Author: Jay Mitchell

Principal Predictions: The Legacy of the Coronavirus on GTM Organizations

May 14, 2020

Jay Mitchell

While companies prepare for the “Revenue Rebound” as the coronavirus pandemic evolves and eventually slows, I turned to my team of Mereo principals to ask: What industry and organizational changes from this unprecedented disruption do you foresee remaining?

Here are their expert insights:

Supply chains will react with — and stick to — a new normal of heightened security and multi-sourcing

Supply chains have faced significant disruptions and shortages from the coronavirus pandemic. In the short-term, governments and business leaders have been scrambling for quick fixes to these major issues. But the mid- to long-term strategy demands a new normal that overhauls the status quo of pre-COVID-19.

No longer will cheapest be the name of the game. Governments and businesses are going to be focused on security of supply (aka supply chain continuity). This is particularly vital for healthcare, critical technology and military industries. Entities will look beyond cost to ensure flexibility and agility of their supply chains.

Flexible supply chains will result from replacing sole sourcing strategies with multi-sourcing strategies. Raw material and finished goods inventories will increase to protect the continuity of supply. Organizations will not be looking to offshore, especially with critical goods, as much as they will be focusing on regional-based manufacturing and supply chain strategies that serve local customer bases. And the software solutions — which enable the supply chain optimization, rapid adjustments, scenario game-planning evaluation, and near real-time communication and visibility — will increase in demand and value.

The overall integrity of supply chains will grow in importance. In our hyper-sensitized culture more aware than ever before of risks, it has to. Government regulations and focus on ingredients and quality will heighten, resulting in inherent enhancements for those who wish to remain marketable. Monitoring and control of imitation and fake goods sold via ecommerce will increase, threatening counterfeiters and dishonest sellers (and potentially the distributors) with major financial penalties (we will see more of Amazon’s recent lawsuit).

Those in the industry used to playing “Lean” and JIT (just in time) supply principals will need to align their designs to the new post-COVID-19 reality of integrity, control and security.

— Joel Reed

Learn more about Joel Reed and view his recent posts here.

Organizational leadership will face a recurring pressure to adapt rapidly — or fail

The mid- and long-term effects of the current global pandemic have yet to show their true numbers. The economic impact on major industries will continue to ripple out, disrupting supply chains, advancing bankruptcies and entirely reshaping the very nature of how business is done.

While there is still much left to be learned, one thing is clear — this will not be the last major market disruption business leaders will experience. This crisis environment and sweeping changes will likely become a recurring theme. Organizations and industries with leadership prepared and willing to adapt will succeed. Those who fight the change and stick to the status quo will be shuttered for good.

Regardless of no one wanting to hear it, it is true: Our industries and markets will never be the same. Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Leadership around the world have started to and will continue to rethink how business is done — from manufacturing, distribution and supply chains, to service delivery and remote work.

Innovative leaders and organizations will thrive, and new cottage industries will emerge to take the place of aging or dead ways of doing business. Specifically, we will see major competitors to Amazon. We will see a monumental rise in home delivery over brick-and-mortar shopping and dining. Commercial real estate must pivot in response to a new norm as demand for large gathering spaces will continue to weaken.

Organizationally and internally, leadership must adapt traditional office norms to virtual work-from-home teams. Technologies that enable virtual environments, including AI, will increase in demand and output. Organizations are implementing digital tools at a rapid rate to enable personal and professional collaboration. Long live the virtual happy hour.

And with unemployment at unprecedented levels, leadership now has access to new talent that will be hungry for work. Leadership can take advantage of this time to improve its talent pool and weed-out any employees unwilling to or failing to adapt to the changing times.

In all, for leadership to stand tall into the uncertain future, they need to be proactive: Diversify revenue streams and implement technology now to enable your organization into the future. They must be balanced: Rethink traditional work environments, supply chains, physical spaces, and be ready to handle the “old normal” and “new normal” in equal measure. And they have to be innovative: Rethink and rebuild your business model, business processes, M&A strategies and technologies to enable greater flexibility and responsiveness to whatever the future brings.

— Steve Maegdlin

Learn more about Steve Maegdlin here.

Online retail will be commonplace — while customer appreciation of personalized service and interaction will be at an all-time high

While online shopping has been steadily growing and gaining traction over the past several years, the COVID-19 crisis is going to create step function change in the move to online ordering — and it is going to permanently change the way customers want to interact with brick-and-mortar retailers. Companies such as Ace Hardware are seeing online ordering reaching volumes not originally forecasted to occur before 2025. At the same time, retail outlets are redefining the customer interaction in ways that will be here to stay even when the immediate crisis is over.

After COVID-19, customers will continue to expect a seamless experience between their online and store-based experience. All retailers are going to be forced to figure this out or risk declining sales and market share. The crisis is compressing the urgency into a matter of weeks or months versus the years it might have taken to get this right. The concept of curbside pick-up will be here to stay, enabling the customer to get what they want quicker than before. Also customer expectations for delivery of virtually any product or any order size will continue after the crisis has averted. Brick-and mortar-retailers — particularly those with many locations — are in position to potentially capitalize on these trends versus mega-retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot where there are fewer locations, which means more distance from the end-customer. The positioning of inventory close to the consumer can be a strong advantage if retailers figure out the seamless online-to-store experience.

Conversely to all of this, there will also be renewed appreciation by a segment of the population for personal interactions and personalized service after the COVID-19 crisis is over. Many people have been starved of human interaction and will be grateful when retail employees go above-and-beyond to answer questions or solve problems. Retailers whose business models rely on brick-and-mortar locations should not skimp on their investment in employee training both in terms of product expertise and customer service skills. Great service will also permanently extend to new dimensions as a result of the crisis including over-the-phone service, online chat service, and delivery service and experience.

In summary, the retail industry is being forced by this crisis to change very quickly. Those who can discern the lasting trends and perfect their new processes will stand to grow and thrive. Those who do not will decline after the crisis is over.

— Andy Carlson

Learn more about Andy Carlson here.

Marketing must prioritize activities that will help their organization maintain consistent brand promises amid these evolving times

Given the economic climate, marketing budgets will face the threat of being slashed. Yet companies are facing one of the greatest disruptions in their histories. Marketing activities will be vital to ensuring lights remain on and brands stay relevant.

Companies will need to get creative and prioritize which marketing activities will make the greatest impact to the sales funnel. Online advertising, social selling, search marketing and virtual events will be key. Marketers who can effectively track efforts and share results in compelling ways tied back to revenue will keep their department relevant. They will get bonus credit for being able to show how investments in marketing now will impact the current and future quarters, even at minimal spends.

