Sharpen Your Sales Process: First, Get the Fundamentals Right

Big changes in the buying process are creating a need for equally big changes in the way sales teams sell. But first, you need to get the sales fundamentals right.

The buying process has changed. Has your sales process kept pace? If you’ve never taken a moment to align that process with the evolving needs of your market and buyers—and the strengths of your market position—you’re missing opportunities to more effectively create a sound sales process. This GrowthBit, the first of a two-part series, identifies the three fundamental elements you need to lay the foundation before tackling your sales process.

Sales doesn’t lead. The market does.

Sales takes its cue from the market, and that market has changed dramatically over the past few years. Prospects are coming into the buying process better informed and educated. They’re conducting their own research and putting in more legwork before they engage with sales, including visiting your site and your competitors’ looking for different alternatives that might solve a problem they have.

Does your sales process align with the market reality? If not, it’s time to change things up.

The buying unit has changed, too. Big or small, organizations are making decisions based on buying committees that can include a few people or as many as a dozen or more. And today’s market is more crowded with competitor offerings, with significantly less greenfield to spread out in.

Does your sales process align with the market reality? If not, it’s time to change things up. But before you make those changes, you need to get the fundamentals right: your value proposition, ideal customer profile and buyer journey.

Value proposition and product-market fit: A look-in-the-mirror moment.

In our opinion, every great sales system starts with a deep understanding of the product offering and the problems it solves. I tell companies that this is their “look-in-the-mirror moment.”

On the surface, the value proposition is about that outward message: what you show (and tell) your market. But it starts with an inward look to understand your strengths, weaknesses, and the problems you solve. We begin with sales workshops by leading companies through a SWOT analysis of their offering and discussing how that offering differentiates from the competition in terms of how it solves the problems experienced by a specific market.

It’s the process of marrying the value proposition to the needs of the market that helps create a strong foundation for sales.

Then we look at how that analysis lines up with what the market needs to determine the product-market fit. It’s the process of marrying the value proposition to the needs of the market that helps create a strong foundation for sales. If the two don’t line up, even your best prospects will have a hard time connecting the dots between their needs and your solution.

The final step is to turn these observations into a compelling narrative about how you differentiate your product. What are you doing that others are not, and how does that translate into value for your target market? That’s the essence of your value proposition, which consists of your differentiation statement and unique selling points. To fully operationalize this, your value proposition narrative should be embedded in market-facing collateral and resources for sellers, including enablement materials (call scripts, competitive analysis sheets, presentation decks, training videos, etc.).

By doing so, you will help to ensure your narrative is effectively conveyed to the end-user or prospect, thus enhancing your sales team’s efforts. Notice that we haven’t even started discussing the sales process yet. The foundations for a strong sales process are as important as the process itself.

Ideal customer profile and persona: Get hyper-personal.

Once you have clearly defined the unique value you bring to the market and your product-to-market fit, you can narrow the scope to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP). This is the culmination of key attributes that define the ideal customer, leading to more consistent and repeatable business outcomes. Your ICP is most likely to value the unique strengths you bring to the market (and potentially overlook/discount any weaknesses).

Your ICP may be characterized by a mix of attributes including revenue, employee count, state, region, industry, sub-industry, technographics, persona identification and incumbent solution. Once you have identified your ICP, this can inform your named account strategy and help you focus on developing a strategy around activities for outbounding and other types of outreach. This gives your sales team a playbook for identifying and engaging companies, inbound or outbound, that fit that ICP.

Fifteen years ago, a single person may have been the only stakeholder deciding to buy a product. Today, that’s no longer the case.

Most importantly, you need to be able to score and rank opportunities into tiers based on the most definitive ICP criteria so that you can use your resources wisely by prioritizing the accounts with the greatest potential to help generate repeatable revenue. Below is an example of tier distribution and touchpoint activities by tier.

While the ICP identifies and ranks your ideal sales target at the company level, that still leaves some blanks when it comes to individual members of the buying committee. Fifteen years ago, a single person at the top of the hierarchy may have been the only stakeholder deciding to buy a product. Today, that’s no longer the case

A single sale will most likely involve many stakeholders, and they will all come to the table with vastly different questions, objections, priorities, and timelines.

Defining these personas and personalizing and contextualizing the message to reach each one is a lot more work. But it’s well worth the effort, with 2023 McKinsey research showing that companies with faster growth rates derive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing competitors.¹

Buyer journey: Meet your customers where they are.

Defining the value proposition is an inward-out process, but building the buyer journey is very much outward-in. And with many enterprise deals taking as long as a year or more to close, identifying the milestones along the way is essential. (However, the same principle also applies to more transactional or speedy buying models.)

Put aside your own desired outcomes for the journey and take a close look at the habits of your market and buyer personas. Are they buying digitally? In person? How do they like to consume information? On what channels? Now that you’ve crafted your value proposition, what is the most effective way to deliver it to each member of the buying committee?

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to move the buyer forward or, conversely, lose them.

Remember that this isn’t a journey from point A (initial contact) to point B (close). That final, definitive win is preceded by five or six smaller wins to get there. And a sale is like a parlay: if you lose at any point, you risk losing everything. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to move the buyer forward or, conversely, lose them.

Learn how each persona shows you that they are engaged, how they show you they are ready to move to the next stage (since not every win involves a customer being ready to buy) and how they show you they need more time, more information or more support. Being able to interpret those insights at every buying stage for each buyer persona should enable you to build an effective, buyer-centric selling process.

One final point: these sales fundamentals shouldn’t be left to the sales team to figure out alone. This is a “we” thing, not a “me” thing: it’s a team sport that needs to involve teams like product development, product marketing, strategy and, in the best organizations, the customer advisory board, to name a few.

Here’s the bottom line.

Big changes in the buying process are creating a need for equally big changes in the way sales teams sell. But first, you need to get the three sales fundamentals right. Now is the time to define your value proposition and product-market fit, ICP, personas and buyer journey, because getting these elements right is the foundation for creating a successful, informed sales process.

Once you’ve established that foundation, the next vital step is to define a sales process that aligns with these fundamentals and creates a clear plan of action for your sales team.

Learn how to define and establish an effective sales process in part two of this GrowthBit, coming soon…