Selling Knowledge Article Series Three: Customer Insights that will transform sales conversations

We hear a lot about equipping sales people with Customer Insights to help them move from simple questioning to exploring and discussion challenges and solutions. But what are these Insights that will transform the conversations sales people have with customers?

In this third article in the Selling Knowledge series, we’re going to drill down into the categories of market and customer insights you might want to capture and make available to sales people. Value propositions, points of differentiation and other messages for your own products will be covered in a subsequent article.

We will examine what sales people are likely to find most useful under the following headings:

?               Characteristics of an organization that make it a good target

?               Descriptions of business activities and workflows addressed by your proposition

?               Profiles for target personas

?               Market themes and topics that can drive conversations with prospects

?               Business challenges (issues and impacts) / disruptive insights that may motivate prospects to consider your proposition

At the bottom of the article you will find a link to a free resource where you can explore and examine examples (taken from the Financial Services industry) of the different types of insights discussed here.

Characteristics of target organizations

In article two, we looked at segmenting markets by industry, company size and / or geography, etc. Once you’ve done this, you need to give sales teams guidance on the characteristics of target organizations that are likely to make them a potential fit for the products and solutions your company sells.

This is particularly important for Inside Sales people who do outbound prospecting and respond to inbound leads, to help them call the right prospects and ask relevant qualifying questions.

Exactly what these characteristics are will depend, of course, on the products and services you offer. They might be simple things like number of people in field service, if your product is a tool used by engineers and technicians. Company revenues and / or the extent of global operations could be important if you offer a sophisticated, enterprise scale solution.

It could also be important to know what products / solutions a company has already that are in the area your firm operates in. If a company has just purchased a competitor’s product they are unlikely to be a good prospect for you in the near term!

Qualification questions

In creating selling knowledge, many firms will also want to develop a set of qualification questions for Inside Sales people to use – with different questions for different industry segments.

Business activities and workflows you address

When you onboard new sales people and bring new products to market, you need to equip people with a solid understanding of the customer’s business activities and workflows served by the company’s solutions.

If sales people don’t properly understand the relevant parts of the customer’s business and processes they can’t have credible conversations around the opportunities and challenges they may face.

Online learning and microlearning

This sort of information is usually pulled together by the Sales Learning team, working with knowledgeable people across the business, and delivered to sales people in the form of online learning and microlearning.

Target personas

A lot has already been written about personas and the sort of information that should be captured for them, so I’m going to limit my comments here to a few key points.

The sort of ‘persona profiles’ that are useful in positioning and marketing consumer and small business products are unlikely to be suitable for sales people selling B2B solutions.

Sketching out the likely personality profile, interests, age, family unit, etc. for a given buyer persona won’t be of much value to most B2B sales professionals! What will be of interest are insights such as:

?               Types of firm they work at

?               Typical education

?               Example job titles

?               Roles and responsibilities

?               What keeps them awake at night

?               Critical workflows they are involved in

?               Specialist knowledge

?               Where they go to get information

?               Other personas they work with

It will also be crucial to give sales people a heads up on the types of challenges faced by different decision makers, influencers and users. I cover this further down in the article.

Market themes and topics

To get initial traction with a prospect and then build credibility, it’s important for sales people to be up to date with the latest developments in the industry in which the customer operates. These themes and topics will be driving change in that industry and, potentially, opportunities and challenges for the customer.

Disruptive insights

Market themes are also good sources of ‘disruptive insights’ that can be positioned with a prospect, to get them to start thinking about changing the way they do things now and consider potential alternatives.

A small team in Marketing or Sales Enablement, needs to keep an eye on market shifts, new regulations, moves by big players in an industry, etc. capture these and make them available to sales people as regular updates.

Customer business challenges and opportunities

Perhaps the most important thing you can do for sales people, is to equip them with a heads up on the challenges and opportunities that could be top of mind for the different decision makers and influencers they call and meet.

Maybe 10 years ago, a sales person could rely on good questioning technique and easy going prospects who were happy to sit there and answer question after question. This is no longer the case.

Buyers expect sales people to understand their business and want to be engaged in thoughtful conversations to explore how they might improve processes or workflows to take advantage of new opportunities or address new threats. To do this, a sales person needs to prepare him or herself with an understanding of what a particular persona type may have on their mind and / or have a disruptive insight that could get them thinking about new ways to do things.

Issues versus impacts

As any good consultative sales person will tell you, it’s not enough to uncover the issue or problem the customer is facing. You also have to drill down to discover what the impact of addressing that issue might be in terms of improved efficiency, lower costs, higher revenues, mitigated risks, etc.

When you work with internal stakeholders to capture the likely top of mind challenges for different personas, you need to capture guidance for sales people not only on the issue the customer may face but also how they are likely to see the impact, based on their role in the business.

Different personas will see value in different ways.

Preparation

More than ever, in this time-challenged world, preparation has become the key to successful conversations with customers. Business executives expect sales people to add value to their day by bringing them new insights and ideas. Sit there and just ask questions and you’ll be out of the door after 10 minutes!

You can’t rely on sales people to figure out these insights into potential customer challenges and opportunities for themselves. Product marketing and sales enablement teams need to work with knowledgeable people across the business to capture this information.

Examples of Insights

To get free access to an example Selling Knowledge database, click on the image below. You will be able to explore best practice examples of each category of insight, taken from the Financial Services industry. You can also use the tools provided to capture and develop your own insights and output these to Word to share them with colleagues.

https://www.bpmworks.com/Freemium-Messaging-Workbench

Next week I’m going to share some tips and hints on how to prepare for customer insights workshops to capture this type of information.