Marketing professionals will face greater pressure from audiences to up the ante for more personal, more relevant and more engaging content. Real-time data and attribution modeling will help inform pinpointed executions and adjustments. Virtual events will become commonplace, and attendees will expect a high level of quality and experience. And building credibility in a growing virtual environment will mean inviting your customers to participate in your marketing programs. Gather testimonials. Forge partnerships and advocates. Create vlog case studies. Your marketing will stand out and above.

As always, it is vital for marketing to keep a pulse on the market now and into the future. Scenario planning and market research have taken on a new level of importance. Marketing departments should plan for new customer pains, new target audiences and emerging markets.

For any of these marketing efforts to make a true impact on organizations’ bottom lines — to help carry them through this pandemic and rise-up onward — marketing must align with leadership and other departments. Share plans and come together. What products and services will need investments based on market research and predictions? What are the new target buyer priorities and details?

The past norms before this pandemic are bygone, but new opportunities are fresh for the picking to those who strategically plan and push forward.

— Carolyn Layne

Learn more about Carolyn Layne and see her posts here.

Salespeople will need to master their trade, if not already, and look to inside sales for success

As many in the industry have been discussing the lasting impacts of the coronavirus, a key point often goes unnoticed — now more than ever before sales teams need to excel at the skills of the trade. A special focus must be put on identifying competency gaps as soon as possible and closing them.

Salespeople are facing a tenser economic climate, higher risk aversion and cost consciousness across industries and sectors. Today’s and tomorrow’s buyers will be seeking out salespeople who have mastered all the levels of sales excellence — who hold steady with an authentic and consistent Seek to Serve, Not to Sell sales style in the shaky wake of this crisis and any to follow.

This back-to-the-basics sentiment extends beyond salespeople and their individual skills alone. Sales leaders must adapt their sales excellence framework with a clear sales strategy, a solid sales management system and a sales enablement plan to ensure the right new buyers are targeted and engaged with valuable dialogue throughout the whole buying process.

For sales teams as a whole, the crisis has forced sudden remote work between customers and colleagues alike. In this context, the capacity of the sales manager to maintain contact with all team members and really care for them has been crucial. The proximity between the manager with their staff is a well-recognized parameter of sales rep motivation and performance. It does not mean that it is always a reality. The sanitary crisis has made this parameter even more visible and one can expect that, on average, it will receive a higher attention than before.

Additionally, the extended phase of travel restriction and reduced face-to-face interactions will further boost the development of inside sales beyond transactional sales to small customers. There is still a broadly accepted myth that inside sales does not allow you to build, develop and maintain a relationship with customers. Yet at Gartner, which does not sell a commodity, many customers who spend five figures yearly on research reports and events are managed in fact through inside sales. This framework has not prevented Gartner’s account managers from developing deep knowledge of their customers and forging real relationships with key contacts. And post-COVID-19, more companies will realize that they can leverage inside sales in a similar fashion with great results.

— Olivier Rivière

Learn more about Olivier Rivière here.

Sellers need to speak to healthcare and government buyer struggles with novel pains that are continuing to evolve rapidly

We all have had a front-row seat to the structures of both healthcare and government crumbling beneath the massive and sudden weight of COVID-19. Hospitals prepared to be overwhelmed with patients. Elective procedure revenues disappeared. State and local government processes and controls have been tested in a new work-from-home environment.

For healthcare, a myriad of new organizational priorities for buyers are demanding attention and taking it away from others common in the past. Buyers’ traditional revenue streams have been disrupted with devastating impacts to the industry overall. As such buyer motivation has turned specifically to identifying and enabling new revenue streams such as with telehealth, and reducing costs. This is no short order from buyers for B2B organizations to serve.

With local and state governments, buyers are facing a whole new world. There is greater distraction with work-from-home issues that need addressing, fast. Their processes and priorities are being stress-tested, and frameworks need to be revised and re-written. Budgets shortfalls are anticipated, and B2B selling organizations who serve state and local government need to be prepared with relevant messaging that prioritizes solutions that make a big impact on a small budget.

In all, like with other industries after the COVID-19 pandemic but at an even greater depth, healthcare and government buyers are suffering from new and highly specific pains. B2B organizations who can answer those with compelling solutions on the buyers’ evolving terms, will stand out and win.

— Andy McGuire

Learn more about Andy McGuire here.

New buyer trends that are here to stay mean sellers need to overhaul their go-to-market strategy

With the “new normal” of post COVID-19 not yet in focus, let’s all remember the adage from Warren E. Buffet: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

In that vein, post-COVID-19 buyers may soon see which sellers need a new swimsuit. So, while COVID-19 waves will hopefully soon lessen, three specific buyer trends are taking form — with some already making waves — that will accelerate and alter how sellers must go-to-market.

Remote work makes the buying committee even more disconnected. As remote work becomes standard (along with barking dogs and Zoom meetings that look like Grateful Dead concerts), access to buying committees and key decision makers is even more challenging. Sellers must now plan better and execute smarter and better-coordinated revenue pursuits.

Risk management moves front and center. The painful spectacle of business cycles that grind-to-a-halt makes risk the No. 1 lens through which buyers scrutinize seller promises. Sellers must demonstrate clear proof — validated with hard data — and flex even more to structure low-risk, high-return deals that produce results from day one.

Value reigns. While the market shakeout will clear the field of many vendors, it does not translate to dropping noise levels. Marketers have already cranked their dials on campaigns using the latest in automated MarTech tools. Noise filters will tighten — and only seller messaging with a crisp, clear value proposition will gain buyer awareness.

The takeaway? If your sales revenue was unpredictable or faltering before the COVID-19 tide went out, now may be a good time for a new swimsuit. Consider a refresh to more-compelling, business-value-focused messaging that breathes life into sales playbooks.

— Bill Watson

Learn more about Bill Watson here.

What changes are necessary for your organization to remain competitive and thriving? Connect with us to talk strategies for best seeing those through for sustainable revenue performance post-coronavirus.

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{Top Sales Magazine} Revenue Rebound: Plan Now to Sell Later

May 5, 2020

Jay Mitchell

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the business climate has been disrupted in an unprecedented manner.

There have been a number of reactions to the disruptions. Some of the more common in B2B I am witnessing are that leadership and employees alike are taking a reduction in pay and hours, with others turning to furloughs or layoffs to manage cash flow constraints. There just is not the same level of work to be done for most parties. Customers are home, and there is less access to buyers for “selling time.”

Right when disruption hit, most of us took a pause to assess the situation and get our footing. We paid attention to our loved ones and households, and we looked to world leaders to see where this was headed next. In reality, there was limited clarity, only projections and caution as we waited out what we hope is the worst health crisis we will witness in our lifetimes.

