Get Reps to Speak Your Customer’s Language

For years we’ve been talking about the importance of the three Challenger rep competencies: Teach, Tailor, and Take Control. While each competency is crucial for Challenger rep success, our focus in this blog is Tailoring. Why? Because it’s really tough to get right!

In today’s sales environment our reps are working with more customer stakeholders than ever before, and each of them have different value and economic drivers as well as barriers to overcome to make a purchase. In order to ensure that our value propositions land on receptive ears, our sales reps need to tailor their messages to each specific stakeholder. That can be difficult for a myriad of reasons. One such reason is that sales reps struggle to understand the different roles within an organization and therefore have difficulty tailoring their messages to those individuals.

We often see members try to remedy this by putting their reps through business acumen boot camps that aim at helping reps better understand broader business issues and get a better understanding of how their offerings map into different areas of the customers’ business. While a great use of time, what often happens is that the reps return to the field armed with the knowledge they learned and struggle to translate it to the specific stakeholder in front of them.

So what can we do as an organization to help our sales team become more effective at tailoring?

We’ve recently profiled Solae, LLC – a company who has done an extraordinary job at helping their sales reps tailor their conversations with their customers by creating a process called “Message-to-Role Mapping.”

The Solae process involves three principles:

Solae doesn’t simply tell their reps what to say, they help reps understand why certain messages will resonate by teaching them how different functions are goaled and how those individuals think about their world. They then give their reps a roadmap to individual customer stakeholders, organized by role. It’s everything the rep needs to know—all on a single sheet of paper.
The Solae Marketing department works in conjunction with Sales to craft a set of talking points or messages tailored to the various stakeholders’ desired outcomes, ultimately connecting the customer’s needs to the supplier’s offerings.
Solae created a validation tool to ensure that the rep has reached consensus with individual customers on how Solae’s solution can help that individual specifically. This is done before Solae dedicates resources to that account.

Solae learned that for a rep to tailor, we’ve got to take the seemingly endless world of possibilities and break it down into the core components. Solae reduces the burden of taking all the customer information reps have at their disposal, and strips it into the two most critical components.

First, their knowledge of an individual stakeholder’s context – or how that individual fits in to their overall business.
Second, they have an understanding of the outcomes that the customer is looking for, or more specifically, the quantifiable results that individual is seeking to achieve.

What do both of these conditions have in common? In both cases when speaking with customers, Challenger reps aren’t focused on what they’re selling, but rather what the specific stakeholder is trying to accomplish.

Want to learn more? Click here to download Solae’s Message-to-Role Mapping case study. Want even more? We’ve conducted a 90-minute webinar with David Hewitt, Director of Global Sales Effectiveness at Solae at the time of this case study who introduced this tool to their sales team. Also, visit our topic center on Tailoring for Resonance. Happy Tailoring!