Author: Jay Mitchell

selling

Semantics Matters in Selling

August 29, 2019
Jay Mitchell

I am often asked why myself and other Mereo consultants use the term “solution” over “product” and/or “service.” Is it just a preference? Do I not mean product anyway?

We prefer the term solution because it is all-encompassing — an umbrella term that leaves plenty of room for us to start off on the same page of what it is we really are talking about. There is no disconnect, no moment of someone raising their hand to say, “That is wrong. That is not what we have here.”

“Solution” encapsulates products, services, packaged bundles or kits. It even keeps in the conversation go-to-market components including wholesale distribution, contract manufacturing and consumer packaged goods manufacturing.

We can start on a level of understanding with clients when we use the term solution, and then we can work our way down to what these solutions are specifically. And in doing so we have established understanding and consideration. In this small way, we are already building trust and confidence.

The same holds true for a selling organization when speaking with their buyers. The differentiated messaging salespeople use matters — as do the words they choose to share that messaging. The language displayed on a website and in buyer-facing content can either connect through shared meaning and relevant messaging or it can be another thing a buyer glosses over and moves past.

For regular insights, connect with us.

 

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Just because you built it does not mean they will come

August 22, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Most companies want to be known for their game-changing solutions. They want to serve their target buyers with value time and again. And here at Mereo, we think that goal is noble and that distinction between selling to “everyone” versus selling to the “right ones” is spot on.

Yet, I have witnessed chief product officers, chief executive officers and chief sales officers drive solution management and development by focusing on just “the one.” You know what I mean — that single client the sales team and/or another C-suite leader is excited about. Maybe this client has a big name or a buzz-worthy logo the company wants to slap on their website. And with one client to focus on, it is all that much easier to assess and define their needs to create a specific solution. So the company builds out a particular capability just for this one client.

Unlike fictional Iowa farmer Ray in Field of Dreams, who was guided by the famous “If you build it, he will come” guidance — just because you develop a solution that can serve one client does not mean it is well suited for your broader target. Sure “he will come” may be true for your single goal client. But then what? Is this the scale you are seeking? Is the monetary value worth it for all the research and development you will be investing? Is serving that one client more important than serving your broader buyer base?

“We want that logo on our client list” is not a feasible strategy for a business that strives to experience sustainable revenue performance.

What does work time and again in solution management is seeking input and feedback from a wide variety of individuals who fit the bill of your target buying audience. And at Mereo, we can help you achieve this by helping you form your own client advisory board (CAB) — one of the pillars to a scalable solution management approach.

 

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Assimilating Your Teams Post-Merger and Acquisitions

August 15, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Mergers and acquisitions can seem like an early episode of the Brady Bunch. Two families — businesses — are brought together under one roof, and now they face the sometimes uncomfortable, uncertain reality of learning how to live together and thrive both individually and jointly as a family.

Sure, now young Bobby and Cindy have new playmates in each other, Mike and Carrol have more help in their older kids Greg and Marcia — everyone brings unique, new capabilities and strengths to the household. But within that, there is often a threat of individual resistance, of role confusion or outright mutiny to change.

Though often with a merger or acquisition, employees remain separated by location and no one is expected to truly see one another as a family — despite due diligence, if there is not an adherence and assimilation to a singular and uniting mission, negative impacts can ensure.

The Assimilation Pitfalls of Mergers and Acquisitions

The first threat would be nothing changes; the two companies do not experience any growth despite the combined effort. The second would be confusion and missed opportunities, and potentially failed quotas. The third would be disruption, maybe a loss in sales, marketing or other market-facing professionals.

This would be like the Brady boys pretending the girls didn’t exist and taking over their bedrooms as their own. Like the Brady kids not understanding that they must respect Bobby as much as they respect Cindy. Or, as if the Brady kids ran away from the new household altogether.

Upwards of 70 to 90 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail.

Often the real issue comes with leadership’s relaxed stance on assimilating workforce. “The teams were performing well prior to the M&A — they will continue on well while we figure everything out.”

