquisition is all about challenging the status quo to highlight the benefits of switching to your solution, expanding value with your current customers requires you to reinforce your position as their status quo.

10. Enable Ongoing Situational Training

Most training and learning efforts are based on a collection of competencies, supported by a curriculum and catalog that gets scheduled on calendar-based interest and availability. But what does that have to do with helping the company’s business strategy, responding to shifting market demands and intervening to fix emergent needs when they arise?

To be as effective and efficient as you need to be today, your training has to rise to a new level of flexibility, customization, and situational relevance — one that gives your reps a training experience you can stand up at a moment’s notice to solve problems as they occur and tackle initiatives as they arise. Training your reps for situational agility equips them with the messaging and skills they need relative to the customer conversations they’re having.

Corporate Visions can help your company create a sales strategy on a solid foundation of effective marketing and sales messages. We help global B2B organizations build powerful messages, create content to deploy your message, and train sales teams to ensure they deliver your message effectively.

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The Best Way to Apologize to Customers, Backed by Science

The post The Best Way to Apologize to Customers, Backed by Science by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

No matter how you phrase it, apologizing to your customers for a service failure is never easy.

They’re upset, and you need to find some way to salvage the relationship and their business. But it’s tricky to navigate such a sensitive conversation. If you don’t phrase an apology the right way, a lukewarm relationship with your customer will get very heated, very quickly.

Not only do you risk losing the customers you’ve wronged, you risk all future revenue from those relationships. Losing those customers also means losing the opportunity for growth or expansion within their accounts. What’s more, you will likely have to deal with the fallout that follows, including the negativity that can spread like wildfire on social media.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

What if you could skillfully phrase your apology message in such a way so you not only recover but actually improve the customer relationship going forward?

You can. Researchers call this phenomenon the Service Recovery Paradox: a situation in which the customer thinks more highly of you after you’ve corrected a problem than if they’d never had the bad experience to begin with.

In other words, a service failure is actually an opportunity to increase customer loyalty!

So, how can you wield this powerful concept to win over even your angriest customers when something goes wrong?

A Proven Framework for Successful Customer Service Apologies

A 2016 article called An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies identified five specific parts of successful apologies.

Acknowledgement of Responsibility: Demonstrate you understand your part in the service failure
Offer of Repair: Describe how you’re going to fix the problem and work toward rebuilding trust with your customer
Explanation of the Problem: Explain the reasons for the failure
Expression of Regret: Express how sorry you are for the problem
Declaration of Repentance: Promise to not repeat the problem

This is a helpful collection, but it leaves a couple key questions unanswered.

First, many influential people in B2B environments frown on what they consider to be “emotional” content, choosing instead to promote a “just-the-facts” approach. So, what’s the better approach?

Second, if you choose to include all five of these steps, which order should they go in? What sequence of these five steps is most effective in order to achieve the Service Recovery Paradox?

With these questions in mind, we set out to discover a scientifically tested and proven framework for phrasing and delivering a B2B apology.

In partnership with Dr. Nick Lee of Warwick Business School, we conducted a research study with over 500 participants across North America and Europe.

Four different combinations of the five apology phrases were created to test for the strongest combination. And, we included a fifth test condition — an “emotionless” response containing only the two most factual components.

You might not think such subtle changes would affect the outcome. After all, the only difference in each of the five conditions was the order in which the individual phrases were presented.

On the contrary, we discovered that one of these approaches dramatically outperformed the others when we asked participants follow-up questions like:

How likely are you to buy more from the supplier?

How likely are you to recommend the supplier to others?

How confident are you that the supplier fully addressed the incident?

Across every question we asked, test condition number three was the clear and consistent winner. And the emotionless, just-the-facts approach consistently landed at or near the bottom of every question.

The best way to apologize to a customer is to phrase it in this specific order: Offer of Repair, Acknowledge Responsibility, Declaration of Repentance, Explanation of Problem, and Expression of Regret.

With so much on the line, why leave such a critical conversation to chance? Discover how you can harness the power of the Service Recovery Paradox in your customer service efforts with a tested and proven framework for delivering customer apologies.

See the all the research details and learn how this winning apology framework can benefit your organization in our State of the Conversation Report, Sorry Shouldn’t Be the Hardest Word: Apology Science in the B2B World.

Download your free report.

 

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Quick Quiz: Five Questions To Assess An Executive’s Clout (Updated April 2019)

The post Quick Quiz: Five Questions To Assess An Executive’s Clout (Updated April 2019) by Eric Beckman appeared first on Corporate Visions.

With so many different ‘executive-level’-sounding titles in use today, it’s not always clear how much decision-making authority the contacts you’re targeting may have. What can you do to figure out how to find the decision maker of a company?

