Here's how to compete with the 800 pound gorilla in your industry

More than seventy percent of buyers wait until after they have fully defined their needs before contacting a salesperson to discuss a product or service. That finding, from CSO Insight’s new white paper, The Growing Buyer-Seller Gap, underscores the growing trend we all know and most of us hate:

Buyers are waiting longer and longer to talk to us, and doing more and more of their research independently.

This can place salespeople in a difficult position. When buyers think they already know what they want, they come to the conversation expecting to compare features and pricing. To them, the purchase is simply a cost line item on their financials.

Without a value conversation, your sellers find themselves racing to the bottom to provide the most features at the lowest price, and cutting your margins in the process.

But how do you have a value conversation, when the buyer just wants to compare pricing?

Pressing the restart button

Salespeople who react to this trend by giving the buyer exactly what the buyer thinks they want are destined to fail. These salespeople are having product and feature discussions because they think that’s their only choice.

To short-circuit this pattern and hit the restart button on the conversation, salespeople have to get buyers to discuss their business problems and identify the value they seek from the solution. Then they have to navigate specifically how the solution will provide the desired value, as well as the nuances of product differentiation that will improve the value they receive versus competition. And they have to bring the buyer along on that journey willingly.

Unfortunately, most salespeople don’t have the business acumen to do it successfully.

How a major software manufacturer addresses the problem

I recently spoke with an executive sales leader at a major software manufacturer in the U.S. I can’t say who it is, but it’s one of the big ones. I asked this leader how they were tackling the sticky problem of teaching their salespeople essential business skills, so that they can have value conversations with executive buyers.

Their solution? They send their people to graduate school and pay for their MBAs.

Specifically, they collaborated with a local university to create a custom MBA program for them. Then they identified their top 300 best salespeople, and paid for their degrees in the program.

A magnificent solution… and a vivid example of how difficult it can be to compete with the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Very few companies can afford to send all their best salespeople to grad school.

The salesperson’s MBA shortcut

This problem of how to compete with the 800 pound gorillas is one of the reasons I am in love with the DecisionLink solution, which I’ve talked about elsewhere.

DecisionLink is a gorgeous solution for quickly and collaboratively establishing the true financial value of your solution for each prospect’s specific situation. It enables early value discussions, as well as interruptive discussions–the sort where the prospect thinks they know what they need, but where the seller effectively gets them to reconsider new points of view to establish their true needs.

When you buy DecisionLink, you also gain access to DecisionLink University. This online training program teaches salespeople the language of business, including how best to relay financial value, how to talk about things like return on investment, total cost of ownership, internal rates of return, and other concepts that matter to executives.

Inside DecisionLink, assets can be linked to the stakeholders and personas they most are most appropriate for, making it easy for salespeople to present the right information to the right people during the process. When your salespeople are also using Membrain, they will be directed to DecisionLink at the right time - which is early in the sales process.

It’s like a miniature MBA for your salespeople, without the MBA price tag.

We’re proud to have partnered with DecisionLink to offer its solution to our partners and customers. What this means for you is that you can build your process right into the salesperson’s workflow, and simultaneously arm sellers with the knowledge, tools, and assets they need to start having value conversations that reboot buying cycles. With customers who already think they know what they need.

By reframing the investment conversation in this way, your salespeople effectively short circuit the race to the bottom, and establish relationships that lead to profitable long-term customer partnerships.

I’d love to show you how it works with a personal demo. Reach out to schedule yours.