Transcription
If you frequently lose your deals early in the process, you need to better motivate your buyer. If you find your deals fizzling at the end of the process, you need to better enable your buyer. You motivate by isolating personal wins your buyer will experience with your solution. You enable by teaching them how to articulate the business impact those personal wins drive. You need both to win consistently. Let's talk a little bit about those areas.
You need to motivate because individuals evaluating your solution have a full-time job outside of looking at new vendors. Every hour spent with you and internally advocating for your solution is time spent 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.
Pretend you're selling to me as a sales leader at MongoDB, and your value proposition is making MongoDB more profitable. Well, I would love to be more profitable. You won't find company profitability anywhere in my compensation plan or how I earn a promotion. I'm pulled too thin to take on a lengthy evaluation that doesn't help me achieve my key metrics. Let's think about how you would find out what would motivate me: What metrics measure my performance? What systems and processes are hurting my attainment of those metrics? And then finally, how would I measure the success of implementing your solution?
As an example, my primary metric is net ARR with an emphasis on new business. A challenge I have is getting new reps onboarded and quickly productive. A motivating value proposition for me would be: "You will help increase new rep productivity, which will increase your new business faster—faster onboarding, bigger commission checks." Now I'm sold personally, but I need to be enabled to successfully sell the solution to others internally.
Let's talk about enablement. Your champion's biggest problem is rarely their boss's biggest problem, and it's almost never the company's biggest problem. Armed with only the value your solution brings them individually, 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, in addition to what you can find through your research. Here are a couple of questions you can ask:
Number one: What significant changes has the organization made recently, and why? And then number two: How would the organization measure the success of implementing your solution?
Putting things back into my world, talking to me like all tech companies right now want to become more profitable. I'm personally motivated by the potential of bigger commission checks and an accelerated promotion path that would result from onboarding AEs faster. AE onboarding leads to increased rep productivity, which leads to a decreased cost of sale, which leads to increased profitability. You don't want me going to finance saying, "Hey, this solution will help me make more money." They'll be like, "Yeah, dude, you're already overpaid as it is." You want me going to them saying, "This solution will make MongoDB more profitable by reducing the cost of sale." But I'm motivated and excited to push that conversation forward because I know what it's worth to me individually.
Think through your current deals. Where do you feel like the business value is strong but your personal value is weak? And vice versa, where do you see a personal value being strong but the business value is a little bit weaker? Use this lesson on motivating and enabling to shore up those gaps, and you can expect an increase in win rate. If this is helpful, would love it if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, and you can also find my best frameworks at salesandgivers.com.