Aligning Your Sales Process and Value Messages to Your Clients’ Buying Behaviors.

Successfully selling your services and solutions in a dynamic and highly competitive marketplace requires a solid understanding of your customers’ needs — and a sales process and messaging strategy that clearly demonstrate your ability to meet those needs.
 
Unfortunately, many companies continue to rely on out-of-date sales processes and sales materials that tout features and benefits of their offerings but have little relevance to the client’s challenges or goals. A key to an effective sales methodology is the incorporation of customer-relevant messaging focused on how your solutions solve the buyer’s pain or increase their gain. In failing to incorporate and reinforce their value proposition through targeted messaging at every stage in the buying cycle, these firms are missing out on revenue-generating opportunities.

Here’s what savvy companies are doing to ensure they are providing the right message at the right time during the sales process:

1. They take the time to truly understand their customers’ buying cycle and the selling activities that take place within it. Then they ask salespeople what they are trying to accomplish at each step. This helps to determine what kind of messaging is needed at each stage in the sales cycle.

2. They create impactful value statements and customer-orientated communications focused on buyer needs, challenges or goals.

3. They embed this messaging in their sales process and all marketing materials, and provide the sales team with tools specific to each stage in the buying cycle.

4. They train and re-train their sales team on how to deliver the right content based on the current selling situation. Instead of focusing the conversation on their company and its services, they first determine the customer context, and then map out how to respond to these situations.

5. They make sure all necessary content is available in a single, central repository.

Where does your organization stand?
Here’s a checklist that allows you to quickly evaluate whether your sales messaging strategy is on target and effectively supports your sales process:

 Have you assessed and enhanced your company’s sales messaging within the past 12 months?

 Is it current, streamlined and aligned with challenges facing your buyers?

 Is it supported with built-in proof points, testimonials and case study summaries that objectively convey your value?

 Is it integrated into your selling process and sales cycle?

 Have your sales professionals embraced the messaging and are they conveying it consistently and appropriately to their clients and prospects?

 Does your sales team have access to, and use, the appropriate sales collateral at the right stage of the buying cycle?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s time to find out. And if you don’t like the answers you are getting, it’s time to make a change!

Create a game plan
The first step in a sales messaging optimization strategy is to ensure your sales cycle is aligned with the decision makers’ buying cycle. Once you’ve identified how key steps in your sales cycle (e.g. prospecting, qualifying, presenting, closing and penetrating) align with your buyers’ cycle, you need to:

• Develop impactful messages tailored to the specific needs and buying preferences of customers at each stage in the cycle. Provide “messaging roadmaps” for the most pressing business objectives facing your target buyers. Build content that conveys your understanding of their objective and communicates how your firm has helped other clients meet similar objectives through your solutions. Validate your capabilities and value with proof points and mini client success stories. 

• Involve members of the sales team in drafting the messaging to ensure it is timely, on target and will be used. Consider creating templates that allow for some customization based on different customers and segments.

• Integrate these value statements into your sales process, sales training program, Web site content and marketing materials.

• Train your sales team how to effectively convey your value proposition and message to the right person at the right time.

• Create one central online repository for all sales and marketing materials. Salespeople should only have to go to one place to find everything they need to help identify, develop and close deals.

• Inspect what you expect: Have ongoing dialogs or role plays with all sales team members to ensure your messaging is being appropriately and consistently communicated.

Continuously evaluate and improve your messaging
Just as the goals and challenges of decision makers continuously shift in response to changing business objectives, so should your sales strategy and messaging. Stay closely attuned to the trends in your marketplace and the buying patterns of your clients. Periodically evaluate and adjust your sales process and sales messaging to ensure you’re able to capture the attention and business of target buyers.

Kathy Dooley
Marketing Director
ClearEdge Marketing

In this economy, IT staffing and consulting firms are seeing many of their clients not only cut back or freeze hiring, but inevitably go through staff layoffs. Our first instinct is to cut and run, don’t waste your time, they aren’t buying. But should you move to greener pastures when layoffs are in full swing at client locations?

Taking the Long-Term View
We all talk about how important it is to build long-term partnerships with our clients. That commitment is never more apparent than when clients go through layoffs. How you treat, value and support clients during the dry spells in hiring activity can have a significant impact on the viability of that partnership when the rains come pouring back. So, how do you demonstrate customer care and build client loyalty when your customers aren’t buying? Below I’ve outlined a simple, two-part approach you can take to help keep your client relationships strong, position yourself as a true long-term partner and enable you to tap into new talent sources and a wealth of future business.

Part 1: Make Your Client Shine Now
Your client is going through a tough spell; tensions amongst their rank and file are no doubt high. Providing a few simple, value-add services can make them stand out to their retained staff, in their communities and to their displaced alumni. While you are not an outplacement firm — nor should you try to be one — you are a master at finding, vetting and placing professionals. Develop a communication your client can disseminate to their displaced workers with a list of available services you are willing to provide, some ideas include:

1. Resume tips and techniques – No one knows resume best practices better than your recruiters. So offer a free webinar to your client’s downsized staff. Review basic resume tips, techniques as well as pitfalls to avoid.

2. Jump start their job search – After a period of adjustment, displaced workers will be ready to start looking for new opportunities. Offer to include their resumes in your database with the expectation that if an opportunity arises they will definitely be called.

3. Become their career expert – Develop a monthly or quarterly newsletter — or develop a career page on your Web site – that gives clients, their current staff and their displaced workers industry information, career advice and current job openings. This positions you as an expert to your client, while also opening the door to future referrals as downsized staff find other employment and possibly run across opportunities for your business.

Part 2: Help Your Client Plan for the Future
While it may seem premature to begin future-state workforce planning while actively going through a downsizing, it’s actually the perfect time. Layoffs are often a reaction to short-term, cost-containment issues; but that won’t always be the case. Downsizes, however painful, give the client a unique opportunity to plan for and develop a more appropriate workforce structure based on future business goals. Offering your workforce expertise during this process will enable you to build an even more solid partnership with the client.

1. Technology and Skills Assessment – Offer a high-level, technology and skills assessment. Will the skills they currently have in place support their six-, 12- or 24-month business goals? Are there key software or infrastructure changes on the horizon that will drive the type of skills they will need to retain or recruit?  By providing your client with an assessment of their current workforce and a forecast of the top skills they will need in the near future, you are helping them make better workforce decisions in order to meet their overarching organizational goals.

2. Flexible Workforce Planning – Having the right skills in place is critical, but developing an optimal workforce structure for their organization will help your client keep costs down and efficiencies high. After all, those were some of the reasons for their current layoffs. By assisting your client in proactively planning for the right mix of direct hires, contract staff and outsourced engagements, they will be in a better position to quickly ramp up or ramp down operations in order to meet the changing demands of the marketplace.

It Pays in the Long Run
For any firm, it is obviously critical to maintain profitability and focus on what is currently making your business money. But, it’s is also important to keep your name in front of clients who may not be ready to buy. The beauty of these value-added services is in the “offering” itself. Just letting clients know you are committed to the partnership despite their current spend will gain you incredible leverage — regardless of whether they take you up on the offers.

Keep in mind, the inevitable economic upswing will soon affect everyone, including your clients. Actively maintaining your relationships, demonstrating your value and supporting your clients during layoffs and dry
spells — when many of your competitors have long hit the road — will put you in the best possible position to shut out the competition and capture significant client-share when activity does pick back up.

Jessica Castaneda
Marketing Director
ClearEdge Marketing