How to Achieve Sales Targets: The sales story you should be telling to ignite change (and the tools to make it happen)

Today’s uber-connected buyer might seem to be holding all of the cards, but perception isn’t reality. While buyers are empowered to navigate most of the journey without a sales presence, they often get lost. The complex purchasing journey brings more of everything – information about your competitors, messaging, leverage and solution options. It also brings more stakeholders – most at executive levels – and more financial scrutiny over each dollar being spent. When sellers finally get a seat at the table to meet buyers where they are, the story they tell matters. And that story must help buyers justify the economic investment in your product, service or solution.

Why? These empowered buyers are also frugal and risk-averse buyers, who fear making the wrong decision. The consequence of which is often the worst case scenario: they choose to “do nothing.” Research shows the need for financial justification in enterprise purchase decisions is critical (Corporate Visions). Did you know…

• 61% – of executives lack confidence in their ability to build a meaningful business and financial case to justify a decision, meaning that you as a provider need to close this gap
• 56% – believe their salespeople are “50-50” or worse at connecting your business value to executive-level needs and initiatives
• 39% – are confident in their sales reps’ ability to build a meaningful business and financial case that creates the urgency for a decision

Mind the Value Gap
Why Improving Sales Performance Starts with Speaking the Same Language

Based on these findings, sellers who seize the opportunity to close the gap (between what the buyer expects and what they are actually being pitched) can make a compelling case for change. We call this the Value Gap.

Executives have specific requirements to feel comfortable with a purchase approval, and financial justification often tops the list. While sellers might inherently understand the value of a product or service, that doesn’t mean the way they communicate it will resonate with buyers. Igniting change means redefining your sales engagements, starting with throwing out the traditional product pitch. Instead, replace it with the story of your value, retold consistently by every member of your sales force, in the context of what each individual buyer cares about.

With sales enablement technology, your reps can apply value selling tools to deliver unique insights, benchmarks, and analytics during prospect engagements. These tools dynamically create the financial case for you, by guiding the right questions at the right time, and supporting the story of your value with quantifiable data. It means you can shift the discussion from if to when they will meet their business goals.

4 Steps to Value-Based Selling, Backed by Data

In the research, we found this simple sequence to have a big impact when thinking about how to tell your own value story and build urgency with buyers.



What does each of these steps actually look like? Here’s an explanation, using our CLOSE Sales Methodology:

1) Using sales tools, prompt the right discovery questions dynamically and intelligently to help uncover your most pressing business challenges.

2) Assess current challenges to uncover hidden needs, while helping buyers close the gaps between their legacy solutions and current solutions.

3) Recommend and align the right solution set to meet buyer needs, based on the identified gaps from the discovery and assessment steps, and tell a solution value story.

4) Justify the business impact, based on the discovery information, assessment and solution recommendations, automatically quantifying the differentiating business value improvements, necessary investment and ROI calculations.

Leveraging these elements through sales enablement technology that incorporates value selling tools like ROI calculators and TCO comparisons will empower your sellers to uncover, assess and illuminate unconsidered needs and build urgency around your proposed solution. Sales engagements that tell a value story with financial justification can cut through the noise of the purchasing process and inspire buyers to act now. Learn more about how Mediafly’s Evolved Selling platform can help your sellers better communicate and quantify your unique value for more deals won.

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Additional resources related to value storytelling and financial justification:

How to Differentiate Yourself and CLOSE More Deals
Evolve Your Sales Team from Pitch to Purpose workbook
Evolved Selling: Optimizing Sales Enablement in the Age of Frugalnomics