5 Essential Selling Skills to Change the Customer Conversation

Posted by Ellen Quackenbush on Nov 1, 2018 10:28:01 AM
Ellen Quackenbush
Find me on:

Today’s customers are savvier and more impatient than ever. Being a Challenger and disrupting the customer’s status quo is just not enough anymore.

Customers want a value creation partner to identify the right opportunities, build the right solutions, and quantify the financial improvement their business will get. Simply said, customers want to know “What’s in it for me?”

Holden Advisors has developed a proprietary set of value selling tools that build five essential skills to drive engagement across the entire customer journey. Take a look:

  1. Identify the biggest value hot spots:  A Seller’s most valuable asset is time. Knowing where to focus is key.  The trick is to identify the use case and business operational step where you can make the biggest impact on your customer’s business.
  2. Quantify your differential value:  Prove that you are the best choice by quantifying your financial value to the customer, using their data, compared to the alternatives they are considering. Keep the calculation simple—so you can demonstrate it easily and transparently.  And, once you know your value—communicate it!
  3. Build consensus:  Customize your value message for different users and use cases to align to key decision-makers in the buying center. The more stakeholder needs you can address, the stronger your account position becomes.
  4. Engage in value conversations:  The key to compelling value conversations is simple, open-ended questions that draw the customer into a dialogue on how to address their most pressing business issues.  For Sellers, the right questions are far more powerful than the right answers in creating customer engagement.
  5. Make your champion a hero:  Elevate your buyer, the one that advocated for your solution, and make them a hero within the organization by linking your value story to C-suite KPIs. Then be sure to measure and report the value created and the business improvement realized post-implementation. That way, you not only prove you kept the promises made in the proposal but also solidify your advocates decision as the right one, as measured by performance improvement. 
With these five essential skills, your sales and marketing team can develop a customized go-to-market strategy for your target use cases.  While this next level of customer understanding and customization is done by only the top 10% of Sellers, Holden Advisors’ proprietary value tools extend this best practice to the rest of the salesforce. Imagine the impact to your revenue and profits!

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone