The Top 5 Sales Readiness Initiatives with the Greatest Impact
Sales Readiness means many things. Lots of initiatives can fall under that banner.
Wouldn’t it be great to know which five (5) have the greatest impact on Sales performance?
The world’s largest online training community, TrainingIndustry.com, recently released the findings of its major Sales Readiness survey. In it they identified 14 “sales readiness” initiatives, and then asked the respondents to rate them based on perceived impact.
Here are the top 5:
Value Propositions –creating differentiated positioning that helps create competitive separation
Product/Service Information – providing accessible, usable solution information not just feature/function
Executive Communications – help communicating with executive buyers not just user influencers
Overcoming Common Sales Objections – reframe concerns to take them off the table or turn to advantage
What do all of these top sales readiness initiatives have in common? They all revolve around creating and delivering great sales or customer messaging. In other words…messages matter most when it comes to impacting sales performance. What are you doing to fine-tune your messaging? What is your organization doing to leverage their messaging as a strategic asset?
Here’s a quick, 5-minute executive summary review of those findings to help you focus on the Top 5 Sales Readiness.
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Ever heard of the Rosetta Stone? One man spent his entire life unlocking its secrets. We know you don’t have that kind of time, so just watch this video to get up to speed:
It wasn’t until the discovery of this stone in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops that the modern world was able to decipher hieroglyphics. This stone carried the key to finally cracking the hieroglyphic code.
It contained a carved text made up of hieroglyphs along with Egyptian and Greek translations, which enabled scholars who knew Greek and Egyptian to work backwards to finally understand the hieroglyphs.
In some ways, sales people need to be like the Rosetta Stone. They must translate your product and services details into something the customer will understand and care about.
Context is King!
Customers know what they are trying to accomplish, and they understand there are challenges that are causing them pain. They are looking for a partner company to share a unique insight and clearly align their offering with these challenges, demonstrating how they will provide relevant value in meeting the customer’s objectives.
This is called “context.” Without context there can be no translation. Or the translation will be questionable because you are forcing your customer to do the heavy-lifting.
What happens if you leave the translation of your message up to your customer?
It’s hard work! It takes a ton of effort to listen to a message that’s all about your company, your product and your technology and try to figure out what that means to me – the customer. People like to hear ideas and answers for their problems; they don’t like to be sold product features and have to intuit how it helps.
It’s confusing! Your customer wants to know what they will be able to “do” with your product. What they can “do better” or “do different” in order to succeed. Forcing them to translate your product features and capabilities into something meaningful can become frustrating and futile.
It’s boring! How long can you sit in any conversation listening to someone talk all about themselves before you tune them out? If you ask the right questions to uncover their pains, issues and challenges, then you can focus your entire message on your customer. Putting your product and your message in their world – in their Story. You’re making it more relevant and more exciting for them.
Language translators didn’t need more hieroglyphs in order to finally come up with a translation. They had thousands of years of hieroglyphs. What they needed was the hieroglyphs to be put into the context of a language that made sense to them.
Similarly, your customers don’t need another company capabilities presentation or credentials dump. They’ve heard the same thing a thousand times. What they need is your company to put your offer into the context of what they need to accomplish.
Does this mean more work for you? Yes! Is it going to be harder to do? Probably!
But know that most of your competitors aren’t taking the time to do this. You have an opportunity to be your customers’ Rosetta Stone.
You’ll not only translate a better message, you’ll win more business by doing it!
— by Mike Miller, Consultant, and Tim Riesterer, SVP of Strategic Consulting & CMO at Corporate Visions Inc.
If you’re in sales, check out The Power of Story webinar to find out more about translating your message into your buyer’s world.
If you’re in marketing, check out the Bridge the Messaging Gap webinar to see how you can translate your 30,000-foot level brand message into a 3-foot level field message that’s ready for your sales team to use.
Whether you’ve traveled abroad or not, you can certainly appreciate the humor in this clip. Watch this funny TV spot:
It’s safe to assume that all of us have experienced the wish for conversation intervention. That’s when you were desperately hoping someone would intervene in a conversation because you didn’t understand what was being said.
Well, how about your customers? What language are you speaking to them? Are you making it easy for them to get your message? Are you making it easy for them to understand? Or, are you expecting them to do the translation?
One of the big challenges of selling (especially in the business-to-business space) is that you rarely sell to just one person. The more complex your product, the greater number of buyer types you have to interact with, and accordingly, so does the number of languages you have to speak.
Once, while traveling through Luxor, Egypt, I visited the local Souk, or marketplace. It wasn’t long before I had a bunch of kids swarming around me, trying to barter off their wares. It was fascinating how shrewd these young kids were.
