Arm Reps to Teach Where Customers Learn

Despite increasing deal complexity and shifting customer buying behavior, the best performing sales reps continue to prosper in today’s world of sales. Why? Because, they are consistently engaging customers well ahead of the traditional sales funnel.

SEC’s 2012 research shows that the best reps shape the nature of customer demand by delivering disruptive insight where customers learn, effectively reframing how customers think about their business. In doing so, high performers are moving customers into the sales funnel by teaching them about previously unrecognized, underappreciated, or unanticipated problems affecting their business in a way that leads customers to appreciate the value the supplier is uniquely positioned to provide.

Sounds simple enough, right? But as you might expect, getting reps to go out and shape demand is far from easy—especially without the right organizational support.

To enable member organizations to support reps’ pre-funnel activities at scale, SEC developed the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping Toolkit. Based on interviews with high performing reps and the behaviors attributed to successful demand shaping, the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping tool serves as a guide reps can use to gain permission and access to, qualify, and teach customers like their top performing peers.

That said, the tool isn’t exclusively for reps—managers can also leverage it as a coaching guide for sharpening reps’ pre-funnel sales activities and sales leaders can use it to inform sales processes and/or enablement support.

The tool follows a four step process that emulates how high performers approach opportunities ahead of the sales funnel. Each step is accompanied with key tells and action steps to help reps identify and advance the right opportunities into the sales funnel. At a high level, the four steps the tool follows are:

General Listening—Leverage social media channels for more than just direct leads; use it to understand the nature of the conversation customers are having with one another so reps can better position themselves as thought leaders in the space.
Narrowing Listening and Gaining Access—Focus listening on accounts to identify opportunities with potential to move into the sales funnel, gleaning as much information as possible.
Identify Change—Determine the potential for driving change within these accounts. Establish an understanding of whether the customer is aware of the problem/opportunity in their business and potentially has an action plan/solution in the works, aware of the problem/opportunity but has a poor understanding of it, or is unaware of the problem/opportunity altogether.
Teach to Shape or Reshape Demand—Teach the customer about the problem or a better way to solve it to shape/reshape demand and lead them into the sales funnel.

SEC Members, to learn more about the Pre-Funnel Demand Shaping Toolkit and how the top performing reps engage customers with commercial insights, make sure to check out this year’s SEC study, Getting in Early: Shaping Customer Demand Through Pre-Funnel Engagement.

Also, review the Challenger Plan, SEC’s new research-based sales methodology that represents how today’s best salespeople approach commercial opportunities from pre-funnel activity through to deal close.