Take this simple, five-question test to gain an objective perspective.

Score 1 point for each “Yes” answer. If the contact you’re targeting scores 4 or higher, you can expect they wield meaningful influence.

How To Find The Decision Maker Of A Company With A Five Question Quiz
Does your target report to the CEO or Managing Director?

If yes, this shows your customer truly values the importance of this role. Individuals reporting to the CEO or Managing Director have a significantly higher chance of sitting on the executive committee. Of course, you need to consider the size of your customer, but when your target nests under someone else their clout may be lower than you think.

Does your target’s budget focus on new initiatives over maintenance?

When spending favors innovation over maintenance, it indicates your target plays a meaningful role in your customer’s growth strategy. Their budget and clout are likely growing. In contrast, when budget favors improving traditional tasks or refreshing existing infrastructure, that signals a relatively less important role.

Are your target’s subordinates focused on delivering business value?

Does your target’s staff seem disconnected, or confused, about their role in supporting company-wide business strategies? That could point to a broader stumbling block: Many executives struggle to act as partners with their peers. Research shows such individuals may think they’re more influential and effective than do their colleagues.

Has your target been in their current role for at least five years?

It takes time to earn respect and effectively promote a business unit’s contribution within an organization. On average, executive tenures run less than 5 years – even shorter when reporting to the CEO or Managing Director. A target who has held their post for at least five years is more likely to have created and established authority as a decision-maker.

Does your target generate new ideas?

Influential executives continually brainstorm how to improve performance. How do you know if your target is an idea person? When new ideas appear, the first person he or she may validate with is you, a trusted partner. Be ready when your target asks if you’ve done something similar for another customer, or if you feel the idea has business merit. These are opportunities to strengthen your relationship.

How did your target do? Here’s hoping they scored a perfect five on this test! What other attributes have you found helpful for figuring out how to find the decision maker of a company?

Want more on this subject? You can always check out this excellent post on HBR about who really makes big decisions in a company. It’s from 2011 but still worth a read all the same.

Once you’ve identified an executive with decision-making influence, you then need to have the confidence and competence to engage them. Learn what it takes to improve your c-suite selling with our executive sales training here.

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Five Selling Techniques That Really Work, And Five That Don’t (Updated April 2019)

The post Five Selling Techniques That Really Work, And Five That Don’t (Updated April 2019) by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

The Five Best Sales Techniques… And Five of The Least Effective

Who couldn’t use an arsenal of effective selling techniques? But there is a lot of “conventional wisdom” out there that, in reality, doesn’t help you make the sale. Here are five of the best sales techniques that really work, as well as five classic go-to selling techniques that may, in fact, be hurting your sales.

Selling Techniques that Work
1. Challenging Your Prospect’s Status Quo

Most salespeople see the sales process as a linear process. At some point, it has an end – the prospect will choose either you or your competitor. The truth is that those aren’t the only two endpoints. There’s another option – no decision – which is chosen all too often.

Studies show that 20 to 60 percent of deals in the pipeline are lost to “no decision” rather than to competitors. It’s only by challenging the status quo that you can get your prospects to see that change – i.e., adopting your solution – is necessary.

2. Finding Your Value Wedge

How much overlap is there between what you can provide to your prospects and what your competition can provide? Most B2B salespeople admit that overlap is 70 percent or higher. So rather than focusing on that “parity area,” you should focus on what you can do for the customer that is different from what the competition can do – this is your “value wedge.” Your value wedge must be unique to you, important to the customer, and defensible.

Learn more about how to define your value proposition.

3. Telling Stories with Contrast

Messaging is about telling your company’s story in a way that attracts prospects to your doors and turns them into customers. The challenge is that, if you’re like most companies, you tell your story in a way that doesn’t differentiate you much, if at all. But to create a powerful perception of value, you need to tell both the “before” story and the “after” story – you need to tell customer stories with contrast.

When you tell customer stories, don’t be afraid to link data with emotion. Often the best way to do that is to talk about the people who were affected by the challenging environment they were working in. Then talk about how their lives became better, easier, more fun, or less stressful after using your solution.

4. Making the Customer the Hero

Every story has a hero. Who is the hero of your story? Is it your company and/or a solution? If the answer is yes, then you need to rework your story – and make the customer the hero. The customer is the one who needs to save the day, not you. Your role is that of the mentor. You are there to help your customers see what has changed in their world and how they can adapt and better survive and thrive.

5. Using Sales Techniques that Involve 3D Props

There are many ways to tell a story. But one extremely effective – and underutilized – technique is to use 3D props. Props break the pattern of what’s expected – and can make the prospect sit up and pay attention. Props make a metaphor or analogy tangible. Props create a physical reminder and can continue selling even when you’ve left the room.