First they spoke in French. When I didn’t bite, they tried Italian. Getting nothing there, they tried German. Still nothing. “Strike three, you’re out,” right? Finally, they spoke in English.
“English, English, English! We love English!” They yelled loudly and now every other little kid in the area knew that when they came up to peddle their goods, they had to speak English.
They were brilliant! Even at this very tender age they’d identified one of the basics of sales and communication. If you want to make a sale, you need to figure out the language the customer speaks.
I bet you know your product specs, features and capabilities inside-out, but how adept are you at changing up your message to match the buyer type you’re meeting with?
You get relegated to who you talk like.
How often have you found an executive who wants to spend time talking about product features and specs – the ISes of your solution? It’s incredibly rare. Even if they want to, they often have so much going on that they simply don’t have time.
Instead, they only need to know the high level message – the MEANs of your solution. What value are you going to bring to their business? How are you going to make them more efficient? More competitive? More profitable? How are you going to help them solve the critical issues they’re challenged with, and either put them back on the road to success, or help them achieve greater success?
Put your story in the customer's context. The conversation differs depending on who you're talking to.
On the other end of the spectrum, your key influencers are probably the technical buyers. Unlike the executives, these guys are interested in getting their hands dirty. They do want to spend time on the nuts and bolts of your technology and product. And boy, is that a completely different language and experience than the executive conversation.
But you’re still selling the same solution or product. How different can that conversation be? And on top of that, you’re not sure if they’ll buy, and changing the message every time is time consuming and hard work! Isn’t it better to talk to more prospects, instead? They know what they’re looking for. Why not simply share the exact same message with everyone, saving time and letting them do their own translation?
Because this is your big chance to be different and stand out from the crowd. Imagine if only one of those children I met on the streets of Egypt identified me as an English speaker and began explaining his wares in a way I could understand. Meanwhile, the rest of the children continued to babble on in foreign languages, only confusing me further. This would be an easy purchase decision. I’d choose the one that helps me understand. (I’d probably even pay extra for some additional guidance and advice on how to get around town.)
It’s the same in your customer conversations. Are you clearly aligning your story with the customer’s context and what they care about? Or are you carrying on in your native tongue?
— by Mike Miller,
Consultant, Corporate Visions Inc.
Check out our new The Power of Story webinar to learn more, and stay tuned next month for Part Two from Mike Miller!
Some folks at Microsoft wanted to show how their normal process creates boring, overloaded, emotionless packaging. And this video was the result. Microsoft never intended this video to get out to the public, but it has now been broadcast all over the Internet.
If someone who watched this video said, “Ha ha! Look how lame Microsoft is,” they missed the key lesson.
None of the decisions shown in that video were made through incompetence or bad intentions. Microsoft hires the most talented, driven, highest-paid people in the world. It’s just that, as more and more people give their well-meant input, the combined effect is a boring, overloaded, unremarkable result.
What is remarkable about this video is how well it messaged the problem to the company’s key players.
The people who created this knew there was a problem in packaging. So, what did they do first?
They showed the problem in such a way that everyone could see how each change, despite its best intentions, contributed to the problem.
Then the people in each functional area could see how seemingly small decisions added up to a big impact on the packaging. And that freed them to look at how to solve the overall problem, which was to create packaging that told the story they wanted to tell in a simple, compelling way.
Now, think about your messaging. Your “standard,” corporate-approved slide deck. Does it have the simplicity and emotional impact of Apple packaging? Or does it more closely resemble Microsoft’s efforts?
If it’s closer to Microsoft’s efforts, you’re not alone.
People often tell us that they would like to have better messaging, but they can’t get it approved through their gatekeepers. And so all too often, they give up.
The first thing to accept is that none of your messaging gatekeepers want to weaken your message. They’re simply looking at messaging through the filter of their own responsibilities.
So, how do you get them to see the problem beyond their immediate responsibilities?
Here’s where you can apply the key lesson from this video to get new messaging approved at your business.
Show people what great messaging looks like. Contrast that great messaging with what can happen to it after it touches many hands. And give everyone involved a chance to be part of the solution. In our experience, when people take that approach, the change can be dramatic.
One more thing.
In launching the Zune, Microsoft ended up creating a package remarkably out of the box. All because someone messaged the problem in a way that all key players knew how they could impact great packaging.
So, what are you going to do to get great messaging created and approved?
A good start might be to e-mail this article to some people you want to influence.
— by Erik Peterson,
Consultant, Corporate Visions Inc.
The Messaging Feed contains easily digestible ideas you can immediately incorporate into your messaging, presentations and other client connections.
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What's on your peers' wishlists for 2010 initiatives? Better value propositions, messages, and customer conversation skills training beat out sales methodology, CRM implementation and training, and branding efforts combined.
Posted by Corporate Visions Inc. 