Yet, even amidst these unsettling and uncertain times, we know the situation will not last forever. Across the globe, states and countries are starting to ease social distancing guidelines and re-opening businesses. And in the aftermath, true organizational leaders will stand out in the marketplace for how they respond to the “Revenue Rebound,” resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

How they manage to do so depends heavily on the actions they have taken in the midst of the uncertainty to prepare for the rebound ahead. While some freeze with reduced sales-cycle activity, true leadership is leveraging this time to prepare to serve their customers for the other side of the pandemic.

Read the whole article on page 24-25 of the Top Sales Magazine May Issue.

The Blueprint™ to sustainable revenue performance

April 23, 2020

Jay Mitchell

For every business — from two-person startups to cross-continental Fortune 50 organizations — there are interdependent operational disciplines at play in selling that feed the overall revenue performance engine: demand progression, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement.

At Mereo we call this the Revenue Performance Blueprint™. Over these last couple months we have dissected each of these elements in greater detail and today will bring them altogether.

These play out differently for every organization. And finding the effective recipe has nothing to do with doling-out these titles per se but rather ensuring there are clear roles and responsibilities for each of these five revenue performance pillars — and that all are connecting, aligning, uniting. Because, if even one piece of the Revenue Performance Blueprint is misaligned, organizations are at risk for failing to sustainably feed their revenue engine.

These interdependencies are inherent in the organization’s overall revenue performance. Therefore, by working in the Revenue Performance Blueprint framework, sales, marketing and product management and other functions supporting the go-to-market engine— led by the company’s CEO — must find and practice alignment as an initial step from the get-go. And then it is different for every client.

The fundamentals of the Revenue Performance Blueprint are common sense — but not common practice.

Achieving Organizational Alignment

There are many factors that keep B2B companies from successfully aligning their leadership, teams and efforts:

Processes, plans, frameworks and tools are not formalized or shared across departments.
Oftentimes literal physical distance exists between locations, spanning states, countries and oceans, and different locations start behaving as if they exist alone in their own silo.
There are few opportunities where cross-departmental leaders or people are brought together to build rapport, to collectively buy-in to decisions, or to band behind a united mission and goal.
There is an “us” versus “them” mentality between departments or geographies when there should be a united “we” front.

It takes awareness and direct effort to overcome the easy but harmful state of misalignment. Leadership needs to make a regular commitment at least once a year, ideally, twice a year or every quarter to come together for review, strategy, forward-looking planning. In many B2B companies we work with, many leadership teams have never interfaced before we engage and bring everyone together. And after they experience this union — and the valuable outcomes from it — they continue this eagerly.

The B2B company and culture overall must overcome fissures that threaten misalignment. Strategy, goals, plans, buyer personas, selling methodology — all the elements that leadership works so hard to lock down — must be formalized and made accessible to the entire organization, gain buy-in from the entire organization.

When alignment happens, the buyer will not see this smoothly-operating machine of departmental parts and operational pieces but rather a united and valuable solution ready to serve their needs, no matter where they look or who they talk to.

Finding the Right Balance

To gain an unfair share™ of the market and achieve sustainable revenue performance all five operational disciplines must be working solidly. In the leadership holds the keys through the consistency, accountability and sense of urgency with which they guide the united organization.

Consistency
- Drives a standard approach to sales process, lead qualification, ongoing pipeline scrutiny, opportunity management, account planning, territory management and other revenue operations disciplines to provide scale and enable measurement
- Institutes governance cadence into sales engine (daily activity, weekly examination, ongoing)
- Enforces common, compelling messaging in conversations (e.g. profile of buyers, conversations with buyers, differentiators, overall value proposition)
Accountability
- Implements rigor in go-to-market approach with sales team
- Brings leadership and sales savvy to management team (proactively manages up and with peers)
- Measures revenue performance and shares metrics broadly (both success and challenges)
- Displays strong communications skills and behaviors across the organization (e.g. win/loss transparency)
Sense of Urgency
- Enhances competitive energy of team (“hates to lose more than likes to win”)
- Leads with “last can of soup in the cupboard” mentality balanced by steady and confident style
- NOT a “super rep” but capable and willing to inject into sales cycles directly and indirectly as needed (beyond executive sponsor)

As we put a bow on this series, embrace the opportunity to shape the culture of revenue performance for your organization. Stand in the gap and take responsibility for instituting the necessary change. Relentlessly execute the leading-practices being adopted. And, above all, seek to serve the needs of your prospects and clients alike.

GROWTH SOLUTIONS

Holistic revenue performance series V: Sales enablement

April 16, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Sustainable revenue performance ensures your organization is meeting its goals and finding its success into the future. Yet achieving profitable revenue year after year is no simple task. There is no golden egg or one solution. You will time and again meet internal and external challenges.

Yet with a well-oiled revenue engine, any challenges you come up against will be mitigated or side-stepped altogether.

At Mereo, we have developed a unique approach to revenue performance that leverages the inherently interdependent operational disciplines of demand progress, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement.

This week in the holistic revenue performance series, we will dive into sales enablement and how this piece of the revenue performance Blueprint™ will help you achieve an unfair share™ of the market.

Common Sales Enablement Pitfalls

There is often confusion around what sales enablement truly encompasses and what the purpose of a sales enablement program is.

And it is hard to explain: Every organization has and needs a unique sales enablement strategy that makes sense for its culture, its goals and its buying audiences. At the most simplistic level, though, sales enablement is what it says it is: An organized and company-wide effort to enable sales channels (front-line sellers and leaders), in order to:

Better align with the buyer’s journey.
Enable and empower salespeople to serve buyers.
Synchronize an organization around consistent sales methodologies, formalized processes and value messaging for a united effort of selling no matter the department.
Help departments work cross-functionally to get your solution in the hands of the right buyer.

Sales enablement programs can be powerful. But there are many forces that can tug at the thread and unravel the efforts, the potentials, the impact. Leadership beware of the following:

Misalignment Among Sales, Marketing and Product Teams

According to HubSpot research, one in four companies indicate their sales and marketing teams are either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned.” And this misalignment is costing B2B companies 10% or more of lost revenue annually.

Perhaps departments have a different understanding of the target buyer. Maybe everyone is working from a different business plan or differentiated value messaging platform. There are formal, common sense sales enablement tools that can help close these detrimental organizational fissures and help your people work together in united strength.

Sales Tools Gap

Are the sales resources your marketing department creates simply going unused by sales? The answer is likely yes. According to research conducted by the CMO Council, salespeople invest upwards of 40% of their time creating presentations and other sales cycle content. That is two days per week. Two days salespeople could be making calls, getting face-to-face with buyers, closing deals. This is a major inefficiency an effective sales enablement program can address.

