The challenges of selling in today’s complex world
In my last article, I outlined some of the challenges sales organisations now face. Increased complexity in the purchasing process has led to over half of sales reps missing quota, reduced deal quality and under-performance in sales.
A new blueprint for success
At Animis Labs, we believe there is a better way to do sales in today’s complex world. We know that 86% of customers will pay more for a great experience, up to 18% more. We also know that by helping customers navigate through the purchasing process, suppliers can have a greater influence on customer thinking. By building trust and credibility with key stakeholders at each stage of the process, they can steer customers towards more ambitious and higher quality solutions.
With these insights, there is now a clear blueprint for success. Every customer interaction must be seen as an opportunity to add value and differentiate your offering from the competitors. Differentiation is no longer delivered through products and services alone, but by the behaviours of sales teams as they engage with customers across the Customer Purchase Experience.
Creating great Customer Purchase Experiences
Sales success is built on the strong foundations of trust and credibility. When the purchase experience is fragmented, teams miss the opportunity to create deeper bonds of trust and understanding with stakeholders. These weaker foundations often lead to deal stagnation or at best, low risk, low value deals. Where there is limited trust and understanding, stakeholders often default to a “good enough” solution. This leads to limited opportunity for revenue expansion and poor lifetime value (LTV) for an account. All too often these customers are the ones to churn.
With so many salespeople regularly missing quota and deal quality in decline, we think organisations need to rethink how they structure teamwork around the customer, so that no matter where the customer is in the purchase journey, the team is able to add high levels of value at each interaction.
Having the space to plan what those engagements look like is key to success. Deep levels of trust and credibility can only be built one stakeholder at a time, so this requires a team effort to ensure that messaging and insights are tailored to their individual buying criteria. To achieve this, we believe organisations need to transition away from older more fragmented sales models towards a model where the customer and individual stakeholder needs, are placed firmly at the centre of how the sales team works.
Key to success
- Customer centricity:- Create seamless customer purchase experiences by removing fragmented team engagement. Realign teams to work better together. Ensure there is time for strategy and planning. Emphasize the important of high value stakeholder interactions that create trust and credibility. This is critical to become trusted advisor.
- Team collaboration:- Create safe, trusting working environment for sales teams to experiment and learn. Encourage creativity and sales innovation, open and honest feedback, reflection and continuous improvement.
- Sensemaking:- Simplify the purchase process. Help define the problem statement and objectives. Help make sense of vendor information, technical specification and compare and contrast. Objectively guide the customer to the right solution for their business. Be a trusted advisor.
- Consensus building:- Build trust and credibility with individual stakeholders. Understand their motivations and identify their buying criteria. Personalize messaging and tailor insights to their needs. Find the common ground between stakeholders, create a common language that drives consensus for your products and services.
- Impact:- Measure impact. Agree key performance indicators with the customer in advance. Implement strong on-boarding and ramp plans to drive early adoption. Establish customer review cadence. Check for individual stakeholder satisfaction. Set out path to revenue expansion and customer advocacy.
At Animis Labs, we work with organisations who are interested in growing the above capabilities within their teams. We provide a platform that supports sales teams through these critical steps. If you would like to learn more about how Animis can help your organisation deliver higher quality revenue and great Customer Purchase Experiences, please message me – it would be great to hear from you.
