CREATE AN EXCEPTIONAL SALES APPROACH
ACCORDING TO BUYERS
The effectiveness of your sales strategy may be measured by how well your reps highlight relevant solution features, convey price position, or follow up with prospects to win deals. However, if you’re only measuring these interactions from the sales perspective, you’ll miss a large part of the story of why you win or lose.
Only by tapping into the voice of your buyers and customers can you understand how buyers truly perceive your sales approach and how it impacts win rate.
While your buyers may not share a defined list of sales behaviors that they want to see from your sales reps going into the evaluation, your buyers certainly have expectations for the sales experience that your reps need to exceed if you want to win more.
If you lack a differentiating sales approach and your sellers don’t make a strong impression on your buyers in the areas that matter most, you’re leaving your deals at risk.
We studied the responses of over 7000 buyers and customers to understand how an exceptional sales approach impacts your opportunity outcomes.
Without an exceptional sales approach,
you're 2X as likely to lose a deal.
It’s no secret that the buyer’s journey has shifted, and most buyers now prefer to self-educate before talking with your sales rep. Gartner estimates that your buyers spend roughly 5% of the buyers journey with your sales rep. In this shortened window of time, your sales reps must seize the opportunity to create significant differentiation, especially in competitive deals.
The data is clear: If you aren’t optimizing your sales approach and providing an exceptional sales experience, you leave the door open for competitors to steal away your winnable deals.
But what are the keys to creating exceptional sales moments that leave a lasting impression?
We analyzed the open-ended responses from buyers and customers around what the seller did to make their buying experience exceptional.
From this data, we’ve identified 3 key requirements you must include to deliver an exceptional sales approach:
#1 MAKE YOUR BUYERS FEEL SPECIAL
Your buyers and customers have unique needs related to their individual role and to their business. If your buyer is evaluating your solution, they have specific problems they are trying to solve and outcomes they are expecting to achieve.
In our analysis, respondents identified sellers as exceptional when the sales rep made each buyer feel special, understood, and heard. Exceptional sellers effectively tailored offerings to meet each buyer’s unique needs. This made buyers feel like a priority to sellers rather than another revenue source. This personalization of the buying experience made a clear impact on buyer perceptions of the sales rep, product/service, and vendor.
WHAT BUYERS SAY
#2 QUICKLY ARTICULATE FIT AND STAKES
Understanding needs alone isn’t enough to deliver a memorable sales experience. Buyers need to feel that your sellers can internalize their needs and tailor product offerings to tightly fit their use case. Your sellers must be able to quickly understand what is at stake for each buyer and articulate the unique impact of selecting or not selecting your solution.
By tailoring offerings and then helping buyers make sense of the cost, risks, and benefits of selecting each offering, your sellers position themselves as a trusted advisor and partner, rather than an adversarial negotiator.
WHAT BUYERS SAY
#3 PLAY THE LONG GAME
The last key requirement to consider if you want to deliver an exceptional sales approach is to do what buyers described as “playing the long game”.
In our analysis, buyers significantly valued experiences where it felt like sales reps were investing in the long-term relationship, rather than trying to just extract revenue and move on. This made buyers less focused on the immediate value proposition of the offerings and more focused on the long-term value of a strong relationship with the vendor.
“Playing the long game” also helps align expectations long term, which improves customer satisfaction and decreases churn risk.
WHAT BUYERS SAY
Your sales experience greatly impacts win rates and revenue. Curating an exceptional sales approach can help drastically increase win rate, revenue, customer satisfaction, and retention.
For more on how you can uncover each sales reps’ unique path to winning, check out these resources below:
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What is a "sales approach"?
A sales approach describes the techniques a sales person uses to convince potential customers to purchase a product. This includes messaging tactics, relationship-building, and communication styles.
What is Win-Loss Analysis?
What is win-loss analysis and how can it boost your B2B sales win rate, go-to-market strategy, and revenue?
At the most basic level, win loss analysis helps sales, marketing, and product leaders understand the reasons for their organizational wins and losses so that they can increase their win rates and capture more business in the future.
Win loss analysis programs are important at all levels of the organization because it helps explain why buyers choose specific solutions and why they do not choose others.
At a higher level, win loss programs help transform organizations as they make fundamental changes to what are often systemic problems. When managers see patterns in buyer feedback that consistently show outstanding—or sub-par—performance, they can replicate best practices throughout their organizations and avoid root cause behaviors that hinder long-term success. In this way, win loss analysis is sometimes compared to Kaizen, the Japanese practice of continuous improvement.