Five Sales Techniques that Don’t Work
1. Challenging Your Customer’s Status Quo

Disruption-minded messages are the lifeblood of the story you need to tell when you’re the outsider trying to acquire new customers.

But applying that same messaging approach to keeping customers and expanding profitability will backfire. In fact, according to Corporate Visions research, customers are 10 percent more likely to switch providers or shop for alternatives if challenged during a renewal conversation. The research also found that a provocative message reduces the intent to renew by 13 percent.

2. Sales Techniques Focused On Selling Benefits

Everyone knows you need to sell benefits not features, right? Well, no. If you start your customer conversation with benefits, you’re jumping the gun when it comes to how most prospects are looking at their first interactions with you and your company.

Remember that 20 to 60 percent of pipeline deals are lost to the status quo. That means that you need to establish a buying vision – the case for why the prospect needs to change – before your solution’s benefits will resonate. That means you need to effectively challenge the status quo and show how the prospect’s world can change for the better (see Selling Techniques that Work #1).

3. Competing in a Bake-Off

When you position yourself against your competitors, you’re competing in a vendor bake-off. It’s a “spec war” and you might gain the upper hand with one feature, but then the competition meets your feature and raises another.

In the process, you and your competition are often having a very similar dialogue with the prospect, leading to the dreaded “no decision.” Instead of talking to the prospect about “why us,” focus instead on challenging the status quo by getting the prospect to think about “why change” and “why now,” and demonstrate the truly unique value of your solution (see Selling Techniques That Work #2).

4. Marketing to Personas

Many marketers use personas to develop messaging. And, on the face of it, it seems to make sense: defining the profile of your prospect will enable you to develop messages targeted to that profile.

The problem is that personas are typically defined by who the prospect is – demographics and behaviors. But the need to change is not driven by a persona. The fact that a prospect shares similar characteristics with the persona isn’t what causes them to re-think their current approach and consider your solution as a new way to solve their problems.

Instead of developing messages based on personas, focus on how to convince prospects that the status quo they are standing on is “unsafe,” then show them how life is better with your solution (see Selling Techniques that Work #3).

5. Relying on the Standard Elevator Pitch

According to Wikipedia, an elevator pitch is “a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition.” And just about every sales organization under the sun spends a lot of time trying to perfect that pitch.

The problem is that the standard elevator pitch tells your story – not your prospect’s story. So instead of spending time refining your elevator pitch, focus on building the story that features your customer as the hero (see Selling Techniques That Work #4).

B2B sales organizations around the world use Corporate Visions’ portfolio of solutions to develop, refine, and use the sales skills and sales techniques that are proven to work. Contact our sales team to have a conversation about how we can help your business improve its results.

Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.

4 Strategies and Tactics for Better Sales and Marketing Alignment

The post 4 Strategies and Tactics for Better Sales and Marketing Alignment by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

According to Forrester Research, only eight percent of B2B companies say they have tight alignment between sales and marketing. That means that 92 percent of organizations have a sales and marketing alignment problem. And an alignment problem is a business problem because, without alignment, a company cannot effectively execute.

First, it’s important to discuss what approaches do not work. Alignment cannot be achieved by merely integrating your marketing automation system with your CRM solution. It’s not about defining a new lead management approach. Simply creating more content and tools won’t align anything.

True sales and marketing alignment require a fundamental shift. Here are some strategies and tactics that can help you get on the alignment path.

Adopt The Right Goal To Align Your Sales And Marketing.

Too often, sales and marketing each have individual goals that seem compatible. Marketing creates sales messaging and tools and generates leads for the sales team. Sales teams use the messaging and tools to transform those leads into revenue. In practice, however, it rarely works this way.

You hear the following complaint from both sides: “we’re doing our job, but they just don’t get it.” The problem with these goals is that they foster an us-versus-them attitude and miss the big picture. Ultimately, these two teams share – and must be aligned to achieve – one purpose: to get customers to choose you.

Make Sales And Marketing Message Development A Team Effort.

Most organizations develop messages in a silo with little input from key stakeholders across the value chain, in particular, those who have conversations with customers. But effective messaging requires your teams to work together.

Salespeople, who talk to prospective and current customers every day, brings insight into the real-life problems that customers are looking to solve. And, as the people who will choose to use – or not use – the tools that marketing teams work so hard to develop, including them in the process will ensure that the materials produced will, in fact, be used.

Run An Effective Relay Race.

When sales and marketing compete with each other, the company can’t effectively compete in the market. An aligned sales and marketing organization, on the other hand, works as a team and takes a relay-race approach. Marketing develops the content and tools that create the buying vision, then sales takes the baton and engages with the customer to get them to choose you.

Pick An Effective Starting Point.

