How Value-based Selling Drives Customer Loyalty and Retention
Thomas Miller
Revenue Growth Expert - Sales Transformation Consultant - Optimizing Sales Performance with the ValueSelling Framework®
How do you successfully tackle complex selling environments as an IT sales professional or sales leader? Learn how best-in-class organizations equip their revenue teams with a common framework, language and toolset to improve customer experience (CX) and create customers for life.
Gaining enterprise buy-in for your company’s SaaS solutions is not for the faint of heart.
As organizations continue to face unrelenting uncertainty, driving customer loyalty and retention is paramount. To do that, you’ll need organization-wide alignment – but how do you overcome the siloed departments and segmented tech stacks that negatively impact the customer experience (CX) and revenue goals?
The answer is an aligned revenue engine that facilitates knowledge sharing among cross-functional teams to drive customer value and ensure a consistent CX. This article will explore how best-in-class organizations equip revenue teams with a common framework, language and toolset to create customers for life.
Enterprise Sales Success
Gartner reports that 83% of B2B buyers prefer digital commerce over salesperson-led interactions and that this mode of buying is significantly more likely to result in purchase regret. You also have to consider that most enterprise tech buyers (73%) don’t even work in IT but work in other business roles.
The odds certainly seem stacked against sellers. As a result, most technology companies need to transform how they sell to engage multiple decision-makers across the entire client organization. That requires trading transactional selling for value-based selling and building the infrastructure to drive adoption, track progress and continually improve – let’s start by looking at how best-in-class organizations do just that.
Aligning the Revenue Engine: A Common Language
When building initiatives to improve CX, many organizations need to consider customer-facing roles. However, ensuring all teams use objective criteria for evaluating deals and a shared vocabulary for communicating amongst themselves and with customers is important.
This enables additional insight into the qualification and proposal/trial-program creation process to avoid wasted resources and facilitates feedback loops across your company. For example, messaging becomes impactful when all marketing assets align to a common, company-wide language. And when sales, marketing, finance, billing, customer support and success all use the same criteria to evaluate and discuss business, it greatly improves knowledge-sharing.
Aligning the Revenue Engine: A Shared Toolset
The proliferation of revenue tech has made it too easy to end up with a bloated and/or segmented tech stack. While the ideal tech stack varies considerably according to your company’s unique needs, there are four basic elements that benefit revenue teams.
1. Qualification tools, playbooks and plan generators
Once you’ve selected the right value-based sales methodology, you have to make it simple to implement. SaaS tools like these help teams prepare for calls, automate customer-info capture, efficiently qualify opportunities and keep deals on track with mutual plans. They also enable you to efficiently share prospect/customer intel across teams and provide leadership with analytics to optimize at scale. Prioritize solutions that seamlessly integrate with your tech stack to avoid the trap of redundant admin work or platform switching.
2. Conversational intelligence
These AI-driven tools are fantastic for evaluating calls and monitoring leading indicators like the number, distribution and types of questions asked. From a CX perspective, their power lies in their ability to capture the voice of the customer and identify patterns in business needs and solutions.
3. Marketing automation & analytics
Think of all the ways in which your company impacts the market, increases awareness and provides assets – that’s what we call your sphere of influence. Having insight into how prospects interact with these channels enables teams to identify additional needs, be more proactive in customer onboarding and refine messaging.
4. Account planning tools
Teams can expand their footprint in key accounts at scale by leveraging these applications to identify the right opportunities, easily evaluate their value and efficiently bring in the players and actions needed to engage. Plus, the improved insight into account behavior further enables feedback loops that help you attract similar opportunities in the future.
Now that we’ve covered how to build the infrastructure that drives customer value let’s look at actionable techniques that revenue professionals can use to sell organization-wide solutions.
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Connecting with and Selling to C-suite Buyers
Embracing a value selling approach helps salespeople have more meaningful conversations, uncover and connect to pressing business issues and jointly quantify the value of solving those issues. Instead of finding a single use case and selling a few SaaS licenses, salespeople can now engage executive decision-makers across the organization and partner with companies to maximize a technology solution – resulting in increased customer value and less purchase regret.
Connecting with busy, executive-level buyers begins with understanding their business. Investigate the company’s financials to develop compelling messaging that piques interest and establishes credibility. Look to the company’s annual report with particular attention to the CEO’s letter, Financial Statements and Supplementary Data and Risk Factors.
You’re looking for insight into growth trends, threats to their business and key priorities. If you’re short on time, AI can be a great aid for quickly summarizing public information. Of course, it’s important to always spot-check for accuracy so you don’t immediately undermine your credibility.
Once you’ve secured the necessary meetings, employ “O-P-C questions” to actively engage prospects and bring the conversation to a higher level. This technique is vital for uncovering business issues worth solving, multithreading the engagement across the buying group and ensuring access to the ultimate decision-maker – not to mention quantifying the value of your solution.
The three types of questions are:
2. Probing: These questions let salespeople drill down to uncover the most pressing business challenge and quantify the value that their solution will provide. When done well, salespeople will expand need, help prospects clarify their thinking and prioritize problems that your solution is uniquely positioned to solve:
3. Confirming: Once a salesperson has identified impactful issues, this is a chance to test the accuracy of assumptions, mirroring the prospect’s terminology while confirming business issues and motivations:
While simple on the surface, this process is far from formulaic. With training, salespeople gain confidence in managing high-level business conversations and uncover and quantify the value of implementing their company’s solution.
Achieving the Goals of Customer Loyalty and Retention
Ultimately, a value-selling approach fundamentally changes how revenue teams approach new business across the enterprise. The effects on CX and customer retention are often dramatic – as are the effects on sales metrics and employee experience. Revenue professionals become empowered to have business conversations that allow them to go from “order-takers” to creating large-scale initiatives that transform organizations.
By embracing a value-based approach, IT organizations will successfully demonstrate their ability to execute in this market and earn their customers’ trust and confidence for the long term.
Are you engaging in value-based selling strategies? How’s that impacted your customer retention stats? Share with us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Originally published in Spiceworks