Ineffective Training

Technology has enabled us to achieve so many efficiencies and overcome yesterday’s barriers. Yet, the value of in-person interactions is not going by the wayside. Quite the opposite. Many organizations commendably commit to regular sales training, but their programs are often mainly online. Salespeople are not engaging with training content as they go through modules as well as they would in-person, active and interfacing with other people. They are not getting one-on-one or face-to-face experience that is necessary for real-world selling with a buyer. They are going through the motions without any true leveling up occurring.

And in situations where salespeople across the organization are brought together — such as at sales kickoffs — there are often missed opportunities to train salespeople in solution value messaging, new sales methodologies, intensive skills workshops as the focus rather goes to celebrations of past achievements and a look to the future’s goals — without the skills and plans to get there.

The most effective sales training curriculum blend instruction, exercises and role-plays across modalities (e.g. in-person, eLearning, ride-alongs) with ongoing coaching.

Sales Enablement Strategies to Win

Think of sales enablement as a three-legged stool. One leg is supported by sales processes and buyer-seller activities. Another leg stands firmly with effective techniques for selling – and enhancement of the requisite skills. The third leg includes value messaging, where sales are enabled with a compelling solution value propositions including differentiation that an entire organization has aligned around.

Effectively Leveling-up Sales Skills

Sales training has been a popular prescription for dried-up pipelines and below-par performance. While effective when properly administered, there is ample amount of malpractices and over-promises when it comes to sales training.

Sales training is never a once and done event. Leadership must require continual opportunities for improvement of their salespeople’s skills. They must provide opportunities to practice effective listening, differentiated value messaging, responding to “no” and more common situations they will find themselves in. Regular formal sales training programs aside, leadership must also reinforce sales training often at meetings with check-ins, practicing in “ride-alongs”, and assessing and dissecting real sales moments in order to ensure sales are at a level required for revenue performance scalability.

Cross-Organizational Solution Expertise

Every single individual in your organization who interfaces — directly or indirectly — with your buyer needs to be a solution expert. This includes your salespeople, your marketing team, your customer service professionals.

There is a large distinction between having knowledge about what solution you offer versus why it is relevant and compelling to your buyer. Formal playbooks serve as an single reference point for aligning your entire organization around your solution’s differentiated value messaging as it pertains to your target buying audiences – that often begins with fundamental elements such as the ideal buyer profile, pains and discovery questions for buyer personas, solution differentiators and proof points, client value stories and objection reframes.

Enabling Valuable Sales Tools

There is a special art to creating sales tools that salespeople can feasibly use and that will resonate with your target buying audiences. Leadership must first align its organizations around goals, targets, messaging frameworks and more in order for sales kits and tools to be revenant and worthwhile. What does sales need for its buyers? How can marketing develop tools sales can customize per buyer to make a compelling case for your solution? Where are the gaps? This is a vital leg to the sales enablement stool and has the potential to take buyers from engaged with sales to ready to close.

Real Results Realized

Axway was in a transformational period to a subscription-based solution. Leadership knew they would need to revolutionize how it launched products, educated sales teams and spoke with its customers. Yet, the organization was struggling from common pitfalls that would impede the implementation of these changes:

The organization was fragmented by geography and departments, resulting in disparate messaging and go-to-market disconnect.
Current salespeople lacked formal skills and conversation training. They were accustomed to pitching products and rarely looked to engage buyers to understand their needs first before communicating a compelling value proposition.
The go-to-market strategy lacked alignment between product, sales and marketing teams.

Read their sales enablement story featured in the March Issue of Top Sales Magazine to learn how they managed to:

Realize growth in marketing-generated opportunities, up 53% in 2017, 58% in 2018 and 28% in 2019.
Support commercial momentum of the subscription business, which saw 7.5% growth in 2018 reaching revenue of €3 million, and 17.2% growth in 1H 2019 reaching revenue of €23.1 million. Organically, the business grew by 4.4% year-on-year.
Improve sellers’ confidence and capability to engage prospects in effective conversations by 33% overall instilling value-based selling approaches and employing Axway value messaging through an in-person and eLearning sales enablement curriculum.
Employ an interactive training approach as part of sales kickoff that leveraged sales-selected target accounts as the focal of exercises. 49.7% of these registered opportunities progressed to close by utilizing concepts and techniques learned and/or honed at the kickoff.
Increase marketing and sales enablement content at sales kickoffs from 1.5 hours in 2017 to a full day of content in 2018, to 2.5 days of content and enablement in 2019, refocusing on education and preparing to succeed in the year to come.
Experience growth in return on marketing per business closed by 76% in 2018 and 41% in 2019, for a total of 148% cumulative growth from 2017 to 2019.

READ THE AXWAY SALES ENABLEMENT STORY

Revenue Rebound: Seeking to Serve in the Time of COVID-19

April 9, 2020

Jay Mitchell

My client phone conversations have shifted the last couple of weeks. We share health updates — and I am happy to report the vast majority of people I have spoken with are doing well. We discuss how we are embracing the dynamics of working from home, online schooling for children and our soreness from more exercise than normal. These are challenging times, but we all agree: We will overcome.

The coronavirus pandemic has altered the world we knew. It has led to tragic personal battles for many, and has upended daily routines and livelihoods for virtually everyone. It has also caused significant and unprecedented disruption to business.

Many of us in the B2B space are witnessing organizations — especially consumer-facing— shut their doors, reduce their staff, go quiet. For other organizations, sales cycles are slowing down, pausing or halted. Corporate offices are dark and empty while we all try to press on in home offices with a noisier house than usual.

It is hard to imagine overcoming this tragic situation, especially while still amidst the continued spread and wrenching record-breaking numbers. But someday, maybe two weeks from now, maybe next month, maybe by this summer, we will be on the other side of the pandemic. We will have made it through. And when we look back from a business perspective, we will be able to see what actions B2B leadership took to prepare for the eventual response and rebound of life and business — how they sat in the driver’s seat of the economic engine as we as a global community worked to “flatten the curve” without letting it “flatten the economy” far into the future.

A Semblance to the Past

The 2008/2009 recession was by no means anywhere near a pandemic. International trade imbalances, mark-to-mark accounting regulations and lax lending standards are a weak comparison to a highly contagious, microscopic virus that has a high mortality rate. Yet like the coronavirus, these market plagues led to disruption to businesses and spread across the global economy.

Looking at the aftermath and the “recession rebirth” that ensued, we saw a major shift in the buying and selling environment — and the roles both parties could play.

Prior to the recession, buyers were already looking for a reason to gain more control over the buying journey. They no longer wanted to rely primarily on salespeople as the gatekeeper to product and service knowledge. They had greater tools for research and input by means of the internet, both in terms of on-demand content as well as access to a peer community full of insights. And as the recession ended, they were able to grab hold of that buying power and bypass the salesperson who, begrudgingly, maintained an antiquated sales approach employed for ages. For sellers, “status quo” overcame the market transformation happening in front of them.