Yet, this is no way to experience real revenue growth. And if your leadership team is not looking toward substantial growth as a performance indicator, the question begs to be asked: What was the point of the M&A in the first place?

In a period of “figuring things out,” your marketing, product and sales teams can feel confusion about their new roles. There will be no formal guide for up-selling or cross-selling the new products, and any attempts made will not have a unified, compelling value proposition that was created to resonate with audiences. New buying audiences’ doors will remained closed to your combined teams. Misalignment will run amok. Or worse, complacency will set in, with the all-too-easy mindset of “us” versus “them” — rather than the “we” your companies have become.

Serve Your Teams to Serve Your Buyers

The time to onboard and assimilate your new teams is not six months or a year after the M&A has been finalized. It is as soon as possible. It is now.

This means strategic planning, training sessions, follow-ups. It means you must:

  • Command a joint value proposition and messaging framework — and get buy-in from all your salespeople, marketing people, product teams and even lighthouse clients (hint: think client advisory council).
  • Treat your expanded sales team as one team, and enable them on your company and common culture, sales methodology and sales operations foundation as such.
  • Cross-train salespeople on new solutions — and practice buyer scenarios that will lead to up-sells and cross-sells. Then, repeat and reinforce.
  • Set up clear expectations and a system of accountability.

The success your teams have experienced in the past is no longer relevant. You are a new company — an enhanced company with a higher order value to bring to your clients. And as you are pushing your sellers to realize substantial revenue growth from this new joint venture, be sure you are avoiding these five common pitfalls that threaten to derail your future deals.

 

SOLVE 5 ISSUES DERAILING THE DEAL

 

mergers and acquisitions

Acquisitions and Mergers: Make 1+1 equal more for your B2B company’s revenue growth

August 1, 2019
Jay Mitchell

In order for an acquisition and merger to be worth the investment, executive leadership needs to see substantial growth in an appropriate and agreed-upon timeframe.

And substantial growth does not equal the sum of the two company’s previous year’s revenue. This expected growth means doubling, tripling, quadrupling — scaling to a revenue level neither company could have achieved alone.

Mathematically it would seem your company has an upper hand after your M&A by means of a larger sales force, with more solution offerings, with more value and more differentiation than ever before. Yet, for any of these “justifications for the M&A activity” to materialize and make a positive impact, leadership must first do the heavy lifting of developing a single, strategic plan to lead the newly united company toward this shared goal.

A Joint Value Proposition

While many companies eagerly start consolidating human resources, accounting, Information technology and other back-office functions to gain expense efficiencies, they too often fail to align beyond that on the revenue performance side of the ledger. It may be a lack of time in the short-term. It may be that everyone thinks of this as a long-term, “we have time to get to this later,” sort of alignment. And leadership might look at their respective teams and decide they have been doing well in the past. Why shake the boat? Why risk failure?

A greater risk, though? Not making a substantial impact in the marketplace when it comes to your revenue performance. And one of the first things companies should address is developing a new joint value proposition.

You now have a higher position to which you can lay claim. You will have new buying audiences whose doors are easier to knock on after this M&A. A joint value proposition will formally spell-out in a relevant, comprehensive, strategic way how your two companies can best serve these specific buying audiences in a way you were unable to do before the combination.

A Singular Sales Methodology and Sales Operations Governance

Maybe your company’s sales cycles take months while those of the company with which you are merging take a couple weeks. Regardless if you think your sales teams compare as well as apples to cucumbers, you must make an effort to operate under the same foundation as one. Sales processes and sales operations frameworks cannot and do not need to line up 100% but there needs to be commonality in sales nomenclature, methodology, operational discipline and governance.

Territory Realignment and Mapping

We have learned in math class the rules of numerical equations from an early age. Two plus two equals four. Four is a greater number than two. And we take that thinking and decide that four must be better than two.

