This week, we are going deeper into this LinkedIn post:
If you frequently lose deals early in the process, you need to better motivate your buyer.
If your deals fizzle towards the end of the process, you need to better enable your buyer.
Motivate by isolating personal wins your buyer will experience with your solution.
Enable by teaching them how to articulate the business impact those personal wins drive.
You need both to win consistently.
Motivate
Individuals evaluating your solution have a full-time job outside of evaluating new vendors. Every hour spent with you and internally advocating for your solution is time away from influencing metrics that impact their core responsibilities.
If your solution does not motivate your buyer by clearly mapping to a personal priority, your deal will stall as they prioritize their core job over evaluating your product.
Here are a few ways to find what motivates your buyer:
- What metrics measure their performance?
- What systems/processes are hurting their attainment of the above metrics?
- How would they measure the success of implementing your solution?
Once you have a motivated buyer, you need to enable them to sell on your behalf.
Enable
Your champion’s biggest problem is rarely their boss’s biggest problem. It’s seldom the company’s biggest problem. Armed with only the value your solution brings them, a motivated buyer will often find executives telling them, “this isn’t a priority for the business right now – let’s revisit in a few months.”
It’s often easier to uncover what the business cares about than your buyer’s priorities because so much is publicly available (annual reports, recent news, etc.)
In addition to what you can find, here are a couple of questions you can ask:
- What significant changes have the organization made recently and why?
- How would the organization measure the success of implementing your solution?
Let’s look at how these come together using a hypothetical (and simplified) buying scenario, where the seller offers sales enablement software to sales leaders.
For this solution, let’s use these as the After Scenario + Positive Business Outcomes:
- After Scenario: Decreased rep ramp time
- Positive Business Outcome: Increased rep productivity
- Positive Business Outcome: Decreased cost of sale/increased profitability
If selling to a VP of Sales, which from the above do you think is more motivating to them?
Their promotion path, compensation, and goals align with increasing new rep productivity.
If the seller engages with the VP of Sales and focuses on decreasing the cost of sale, the deal will stall early.
To gain and keep the VP of Sales’ attention, the seller should initially focus on a value proposition of:
Improved Productivity → Increased Quota Attainment → Higher Commission
Now that they are motivated with a personal benefit (higher commission), we need to enable them to sell internally by articulating the organizational value. In our example, that benefit would be increasing profitability by reducing the cost of sale.
Our motivated and enabled VP of Sales is now ready to get executive buy-in with a pitch of “this new solution will decrease our cost of sale by increasing rep productivity.”