This shift did not mean buyers did not want to interact with salespeople either. In fact, CSO Insights research “The Growing Buyer-Seller Gap” found that 90% of buyers were willing to engage salespeople earlier in their buying journey – as they had for centuries. But buyers were after a different kind of value from sellers. Specifically, they found value from salespeople who presented messages that were:

New for the buyer (34%)
Perceived as risky for the organization (21%)
Perceived as risky for the buyer themselves (19%)
Complex (e.g., impacted several departments) (16%)

Revenue Rebound: A Look to the Post-Coronavirus Future

The toll of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy has a fuzzy resemblance to the 2008/2009 recession, but its sudden impacts and wide reach put it at a level much worse than what we had already experienced. Sellers should anticipate that the control buyers wielded after the 2008/2009 recession will be amplified on the other side of the coronavirus epidemic.

Because much like the recession from a decade ago, there will be a time when the business environment turns again. At the very least, we all expect to see sales cycles ramping up as we move into the second half of 2020. In this post-coronavirus environment, in the “Revenue Rebound” as I like to call it, many organizations will be calling on different buyers altogether. Others will be connecting with traditional buying audiences who have different pains requiring different value propositions. We will all be feeling the shadow of this pandemic for months after it is over. Moreover, it will play a major role as sellers seek to serve buyers, much as it has exposed fragile structures and status quo of business past — with new buyer needs emerging. Some examples of marketplace shifts I have heard in conversations with executives include:

Supply chain reconfigurations and their volatility (especially where the supply chain is single-threaded through China) will be an issue to resolve.
Virtual workforces and customers may remain partially or at least to a greater degree than they were months ago.
Broad and pinpoint talent assessments are being activated to ensure the right team is assembled for the road ahead.

In the meantime, though, while business leaders, their employees and buyers alike are home right now, with sales cycles and business-as-usual no longer viable, leaders have the opportunity to make the most of this situation — to be prepared for the Revenue Rebound. Some will continue to sit back and gape at the situation unfolding, complaining to friends via video chat and to family trapped indoors alongside them. Others, the real leaders, will close their home office door, sit down at their desk, and take a proactive approach to prepare their business and their teams to be ready to hit the ground running once life beyond our homes resumes again. Stakeholders in the organizations led by this second set of executives will look back at the end of 2020 for the rest of their lives and reflect glowingly on the Revenue Rebound that they were party to after the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

Leaders Marching Their Organizations Forward

Over the last two weeks, the Mereo team has been conducting virtual interviews with the core executive team and go-to-market team at a global provider of commerce and communications solutions. This coming week, we are coming together virtually with that same group and core subject matter experts for a workshop to build out differentiated value messaging that will speak to their customer’s pains post-coronavirus. Out of that will come playbooks, playsheets and sales kits. These will feed into custom training that we will roll-out through a virtual environment, across the next couple weeks, engaging salespeople and their leaders in highly-consumable sessions. Why are they doing this now? To capitalize on some margin available in their team’s calendars by preparing for the Revenue Rebound. Their leadership is being proactive. Kudos. All of your stakeholders — customer, employees and investors — will all be better for it.

The future is going to change. We all know this. What will the shift be in your industry? Will you react or respond to the Revenue Rebound? Will you be prepared or rushing to catch-up to competition that took advantage of these coming weeks when you sat at home — literally?

Strategize now—and you will truly serve your buyers when they will need you the most.

We will continue to keep each of you in our thoughts and prayers and are grateful for you doing the same. In the meantime, respond to the Revenue Rebound proactively. Your customers, your employees, your investors and your neighbors are counting on you! If there is any way we can help you either personally or professionally, please let us know.

Holistic revenue performance series IV: Sales operations

April 2, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Sustainable revenue performance ensures your organization is meeting its goals and finding its success not just here and now but into the future. Yet achieving profitable revenue year after year is no simple task. There is no golden egg or one solution. You will time and again meet internal and external challenges.

Yet with a well-oiled revenue engine, any challenges you come up against will be mitigated or side-stepped altogether.

We have touched on demand generation, solution marketing and solution management these past weeks. This week in the holistic revenue performance series, we will dive into sales operations and learn the greatest pitfalls affecting B2B organizations, how to overcome these and how this piece of the Revenue Performance Blueprint™ will help you achieve an unfair share™ of the market.

Common Sales Operations Pitfalls

Sales operations are not the glamorous side of selling, why most get into the business. The team running sales operations is focused on the nitty gritty, down and dirty details of your formal sales plan tailored around your overarching business strategy. With this in place, uniting your leadership and teams, go-to-market activities become more streamlined and successful, pursuing new territory or different markets becomes achievable. Honestly, with a solid sales operations foundation in place — along with the other key Blueprint pieces churning in sync with it — there is little stopping your sales teams from achieving their goals and then some.

Yet, you can guess it or perhaps you are living it: Many selling organizations lack formal sales operations. They allow different geographical locations to warrant different plans, despite having the same solutions and targets. There is miscommunication around goals and methods to reach them. There is frustration within the culture — a lack of drive or urgency to sell your solutions.

And when that happens, leadership is set up to face a number of hardships that keep the organization from reaching its goals and sustainable revenue performance.

Sales Methodologies Awry

There are many ways to sell, all that have varying benefits depending on who your buyer is and what solution(s) you have to serve your markets. Leadership can establish the “best-practice” sales methodology for your particular organization — but when this is not formalized or reinforced by the leadership team, the result is often a bedlam of miscommunication, missed opportunities and frustration for leadership and salespeople alike. This is not what is easiest for the individual salesperson but what is most successful for the united selling organization and those it seeks to serve.

Salespeople in all the Wrong Places

With too many salespeople assigned to a territory, you set your team up for missed individual quotas and an inundated market. Too few salespeople assigned a territory ripe for your solution, and you have a salesperson working 60- to 80-hour weeks, burning out and soon to look for something else, while opportunities fall through his or her overworked fingers. Sure, territory mapping and regular market analysis can be a tedious process, but without it, you suffer from dissatisfied salespeople set up to lose and potential missed opportunities — not to mention a drain from mismanaging your resources and their potential.

Incentives Salespeople Are Willing to Leave Behind

If your compensation plan is based on revenue acceleration and growth (increasing compensation based on increasing quota achievement) but your go-to-market engine operates differently (e.g. margin-driven), your salespeople will feel frustrated from an unachievable reward. While incentives are not everything in ensuring your talented salesforce remains with your selling organization, they are, arguably, the major factor. No one shows up day after day out of the goodness of their heart. They have goals, needs to serve, people to support. If your people believe their efforts are not being fairly compensated, you can be sure they will be quick to move on when the chance arrives.

