You go into a sales call expecting to walkthrough your product overview and company history with your prospect. That’s how it’s always been done, so shouldn’t you keep doing the same? But today’s buyers are different.
They already know more about your product than earlier generations of buyers could ever have. They know relative comparisons of value between your solution and your competitors. And they likely have more than enough info on your company itself. What they need is the added value that you can bring. Whether that’s insight to help them do their job better or to improve their business.
That’s what sales people have evolved into. The lone-wolf sales person selling a transactional sale is increasingly endangered. Today’s effective sales person is adding value to their buyers. That means being plugged into the entire organization and sourcing value for their prospects. Value like detailed product information, customer best practices, hidden analytics, and more.
Sales Enablement as Information Concierge
An effective sales person adds value by acting as an information concierge within your company; leveraging the collected insights and wisdom of your organization to create compelling business cases for their prospect accounts. And since no one else in the organization has as much face-time and experience with prospects, it only makes sense that sales people lead this charge.
Sales enablement leaders should also be thinking about enablement in this context. How can they marshal teams across the organization to enable revenue.
What are some of these information concierge activities that a sales or sales enablement person can do? Let’s take a look:
- Customer Success: Your customer success team works with clients to help them implement and succeed. Many prospects are nervous about buying, not because of the cost, but because of the risk and effort of rolling it out. Work with customer success to identify best practices and successes for implementation that you can work into conversations with your prospects to set their minds at ease.
- Marketing: On data and ways to convince internal teams of business case. Your prospects are buying in increasingly cautious ways. Which is why we’re seeing a rise in the number of people involved in buying committees. Marketing can play a key role here in identifying and building out assets that can support a better business case to sell internally.
- Finance: Your finance team has a wealth of experience in building out models that measure cost versus value. What better team to communicate with the finance teams at your prospects that you’re working with? Instead of relying on marketing or sales enablement to build ROI models, why not work with the pros to build out models that match the actual needs of real finance professionals.
- Up-Stream Sales: Your Sales Development teams are working huge volumes of prospects. In doing so they are learning an incredible amount about how well messages resonate with different parties. That could be through response rates on voicemails, replies to emails, and more. Why not mine that data to learn how to better position your more targeted outreaches?
- Account Managers: Your account managers deal with both the technical and financial aspects of your customers. So they know what increases retention and upsell. Work with them to build out not only your library of mentally-stored case studies, but also little vignettes and examples that you can share with prospects as asides. That gives them a ‘been there, done that’ confidence to move forward.
Recognize that everyone in your company benefits from the success of your sales efforts. And most of your team would love to help you drive more sales — if only they knew how they could help. Well, help them to help you by sitting down with them and walking through ideas like the above. When you’re an information concierge for your prospects, you can bend the force of your entire organization toward generating more sales.