This same “larger number equals a better number” logic does not always apply in business, though — especially when it comes to your sales force.

If your two $20 million companies wish to become one $60 million in revenue over the next three years, there must be more to your strategy than doubling your sales team. Look to the details of how you reached your $20 million revenue in the first place. Look at the market that got you there, where that market is heading. Look at the territories in which your salespeople sell to. Look for opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell your new additional capabilities.

Just because your sales team and those who support them have grown in size does not mean your revenue streams will follow suit. Not without a proper situation analysis and in-depth strategy to map out the next three years of transition.

This strategic planning can feel burdensome and overwhelming at the start of an M&A, but it is important to push through in order to win. Sometimes engaging a third party partner makes all the difference. 

For more proof of mergers and acquisitions best practices, I invite you to read the success of past Mereo client Ariba.

 

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b2b website

Is your B2B website engaging your audience — or just displaying your goods?

July 18, 2019
Jay Mitchell

The question posed in the headline regarding your B2B website is becoming increasingly important as buyers continue to change their habits alongside our advancing technology.

According to a recent CSO Insights study, “The Growing Buyer-Seller Gap,” nearly half (44.2%) of participants surveyed indicated that they identify a solution before they ever engage a salesperson.

This finding reveals a large majority of your target buying audience is finding other means to research their solution options. And, you can probably guess it: Your website plays a major role in whether or not these buyers decide to engage your salespeople.

For the most part, the aesthetic and branding of many B2B company’s websites are top-notch and commendable. And in more websites than not, any visitor can sense the pride the company has for its solutions and offerings.

But as a recent Forrester study has found, there is also a growing gap between B2B websites and the engagement of their content.

B2B Sellers Are Still Failing to Engage Their Buyers

The Forrester study analyzed and graded 60 B2B websites based on 15 criteria related to whether or not the site’s content was engaging.

The “students” did not fare well on the test: Only four out of 60 of the websites received a passing grade — and this was after Forrester lowered its standards from the year before by five points.

4 out of 60 B2B websites failed Forrester Research engagement test in 2019.

In fact, Forrester has actually uncovered that B2B content engagement is not improving but is getting worse: In 2017, the engagement test had only six passing websites.

So what about those 56 websites with failing grades? The main issues revolved around the content:

  1. Orienting toward the company and its products rather than customers.
  2. Relying on industry or brand jargon.
  3. Lacking a human and relatable voice.

This obviously common issue is not exclusive to just B2B websites either. It is for the above reasons that many buyer-seller conversations – electronic, via phone or in-person – fail to serve either party.

Failing to Engage Applies Across the Board of Buyer Communications

Sellers are missing opportunities to engage buyers in more areas than their websites. Conversations are not hitting the right notes. Business proposals are lacking the right story.

Buyers are eager for a trusted advisor to understand them, focus on them, solve their problems — but still too many B2B organizations and their salespeople head in with a stale, ignorable messaging framework: Here’s our solution. You should buy from us. We’re great. Trust us.

An Engaging Formula For Buyer-Facing Content

All customer-facing teams, including sales, must do better at engaging buyers. While “engaging the buyer” may seem like an intangible goal, Mereo has achieved an effective formula that can be applied across situations, across functions for managing it.

B2B website

 

This is the pain, solution, gain, proof framework.

Pain

For any engagement to be worthwhile for either party, your buyer must have a known (over often unknown) pain that you will help them overcome. Though in many social situations, we try to gloss over issues and problems, in a buyer-seller conversation, it is important for the seller to not only touch on the pain but to shine a spotlight on it by stressing the failures, roadblocks and future frustrations it has and will continue to cause. These pains need to be specific for the target audience and real, and that means listening to your buyer and keeping an eye on industry news. And while it may feel uncomfortable being the bearer of the business pain, the buyer should not need to worry about their pains for much longer, because your solution will directly address them – but only if you bring it to their attention.

