Author: Jay Mitchell

Should Your Organization Transition to a Revenue Kickoff?

August 31, 2023

Jay Mitchell

Sales kickoff season is upon us! The fall is rapidly approaching, and preparations are launching across organizations worldwide. Sales kickoffs are the time for you to present your plans for the upcoming year and prepare your sales team. This year has a little different twist though. In the past year, I am hearing more and more about revenue kickoffs (RKOs). In fact, this is a topic I have spoken on more than once around this time last year. If you are up to date on the Mereo blog, then you probably already know what an RKO is. If not, I am here to help you. Whether you are already familiar with RKOs and sales kickoffs, you may still be struggling to decide which variation is best for your organization.

With the rise of RKOs, the shift from a traditional sales kickoff is almost inevitable. While there are several benefits of an RKO, that also means leaving behind some aspects of a sales kickoff. Let us start by diving-in to what an RKO is and why your organization should be embracing this approach as the new year approaches.

WHAT IS A REVENUE KICKOFF?

Before we explore why you should be holding an RKO, let us discuss what an RKO is. An RKO is not wildly different from a sales kickoff (SKO), and you may have been holding RKOs the whole time. The main difference between an RKO and an SKO is that RKOs involve client success / client experience teams as a way of completing the entire “revenue cycle” with a client. Client success / client experience teams serve your buyers after they have made an initial purchase. Essentially, client success / client experience teams step-in when a buyer is transitioning into a client, serving as the chief contact for the client to maximize value for both the client and the selling organization.

Overall, an RKO should operate like a traditional SKO — with a few tweaks. Now that you have introduced a new team to your event, they require the same information your sales team receives in addition to specialized information for their team.

As you can see, the differences between a sales kickoff and an RKO are minimal. So, should you be shifting from an SKO to an RKO? We think so.

WHY SHOULD YOU EMBRACE REVENUE KICKOFFS?

Since RKOs are like SKOs, your organization’s transition should be simple. If you are already inviting post-purchase teams to your event, you are holding an RKO! During your RKO, you should clearly outline your revenue goals, whether that involves rethinking your product roadmap, how you plan to align your organization or something entirely different. Including these teams allows them to have the knowledge they need to help you achieve your revenue goals. According to Zendesk Blog, client success / client experience teams result in strengthened client relationships, recurring revenue and business growth. These are all aspects your organization needs in order to attain sustainable revenue performance.

Incorporating client success / client experience teams also opens a myriad of opportunities in your RKO. As you know, your past SKO events provide a great frame of reference for future RKOs and even how your organization operates. With the addition of this team, you have another aspect to look at each year so you can ask yourself questions like: “How has our client satisfaction changed since introducing client success / client experience teams?” and “What findings were uncovered from including client success / client experience teams?”

Having the answers to these questions in addition to your other efforts will enable your entire organization to continue your journey to achieving sustainable revenue performance.

GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR REVENUE KICKOFF

The transition from a sales kickoff to an RKO should be exciting, not daunting. We are here to help! With the revenue kickoff playbook, start winning your RKOs by gaining access to exclusive tips and tricks from our experts.

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Your Revenue Kickoff Planning Checklist

August 24, 2023

Jay Mitchell

In the B2B world — and in life — preparation is the first step to success. Imagine if you went into every meeting without an agenda. There would be a great deal of “uhms” and uncertainties, wasting valuable time and resulting in inefficient meetings. The bottom line is you would not go into an important meeting blind, and your revenue kickoff (RKO) should not be any different.

As we quickly approach the latter half of the year, it is time to start prepping for your RKO event. This is the time to be creative and excited! Do not forget to take a look back on your past sales kickoff events, identify what you did right — and what did not work so well. Being well-prepared will instill confidence in and allow more opportunity for a successful event. In order to kickstart your kickoff planning, let us examine three necessary actions to cover: choose an engaging theme, create a meaningful agenda and start promoting your event.

Choosing a Theme

Choosing a theme can be difficult, but we are here to help! Your theme should be both fun and impactful. Deciding on a theme may seem like a small detail, but according to HubSpot, a theme will make your RKO memorable, impactful and help you stay on track. A theme gives you a rallying cry for pre-event, event and post-event messages of your program.

With a strong theme, your RKO efforts will resonate with your teams and invoke excitement. Your RKO event is your chance to inspire your teams and give them the tools they need to help your organization succeed, but it is also a chance for you to strengthen team morale. When choosing a theme, ask yourself questions like: “Is my company in a period of high or low morale?” and “What are your company’s pillars or values — and how can this be reflected in your theme?” Last year, I created a list of 13 questions to help you choose the perfect theme for your organization’s RKO if you are looking for inspiration.

Creating a Strong Agenda

Once you have the theme, create an agenda that aligns with it and that will provide the best chance for success. Think about the day. What month are you holding your RKO? How long will your RKO run? These factors and more should be considered when working on your agenda.

Plan an agenda that makes sense. Jumping into how your teams can improve likely is not the way to go. Start slow and build your way up. Perhaps start the day with hot coffee, introductions and ice breakers. From there, the natural flow of the event should lead you to look into performance over the past year as well as objectives for the year ahead. Ideally, after a long stretch of informative content, you will follow with a fun activity before a break.