I know what you are thinking: “This sounds good, but where do we start?”

According to a SiriusDecisions survey, the most significant inhibitor salespeople see to achieving their quota – that is, getting enough customers to choose you – is the inability to communicate value messages.

As an aligned team, identify the key weak spots in your value messages and then work together to develop the messages, content, and sales tools to create and communicate the buying vision.

At Corporate Visions, we know that aligning these two pivotal teams together can be challenging. That’s why we’ve crafted a portfolio of solutions designed to help organizations achieve true sales and marketing alignment.

Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.

How to Increase Sales In B2B Corporate Situations

The post How to Increase Sales In B2B Corporate Situations by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Ah, B2B sales. The products are complex, the sales cycles are long, and many decision-makers are involved. That’s why it’s critical that your sales reps highlight the benefits that your solution delivers in order to increase sales, right? Wrong.

You’re Not As Differentiated As You Think

The fact is, following the conventional wisdom that tells us to focus on benefits will limit your B2B sales potential. Most of the so-called unique benefits companies choose to promote in an effort to differentiate themselves often do not move customers to consider doing anything different.

As a result, you risk:

Wasting sales opportunities where customers make no decision because there’s no compelling reason to change
Losing competitive opportunities because you couldn’t differentiate in the sales “bake-off”
Slowing sales cycles and eroding margins because prospects don’t see enough difference to rush a decision or to pay a premium

Transform Pitches Into Conversations To Increase Sales

Instead of “selling” on benefits, what if you could deliver conversations that convince prospects to choose you? By helping your B2B sales team create a remarkable, memorable, and compelling experience when they are sending emails, communication over the Web, and making in-person presentations, you’ll be able to vastly improve your ability to communicate value during a customer interaction.

Put The ‘H’ Into Your B2B Sales

In the B2B world, it is easy to forget that buyers (like all people) make decisions based on emotion and then justify them with facts. That’s why presenting benefits to prospects doesn’t work as well as we think it does. Even if we don’t get caught up in “feeds and speeds” and industry jargon, the typical sterile dialogue simply doesn’t acknowledge that successful B2B sales require H2H (human-to-human) interactions. It’s all part of creating an interactive customer conversation – one in which the prospect is engaged, participating, and owning the discussion, as opposed to being presented at.

At Corporate Visions, we’ve seen first-hand how beneficial a differentiation strategy with a compelling story can make be a B2B sales pipeline. When you create and deliver messages that customers truly care about, you give your brand a clear edge in today’s crowded market – and dramatically increase sales. Our Power Messaging helps you take full advantage of selling conversations to create more opportunities, “un-stick” stalled sales cycles, and protect your pricing and margins.

Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.

You Don’t Need a Better Sales Process – You Need a Better Sales Message

The post You Don’t Need a Better Sales Process – You Need a Better Sales Message by Corporate Visions appeared first on Corporate Visions.

When Sales needs to hunker down and improve its performance, what do you typically hear from sales management? “We need a better sales process.”

Then, your sales management team and your sales training experts spin the dial to pick one of the many options available in the marketplace – in hopes that it will help you rise above the economic pressures and rapid commoditization of your market.

Unfortunately, many of these programs struggle to deliver the results hoped for. In fact, a few years back, McKinsey & Company documented that 75 percent of the efforts at companies using one of the hottest sales process methodologies in the field – solution-selling – were deemed to be failures within three years.

It’s Not About The Sales Process…

Sales processes and methodologies have been around for more than 20 years. Most companies have tried two or three of them. And most salespeople have been trained on at least that many.

Don’t you think maybe something is missing?

…It’s About Having The Right Messages To Fuel Your Sales Process

Several years ago, we performed a survey of marketing and sales executives. We found that 70 percent of the executives surveyed ranked commoditization or competitive differentiation as their number one threat to growth – outside the economy.

Why?

There are more capable competitors than ever before. And customers are overwhelmed by the amount and complexity of information. As a result, customers, in their confusion, were telling salespeople that they see all the competitors as the same.

Your challenge is to avoid commoditization and set yourself apart from the competition. And that’s not something that can be accomplished with a new sales process.

Your Message Is Your Most Strategic Competitive Asset

Your sales conversations are becoming the last battleground in competitive differentiation. And, your messaging, even more than your methodology, is what matters most in this hypercompetitive environment. In fact, you could argue that your message is your most strategic competitive asset when everything else appears the same.

So, how do you develop messages that make a difference – no matter which sales process your organization uses? Corporate Visions can help. Our sales and marketing message solutions help you find your unique point of view so you can create differentiation strategies with clear points of difference between you and your key competitors.

Thank you for reading this post from Corporate Visions - Differentiate Your Marketing Messages and Sales Conversations.