Solution

Most B2B sellers can quickly tout their solution facts and figures: “It has this feature and this is the evolution of how great it is. It can make miracles happen! It is amazing!” But without knowing how these miracles could directly apply to their business, buyers will not engage. You must be specific about the elements of your solution that are relevant for their “unique” situation? How will it help? How will it sustain its support? Then you can get into the features that back up these benefits, but try not to spend too much time on that.

Applying how your solution can solve your buyer’s pains is part of it; you must also differentiate your solution from the competition, the one thing that you can lay claim to that no other sellers can. And, you got it: Show how that one thing can be the golden ticket to solving their pains and reaching their goals.

Gain

In the pain section, you emphasized what could go wrong if the buyer continues as-is. Now it is equally important to paint a picture of what they could achieve by using your solution. The gain is more than overcoming the pain — it is reaching goals, trumping competition, gaining an unfair share™ of the market. It is something specific and desirable for your buyer. And it is all in reach with your help.

Proof

For any investment, we want a guarantee. “So you say,” thinks the buyer, “but will your solution really work?” Before you have fostered a relationship as a trusted advisor, you must have proof on hand. Through client value stories, client testimonials and solution demonstrations, you are able to show your buyer that others have had similar pains, and because of your solution and your solution alone (with its differentiators) they were able to overcome and to thrive.

For an example of an effective form the proof element can take, I welcome you to explore Mereo client success stories.

 

PROOF

 

selling power article

{Selling Power} How to Create a Winning Business Proposal

June 25, 2019
Jay Mitchell

A business proposal holds the power to win over buyers. It is your best salesperson in the form of a document, because it is on hand for buyers to share with all relevant stakeholders, and it contains your business’ solutions and capabilities.

Every business proposal presents you an opportunity to truly serve the buyer with real value. Yet most business proposals suffer from a few common pitfalls.

First, many proposals fail to deliver what a prospect needs. Your prospect’s needs and your own needs are usually very different. And, ultimately, it is vital sellers change to meet buyer expectations if they wish to prove their value and land deals.

Buyers’ Business Proposal Needs

Mereo had the opportunity to participate in the development of a business study conducted by The Ohio State University that targeted more than 1,000 executives at organizations making enterprise purchases. The first portion of the study asked, “What do you need to be able to sell a business proposal internally?”

This is what the study uncovered:

Business Proposal Element Percent of Buyers Who Expect It
Project Description 100 percent
Solution Description 80 percent
Key Value Drivers 71 percent
Technical Specs 9 percent
Project Plan 69 percent
Three-year ROI Review 54 percent
Five-year ROI Review 46 percent
Budget Impact/Budget Set 54 percent

In the same study, real insights came with the second part of the question: “How often are your business proposal needs being met?”

The greatest disparity between what buyers and prospects need in a business proposal and what they are given appears in the project description (88 percent of sellers provide versus 100 percent of buyers expect); key value drivers (14 percent sellers provide versus 71 percent expect); tech specs (77 percent of sellers provide versus just 9 percent expect); and budget impact (12 percent provide versus 54 percent expect).

Turn Business Proposal Needs into a Compelling Story

Though the aforementioned insights can benefit sellers in focusing their intents, crafting a winning business proposal is more of an art than just sticking in the key value drivers and including a project description.

You are not just selling to a buyer – nor are you only helping them sell to their internal teams. You are inspiring them to transform from where they are to what your solution can help them achieve.

Accordingly, the effectiveness of any business proposal can be vastly improved by storytelling from the buyers’ point of view. And there is no better framework for telling a story than through pain, solution, gain, and proof.

Pain: What problems is the buyer struggling with? Stress these, especially if they persist as the status quo, and illustrate how they can negatively impact your buyer’s bottom line.

Read more at Selling Power… 

 

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sales culture

A Winning Sales Culture Propelled by Urgency

June 13, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Every business leader wants their sellers to embrace the sense of urgency to serve their buyer and realize the company’s goals.