No Urgency to Sell

All the talent, alignment and structure can exist in a sales organization, yet with no urgency salespeople will still be failing to meet quotas and scale goals. In too many companies, most sellers and their leaders confuse busyness with purposeful orchestration. Busyness often masquerades as activity. While activities are important — that is to say, no activity results in no sales — not all activities are equal.

Sales Operations Solutions to Win

Unified Sales Governance

Regardless if you think your sales teams across theaters compare as well as apples to cucumbers, you must make an effort to operate under the same foundation as one. Sales processes, sales cycles and sales operations frameworks cannot and do not need to line up 100% as long as there is sound and just reason. But there needs to be commonality in sales nomenclature, methodology, operational discipline and governance for the sake of your company culture and the buyers it serves.

Strategic Territory Alignment and Mapping

At Mereo, we help companies look closely at how, where and in which markets they are making their revenue. What territories do you sell to? What are the opportunities for selling in each of your territories — up-selling and cross-selling other solutions between markets? Are there better territories you have not yet explored? How many salespeople are truly needed to serve your different territories? Are there some that are struggling to make quotas due to over-commitments of resources? Finding success with sales territory requires a proper situation analysis and in-depth strategy to map out your future success.

Compelling Sales Compensation Strategy

A successful compensation strategy incentivizes and reinforces specific appropriate behaviors and results from all customer-facing professionals. These behaviors and results should help you achieve both short-term profitable revenue objectives — as well as feed into sustainable long-term growth. This is more than saying “We will just give everyone X amount of Christmas bonuses.” This is a strategic look at variables such as:

Your sales cycles (exponential growth / selling a product vs. sustainable operations / maintaining subscriptions).
Your buyer journeys.
Your short- and long-term organizational goals.
Small tweaks you can make now to review mid- or end-of-year to see their impacts.
Open dialogue with salespeople (what do they believe will help inspire them to sell better, sell more?)

Encourage a Culture of Urgency

Every company culture is distinctive. That is what makes it a culture. That is what makes it a good or bad fit for every salesperson. Regardless what your culture’s foundation is, every leader should be embracing the competitive nature of sellers. Lead with a “last can of soup in the cupboard” mentality balanced by steadiness and confidence. Leverage different levels and capabilities of sellers and orchestrate the collective activities of your sales team that are purposeful and not busy for the sake of busyness. Leadership can achieve this a number of ways, but the two easiest to start incorporating today are encouraging a culture of urgency through personal modeling as well as a structure of accountability.

An Operation Set up for Winning

As we have reached operational discipline No. 4 of the Mereo Blueprint™ series, let us take a step back to remember that all five of these elements work together to equip leadership and departments to take bold steps in engaging one another and working together to embrace interdependencies that exist in revenue performance.

While we gear up for Part V: Sales Enablement, we can appreciate that sales operations create a solid foundation for successful selling — yet there is more to winning or losing a sale at play here. Stay tuned for next week as we dive into sales enablement. In the meantime, please watch an interview with Selling Power’s Gerhard Gschwandtner where we discuss the key aspects at play in landing or losing sales.

What Makes a Winning versus Losing Sale

Holistic revenue performance series III: Solution management

March 26, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Sustainable revenue performance ensures your organization is meeting its goals and finding its success not just here and now but into the future. Yet achieving profitable revenue year after year is no simple task. There is no golden egg solution. You will time and again meet internal and external challenges.

Yet with a well-oiled revenue engine, any challenges you come up against will be mitigated or side-stepped altogether.

At Mereo, we have developed a unique approach to revenue performance that leverages the inherently interdependent operational disciplines of demand progression, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement.

We have touched on demand generation and solution marketing the past couple weeks. This week in the holistic revenue performance series, we will dive into solution management and learn the greatest pitfalls affecting B2B organizations, how to overcome these and how this piece of the revenue performance Blueprint™ will help you win an unfair share™ of the market.

Bringing products and services to market that drive profitable revenue

Common Solution Management Pitfalls

A solution management strategy is the backbone of your organization’s sustainability. Without a valuable solution coming to market consistently — be that a product, service, SaaS, bundles, etc. — you have nothing of which to serve your buyer. And over time, your buyers’ needs you first set out to alleviate change. Technology makes new methods possible and others irrelevant. New problems crop up for your target audience. A past problem is wiped out.

Just because they bought from you once does not mean they will do so again. According to LoSasso research, 34% of B2B buyers say their purchase decisions are driven most by features, while 27% say price and only 39% say brand. Likewise, CSO Insights has found that your buyers want to see you innovating and keeping a pulse on the future: 46% of B2B buyers want to hear new ideas at the beginning of a sales conversation.

A solution management strategy needs to take target buyers’ greatest needs — their greatest unsolved pains — as input, to then output to the world an innovative answer. This is all common sense. But first, your organization must overcome common solution management pains.

**A Product Management Mindset**

“Product” is too narrow a focus and often inhibits the understanding of the real opportunity, which is to focus on offering a solution to the market. Solution management is different from product management in that its inherent focus is broader and that its processes engage a wider audience. Where product management focuses on the attributes, roadmap and pricing of a specific product, solution management focuses more broadly on solving a problem — which includes through the means of the product itself, its delivery, packaging, service and support, and how it interacts with other solution components. Too often leadership at B2B organizations are stuck on product, though, and are missing the bigger picture and grander opportunities altogether.

Internal Validation Only

A solution management strategy requires your leadership team to juggle a dozen different variables that could affect its outcome. From market analysis, to competitive analysis, to future forecasts, and specific customer needs and feedback, a lot can successfully inform your solution decisions. Yet, many B2B organizations keep their sights focused inwardly. They ask “What are we good at developing?” rather than “What problems is my buyer still facing that no one has been able to solve?” They see an achievement of a competitor and ask “How can we do that better than them?” rather than “Why is our competitor moving on to something different? How did their solution fail to fully serve the market?” They go by the command of the leadership rather than the calls for needs and wants from the buyer. Little to no external validation rarely garners positive results.

Lack of Internal Competencies

Even if you look to your target B2B buying audience and learn their needs — even if you see a gap in the market, an opportunity for your business to create a solution and deliver it effectively, your leadership team must be honest with itself on follow-through. What is your company good at making, delivering, supporting? For example, are you a software provider that is looking to change to a subscription-based model, but you do not have the internal staff who can support this yet? If you do not have the internal capabilities and competencies, it is likely you have many viable external options to reach your solution goal. However, you must plan for this early on and engage external parties for your solution management strategy to hit the market effectively and stay abreast successfully. This is not the college cram session. This must be preconceived and intentional every step of the way.

