In late 2021, 330 sales and marketing leaders were surveyed to uncover the current state of sales enablement for B2B selling organizations. The report that followed revealed that, on average, salespeople lack an answer to 40% of questions buyers ask about the company’s solution. Additionally, 70% of those interviewed indicated that their salespeople tended to stray off message during buyer conversations.
How could salespeople know so little about the solution they are selling? How can so many buyer questions be met with pauses and “Umm, let me get back to you on that,” responses? How can so many salespeople fail to stay on-message, on-brand and delivering a solid value proposition?
The answer: Even after two decades of sales enablement coming into practice, most organizations are still not providing salespeople the right training, reinforcement, and sales enablement tools and resources. The maturity of sales enablement programs has been slow across selling organizations. To complicate matters further, salespeople today face novel hybrid selling environments and a high-inflationary market that demand even more training and support.
Many of you will be coming out of sales kickoffs where you have imparted key knowledge about your solution. But now is not the time to call it good and to think sales professionals have everything they need for success in 2022. Now is the time to ensure your entire buyer-facing organization commits to enabling your sales team to overcome today’s greatest selling challenges — while delivering unwavering value to your buyers. And it might just start with a solution playbook, what we at Mereo aptly call the Power Play™ Book.
EDUCATE, EMPOWER, ALIGN
B2B solutions — be those enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings or physical products or subscription services — can be complex. The features and benefits and every fancy detail that went into development get product teams rattling off excitedly for hours. But what should buyer-facing professionals do with this information (if they even have access to it)?
What your solution offers does not directly answer why it is relevant and compelling to your buyer’s issues. Answering this demands an extra, vital step. Your leadership team must create the differentiated value proposition for your solution, one that fits with each of your key buyer personas.
A formal solution playbook can serve as a single reference point for your solution’s differentiated value messaging. This is your organization’s lesson guide for sales training, its alignment tool for cross-departmental teams, its springboard for all buyer-facing sales enablement tools and resources. With pain and discovery questions for each buyer persona, solution differentiators, proof points, client value stories, objection reframes, and more — a playbook can and should contain the answers to any of your buyers’ questions. And as you can see from this content list, it starts with the buyer – who they are and what matters to them — because that is the most fundamental building block of enabling sales teams.
So why are most sales professionals unable to answer buyer questions? Why are sales support teams failing to provide adequate tools and resources? Because most of them are not provided the right answers in the first place.
Axway, an API management and application integration SaaS leader, enabled its organization with a playbook to increase valuable interactions with buyers. Learn how with the Mereo Power Play™ Book and value selling training, sellers’ confidence and capability to engage prospects increased by 33% and the organization unlocked a new level of revenue performance.