Competition is ever-diluting. Buyers’ issues can easily fall into a status quo loop where the buyers do not actively seek to address the issues. Perceived busyness can blind leaders from sellers’ lack of purposeful activity.

Most leadership attempts to drive a culture of urgency with rewards and incentives. And while many incentives programs exist, the lack of urgency remains a No. 1 issue I come across in sales teams, across markets and business structures.

With incentives and rewards not doing the job, how can meaningful urgency be achieved?

It starts with the company culture — and the leadership team.

Sell Your Sales Team on Their Purpose

Every moment that passes where a seller is not working toward making a sale is a moment where your company’s value is not being realized by the buyer.

And in order for a buyer to embrace the value of your solution, your sales team needs to understand it as well. This breaks down into a few key elements you need to equip your salespeople with:

  • Target Buyer Profiles — Allowing sellers to understand who they are serving, what that ideal client’s biggest pains are, and what these pains truly mean, and how they can better connect the value proposition dots through relevant messaging.
  • Value Messaging — Arming sellers with relevant points about your solution’s unique value in the framework of how helps buyers overcome their pains and achieve their goals.
  • Differentiation — Showing sellers how much better you have listened to the buyer’s needs, how much more value or a different kind of value buyers can expect from your solution.

Sellers have an opportunity to act as heroes. They can fight the crime of buyer business pains with the tools of the company’s solution. And leadership can help them believe this purpose.

They do not have to be pushy salespeople buyers resent interacting with but rather trusted advisors who buyers turn to in times of need. When the latter sets in, sellers can truly start to feel the multidimensional value they hold at their fingertips for their sellers.

And once sellers understand this, once they are driven with passion and purpose, their calendars and actions will act accordingly, reflecting a sense of urgency to serve buyers.

Reinforcing an Urgent Culture

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 can implement the following into their sales culture to see winning results:

  • Embrace the competitive nature of your 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.

Learn more about aligning your sales team into an unstoppable revenue engine.

 

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What a Pit Stop Crew’s Urgency Can Teach Sellers

May 30, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Across the board, I have witnessed a plague among sales professionals and at times sales leaders. The talent seems there. The structure aligned or aligning. The solution valuable. Yet, the sellers fall short in reaching targets, meeting quotas and scaling goals.

The issue often boils down to something missing among salespeople and overall culture: a lack of urgency.

A Lesson From the Evolution of the Pit Stop

Before we move forward, watch this two-minute video to witness the difference between a team that acts with precision and urgency and a team that appears busy but is methodical in reaching their objective.

sales urgency

The first takeaway from the video you just watched was the elapsed time difference between these two pit stops. Certainly the modern pit stop was faster than the 1950s pit stop.

Yet, taking note of the time difference is just part of the insight this example can provide. The modern pit stop crew’s decreased time it took to get its car optimized can be attributed to a number of things. There are more-modern tools than there used to be. A number of years have passed since the ’50s for best practices to be solidified and passed down to today’s generation. Perhaps there is more at stake in these modern races than there used to be.

The real beauty that can be witnessed in the modern pit stop crew’s urgency is the orchestration of every crew member.

The 1950s pit crew has more members. Every member is bustling around with activity. Yet, the modern crew manages to leave this 1950s crew in the dust with fewer team members.

And how they manage this centers around a theme of purpose.

Busyness Versus Purposeful Orchestration

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.

A seller who makes call after call or sends email after email to a non-targeted buyer is falling into the trap of busyness. While a different seller targeting their activities toward serving a targeted, qualified buyer is executing with purposeful orchestration.

When every seller can perform under the guidance of the latter, then the entire revenue performance system is optimized and ready to race across the finish line ahead of its competition.

Win the Race

As is true for the modern pit crew, today’s sellers are equipped with better tools and insightful best practices. Yet, sellers — and especially under the accountability of their leadership — need to practice under a different cadence of activity that is driven by purpose and not by busyness.

For help in leading your sales team out of the 1950s busyness into the modern approach of purposeful action, contact us.