No Go-to-Market Due Diligence

Many organizations lack the formal due diligence at the start of a solution management process. At Mereo, we believe there are essential internal inputs that will impact your solution management strategy. Between competitive information, win/loss analysis, businesses strategy and more, assessing every internal input can set you up for better success. Not every input needs to be positive. But by going through a due diligence process from the start, you can avoid or mitigate the challenges you can foresee.

Solution Management Strategies to Win

While there are a number of issues that arise within an organization that hinder successful solution management, there are also tried and true solutions.

Alignment. Alignment. Alignment. Alignment.

For a solution to be successful, there must be alignment across four planes within the organization: business, solution strategy, financial and go-to-market. Ideally folks from product management, finance, development and R&D, marketing, sales and service will have a seat at the table. Never should marketing have something new in the works with a launch date attached that product management and R&D are unaware of and unable to meet. This is all-hands-on-deck.

This type of cross-organizational and cross-departmental alignment requires clear and regular communications, a culture of transparency and openness, and formalized solution materials such as a roadmap and messaging framework that align everyone on the same game plan.

External Inputs: Client Advisory Boards (CABs)

While certainly not the only source of input, inviting customers input into your solution strategy and the associated prioritization of resources is sound and proven to work. Engaging customers and prospects early — and often — in solution roadmap discussions leads to:

Greater confidence in resource investments
Easier garnering of early adopters
Lighthouse references
An accelerated market launch

Leverage your own Client Advisory Boards (CABs) and the Mereo Decision Maker Network™ to bring in qualified executives from your target buying audiences. With these prospects at the table, they can tell you firsthand their goals, their greatest pains, and their feedback on your solutions in development and how you are presenting them. This is an invaluable step in a solution management strategy — and while it takes extra effort, it is a vital component to ensuring you are building out your solution, its packaging, its pricing, its delivery, its messaging and all else as effectively as possible.

Analyst / Influencer Insights and Market Research

Every successful sales organization must keep a pulse on the market. Turn to reputable resources such as Gartner, Forrester and more to keep up with the current state of things and — most importantly — pay attention to where the market, competitors and buyers are headed.

Likewise, leadership must keep tabs on the sales pulse. What are buyers and clients asking of your salespeople? What feedback are they receiving in-person? Using these inputs will help to create solutions and value messaging that better resonates with buyers.

Real Results Realized

Axway, a €300.0 million publicly-traded information technology organization with dual headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paris, France, was transforming from a product provider to a subscription-based solution model. In this intense, tumultuous process, opportunities for improvement within its solution management strategy and following go-to-market processes became apparent.

Learn how they rallied together for organizational alignment and came through the other side with a formal and successful go-to-market strategy with our support.

AXWAY SOLUTION MANAGEMENT RESULTS

Coronavirus ‘Extended Spring Break’ Reading List

March 19, 2020

Jay Mitchell

One of the most popular blog posts we do is recommended readings lists for the holidays or spring break for selling organization leaders.

With spring break approaching, we began assembling this spring break reading list — but that was quickly derailed with the coronavirus-triggered impact to business and personal life alike.

So whether you are looking for a reason to pile-up in the corner of the house to get a break from kids home from school on an extended spring break or you need a little “social distancing” — here are some recommendations I have personally read and hand-selected for you. Enjoy!

Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, et. al)

Crucial Conversations is the How to Talk so Kids Will Listen book for the business world. When there is a high-stake conversation to be had with a peer or an employee — or even a leader — you want to be sure you approach it in a fair, effective way that avoids anger or hurt feelings. You want to invoke positive change. And this book provides the strategy and tools to do so.

Get the Book Here

And if this book makes impact on your leadership and your organization’s communication, explore leveling it up with the Crucial Conversations training.

Sales Enablement by Tamara Schenk and Byron Matthews

Sales enablement is a hot topic in todays selling environment. But tell me this, how would you define this overarching topic? What strategies does your organization have in place?

In this book, Sales Enablement, Tamara Schenk and Byron Matthews break down this massive and high-potential growth strategy to practicable, implementable best practices and step-by-step approaches.

Get the Book Here

And for a sneak peak, look to author and expert Tamara Schenk’s past blog takeover on Mereo.

The Joy Model by Jeff Spadafora

If you are a Christian business leader, you may have come head-to-head with the frustration management consultant Jeff Spadafora speaks to in his book: Joy is missing from your faith. Spadafora offers a better way to practice your faith that will benefit both your personal and professional life. It comes from balancing your practical and spiritual sides, from experiencing more than knowing. It helps you find peace and purpose. And it has the potential to greatly inspire your leadership style in positive ways. I know it has for me.

Get the Book Here

Now tell me: What did you think about the books? Are there any at the top of your list from this past year? Give me a shout on the Mereo LLC page.

Your Two Cents

{Top Sales Magazine} Putting the Power of Sales Enablement to the Test

March 12, 2020

Jay Mitchell

How Axway transformed its sales enablement practices for success during its greatest season of sweeping change.

The upfront challenges of shifting from a product-based to a subscription-based provider — in a formalized, cross-organizational, and profitably sustainable manner — was a catalyst for sweeping change at Axway.

Axway, a €300.0 million publicly-traded information technology organization with dual headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paris, France, embraced transformation before the company switched to a subscription-based solution. Leadership roles were disrupted. The solution packaging was shifting. The entire culture was ripe for positive change. Mereo helped Axway hone-in on a number of roadblocks it would face as it raced toward its goals, including its sales enablement strategies and practices. Through the action plan grounded in tighter partnership with each client, Axway revamped its go-to-market strategy, as well as aligned as an organization across geographies for immediate results that have only created momentum for future success.

Here is their sales enablement story.

Challenges in Time of Change

Axway knew that in its transformation to a subscription-based solution, it would need to revolutionize how it launched products, educated sales teams and spoke with its customers. Yet, the organization was struggling from common pitfalls that would impede the implementation of these changes:

The organization was fragmented by geography and departments, resulting in disparate messaging and go-to-market disconnect.
Current salespeople lacked formal skills and conversation training. They were accustomed to pitching products and rarely looked to engage buyers to understand their needs first before communicating a compelling value proposition.
The go-to-market strategy lacked alignment between product, sales and marketing teams.

Solutions

Mereo saw ample opportunity to overcome Axway’s current challenges through sales enablement activities. Led by the global head of marketing, Axway first set out to create playbooks that would (1) bring together and align leadership across functions for input and development and (2) support the upcoming sales kickoff with effective messaging tools for salespeople — while also (3) building-up formalized and aligned content that marketing could use for campaigns.