 

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{SMM Article} Three pillars of effective marketing

May 6, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Marketing plays a more vital role than ever in the buying process. A majority of B2B buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying process before even connecting with a seller (Accenture, 2018). Yet 90% of buyers are willing to engage sellers earlier if the seller is providing real value (CSO Insights, 2019).

Buyers are consumers first and foremost, and they have come to expect a similar buying experience when it comes to their B2B environment, where the seller provides insights and content that prove they understand the buyer and their needs.

How can marketers prove they understand their target buyers and that their company can serve them with relevant solutions? In order to engage a target buyer in the buying journey and keep them engaged, marketers must focus their best efforts on three pillars.

Generate compelling content

While content creation is rampant across industries today, it is important for marketing departments to distinguish between general content and compelling content if they wish to stand out from the slush piles of information. Compelling content is not about a brand or an offering. Buyers find little value in reading a 16-page brochure about a company’s solution.

Compelling content provides new insights, a new point of view for the buyer that challenges their status quo while offering a vision and a new path forward. Ideally, it features a buyer use case with which they can relate and can gather new information about their situation and their options to get ahead.

To ensure your marketing content proves compelling to the buyer and seeks to serve the buyer, check how you position the article: Is it content anchored in what matters to the reader or is it simply a repackaged feature of your brand and what you offer?

Increase marketing awareness

Whether it is through public relations, social media or a variety of other channels, your marketing department’s next step is to distribute the compelling content across multiple channels in the marketplace, to soften the minds and hearts of the target buying audiences.

Social media is an attractive outlet for doing so, but it is important for B2B marketers to look to local media as well, plus other relevant channels and “watering holes” target buyers are connecting with and where they will likely encounter your compelling content. Uncover your target buyer’s journey and identify how to intersect your compelling content at the right moments, in the right places.

As your marketing team is sharing compelling content, ask yourself, “Are we sharing content here because it is easy, or are we sharing it here because our target audiences will find it here and reap its value?”

 

Read more at Sales and Marketing Management…

 

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selling power article

{Selling Power} Can You Improve Your Frictionless Selling Approach?

Jay Mitchell

The spirit of frictionless selling hits the mark: How can we make it as easy as possible for our buyers to move through their journeys?

Yet, when we think of frictionless selling, we must consider a key element that will continue to hinder sales and marketing teams from achieving this noble and effective goal, and that is the underlying objective to buy from us and choose our solutions – to “pick me, pick me!”

As long as our goals remain to sell to the buyer rather than to serve the buyer, frictionless selling will fail to amount to an easier buying process and consistent resulting sales. But, if we can truly put buyers first and make their journey as seamless and valuable as possible, then we can manage the true intent of frictionless selling.

The Buying Process Is Full of Friction

Marketing and sales teams are making it too difficult for buyers to find solutions to their pains – so much so that CSO Insights found less than a quarter (23 percent) of buyers would turn to vendor salespeople as a top three resource to solve their business problems.

According to Forrester Research, B2B buyers believe only 8 percent of sellers are focused on driving a valuable end result for the buyer. No wonder most buyers choose to engage sellers later in their journeys – because they do not perceive any value in doing so earlier; moreover, their experience is that sellers are too invested in their own motives and not what is in the best interest of the buyer.

This is an issue because buyers are often unaware of all their pains or their real underlying issues. Status quo is rarely the best answer for any buyer. Yet overcoming status quo is not a simple task for buyers to process on their own – let alone recognize.

When buyers traverse today’s selling environment, they do so without true guidance, for fear that a seller will be focused only on trying to make it as easy as possible to get the buyer’s money – rather than to provide the buyer real solutions.

Yet operating without the insights of a trusted seller has not fared well for buyers, either. Upwards of 60 percent of B2B buying journeys end in no action (Aberdeen), and more than 40 percent of B2B purchases are followed by second-guessing (Harvard Business Review).

Read the full article at Selling Power…

 

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