This initiative was unprecedented at Axway. More than 60 people within the organization came together across three, two-day workshops in the United States and a two-day workshop in Paris. Axway even brought in three executives from the Mereo Decision Maker Network™, who provided real-time buyer input and validation to the value messaging framework being created.

Next, Axway embedded sales enablement into their sales kickoff, a gathering that had historically been more of a festive celebration of the global sales team. To maximize the value of the session, Axway’s leadership asked salespeople to bring a real opportunity that was directly developed during the sales enablement session with new techniques. During a subsequent sales kickoff, marketing was given even more agenda to educate and train sales on relevant differentiated value messaging.

Over the last two years, Axway has provided additional in-field enablement sessions around new solution offerings and how to sell with the compelling messaging the marketing team had prepared. This cadence of sales enablement has afforded Axway the platform to expand on these efforts from the sales kickoffs and reinforce what was learned.

“Marketing had been generating a lot of leads that hadn’t been going anywhere. And sales is accountable for 70% of the pipeline, so marketing’s impact is higher by focusing on this alignment and support rather than staying silo-ed in the marketing department. With Mereo’s help, we were able to make a bigger impact with my team and its capabilities through sales enablement,” said Josh Hardy, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Axway.

Uncover Axway’s gains and the full article in the March 2020 Issue of Top Sales Magazine…

Holistic Revenue Performance Series II: Solution marketing

February 20, 2020

Jay Mitchell

Yet with a well-oiled revenue engine, any challenges you come up against will be mitigated or side-stepped altogether.

Last week, we touched on demand generation. This week in the holistic revenue performance series, we will dive into solution marketing and learn the greatest pitfalls affecting B2B organizations, how to overcome these and how this piece of the revenue performance Blueprint will help you win an unfair share of the market.

Sell their needs to sell your solutions.

Common Solution Marketing Pitfalls

Each year, buyers are gaining more control over their buying journeys as they grow empowered with more solution options, greater amounts of information and better technology to make an informed decision. In fact, more than 70% of B2B buyers indicated that they fully define their needs before engaging with a salesperson — and almost half already have identified specific solutions prior to reaching out (CSO Insights). The role of marketing and its alignment with sales’ efforts is more important than ever, with a number of challenges threatening its true success.

Selling Processes Misaligned with Buyer Journeys

Buyers expect high-quality, relevant marketing and messaging to the same level as successful B2C. And they expect to find this messaging where they look for it: across digital channels. While this means salespeople need to be able to seek to serve their buyers even better than before — it also means marketing has to deliver compelling and consistent value messaging and differentiation where and when their buyers are looking for it. They need to keep a pulse on the market and the buyer.

Status Quo Wins

Sitting in the minds of your buyer is your most stubborn, greatest competition: status quo. Buyers do not see a compelling reason to change “how it has always been.” They are fine with “getting by as it.” They do not see the urgent need to act now or what it is that your solution could do for them anyway. That is, unless your marketing team can learn and translate these pains into messages that land heavily and sit uncomfortably with the tease of good things to come with your solution.

Inundation of High-Quality Content

Buyers may have struggled to notice your messaging in the past with the mass amounts of content coming their way daily, but you could rise to the top by putting out the highest quality messages and presentations. It is not so simple any longer. Gartner research has discovered that buyers are overwhelmed with an influx of high-quality messages. This should be good news for the buyer, but it is causing them stress and inaction with mixed messages and simply too much to take in. Sellers will be ignored despite their content quality unless they can learn how to become trusted advisors and sense-makers.

Internal Misalignment

Your marketing team spends cycles developing materials to help your sales team engage their buyers and stick the value messaging conversations with supporting materials. Yet, according to Demand Metric, 75% of salespeople say they “occasionally” or “never” get what they need from marketing. Salespeople complain that marketing content is too generic — that it lacks the relevance for the buyers they are on the ground floor speaking to. This misalignment will continue, unless marketing and sales start to sit at the same table for planning and strategizing.

Solution Marketing Strategies to Win

While each solution marketing pain is different, there are a number of frameworks Mereo employs to help sellers put their best solution promotions forward.

Power Profile

This is true regardless of the size, industry, makeup of your selling organization: In order to market your solution, you must know whom you are marketing it to.

The Mereo Power Profile™ provides vital insights and key points instrumental in helping you identify, target and connect with organizations and buyer roles. In creating the Power Profile, we explore and label the following as targeted, opportunity or non-targeted:

Key organizational characteristics and demographics
Ideal organization attributes
Buyer roles and buyer personas

When the Power Profile is left to your teams’ assumptions and not locked down in a formal, aligned process, it can wreak havoc on selling efforts, especially as marketing works to align with sales. The Mereo Power Profile formalizes this vital solution marketing and selling element and makes it easy to act by in the best interest of your target audiences.

Positioning and Messaging Readiness

Your solution marketing strategy will win if you identify a compelling position your solution can take in the mind of the buyer. What are their greatest pains? What are their goals? How does your solution serve them? Mereo helps B2B organizations formalize effective value messaging and differentiation to be used across the organization.

Organizational Alignment PCA Framework

To ensure all marketing activities are strategically aligned — and are not one-off activities for activity sake — we created the Program/Campaign/Activity (PCA) Framework at Mereo. This framework allows B2B marketing teams to see what and where their activities and campaigns are contributing.

Programs: These are the overarching themes the company is striving for. This is the leadership vision, the objectives and goals. Ideally these themes are grounded in a combination of the marketplace challenges their buyers are encountering and the differentiators their solution offers.
Campaigns: These comprise multiple activities that align with a theme or multiple themes at once. Think thought leadership, demand generation, speaking opportunities that are package together with a greater combined meaning. For example, the pre-event, on-site event and post-event marketing activities and sales prospecting activities orchestrated into a cohesive campaign.
Activities: Activities are the individual items within a campaign.

Client Advocacy

Lastly, it is vital to develop programs, processes and sales assets that communicate compelling client proof points in support of your differentiated value proposition. When Forrester asked B2B buyers what helps them make purchase decisions, 71% said real customer stories. Discussion about capabilities and even benefits of solutions help buyers evaluate alternatives they are considering. But when it comes to making a decision, client testimonials from peer companies are the most powerful tool in your toolbox. However, Forrester’s research also discovered that 78% of salespeople do NOT share relevant examples. This is an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself form 4 out of 5 sellers with whom you compete.

Real Results Realized

OKI was suffering from mis-targeted buyers who had no control over their decision-making, a generic value proposition that failed to appeal to target buyers, and a mis-aligned message across the organization presented in a non-compelling way.

Then Mereo stepped in as a consulting partner with our proven solution marketing frameworks to help the company win an unfair share(TM) of the market. Read more here.

OKI’s SOLUTION MARKETING WINS