Once you are back from a break — short refresher or longer with some intentional networking — consider holding a demonstration if you did not do that before the break. For example, if you spent time explaining to your teams how they should execute calls with buyers, ask for a few volunteers and have them act out a buyer interaction. This gives your teams a chance to practice what they have learned and see it in action.

How you plan your RKO is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is to have a healthy mix of fun activities and informative content interspersed with opportunities for networking.

Promoting Your Revenue Kickoff Event

While the actual execution of this step comes much closer to the time of your event, it is a good idea to plan how you will promote your event. In this stage, you can keep your plans as loose or precise as you want. There are many benefits to building buzz for your RKO including: giving your teams a heads-up of when the event is taking place, creating excitement amongst your teams and giving yourself a chance to be creative. The bottom line is that creating your RKO likely is not the most fun you have had all year. When planning how you are going to promote your RKO, you have the chance to make it as exciting or as formal as you want.

A great way to promote your RKO is to use your theme. If you chose a pop culture element as your theme, use that in your promotion! The goal is to inform your teams of when the event is happening, so they are prepared and to create excitement around it.

Access the Sales Kickoff Planning Playbook

Gain exclusive access to our expert-crafted sales kickoff planning playbook and make the most out of your planning time.

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MASTER THE ART OF CONTENT MARKETING TO BOOST YOUR REVENUE PERFORMANCE

June 29, 2023

Jay Mitchell

Content marketing is an important strategy but can be challenging to master. Your buyers desire meaningful content that is shares keen insights and is backed by facts (statistics, client testimonials). On top of this, content marketing is notorious for consuming valuable resources. In fact, Forrester estimates that 65% of produced marketing assets go unused because they are irrelevant. Luckily, there are two main aspects that make content marketing a bit easier: sales and marketing teams working together and customizable content.

REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF WASTED, VALUABLE RESOURCES

Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

With over half of marketing assets going unused due to irrelevance, how can you ensure that will not happen to your organization? The fact that there exists a disconnect between sales and marketing teams in B2B is no secret, but be careful to discount the impact this disconnect has on your content marketing efforts falling flat. Understanding how sellers interact with buyers is crucial to creating successful content.

The unfortunate truth is that many of the resources your marketing team creates go unused because it can be difficult for your salespeople to translate into pitches. Why? In many cases your sales teams lack the proper resources, such as examples and case studies, that buyers covet. The best way to bridge this gap is to align your sales and marketing teams. It can be as simple as your teams having a conversation where your salespeople explain what they need for buyer meetings, from which your marketers can translate this into resources used for both marketing and buyer pitches.

Create Customizable Content

The best way to achieve this alignment is for your marketing teams to create relevant content that is easy for your salespeople to adapt and quickly employ in sales pursuits. Just like your value messaging, your content should resonate and be tailored for buyer needs. This is where your teams will need to work together.

What pains are your buyers facing? What resources does your organization offer to aid these pains? Upon answering these questions, your marketing teams should craft content that aligns with the answers. That is what draws buyers in to the “dialogue”.

Once you have aligned your selling and marketing teams and are producing easily customizable content, it is time to choose the best type of content that resonates with buyers.

USE CONTENT TYPES THAT RESONATE WITH YOUR BUYERS

The good news is that all types of content will resonate with some buyers but let us narrow that down. All content is objectively correct, but some types resonate more with buyers depending on where they are at in their buying journey. You can also align where your buyers are at in their journey with the marketing funnel to make things more clear.

When your buyers are just starting out, they are gathering information. A DemandGen Report from last year showed that the following content is best for buyers in the beginning stages of their journey:

Webinars (57%)
Research reports (53%)
Blog posts / news articles (52%)

In the middle stages, buyers are searching for facts that will help them decide between one solution over all the others on the market. The report showed:

Case studies (62%)
Analyst reports (49%)
Webinars (47%)

In the final stages of the buyer journey, the buyer is ready to decide on which solution to choose. The DemandGen Report showed:

Demos (62%)
User reviews (55%)
ROI calculators (48%)
Case studies (48%)

Creating customizable content for each stage of the buyer journey not only increases your engagement rates, but also enables your sales team to share this content with any buyer at any stage of their journey. In turn, you will realize increased revenue performance.

GO AN EXTRA STEP AND SEEK GUIDENCE FROM EXPERTS

You have the tools to create a successful content marketing campaign! If you find yourself in need of some extra assistance, consider visiting our solution marketing webpage. There you will find the basics, additional free resources and the ability to contact a Mereo expert.

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It Is Time to Go Sustainable With Your Revenue Performance

June 8, 2023

Jay Mitchell

The year is already half over, and many B2B leadership teams will have an eye on the numbers: Are we reaching (or exceeding) our quotas? Are we on track for hitting our annual goals? Are we losing, stagnant or growing?

But 2023 has not been an easy year on B2B organizations. A number of market situations — from high inflation to continuing supply chain issues and more — have tightened buyer budgets and slowed deal flow. The current state of the market is not showing much improvement either.

Business leaders love market upswings, dislike downswings and absolutely fear uncertainty. As I speak with executive team members across a cadre of companies (all sizes and industry verticals), uncertainty dominates each conversation.

If the market is clearly in a downswing, executives can make necessary expense cuts while also making well-calculated investments that offer a competitive advantage and / or faster ramp once the economic climate pivots. But when there is uncertainty, even the savviest business leaders can succumb to the freeze of indecision — for in uncertain times it is too easy to “wait until next week” when the picture may be less cloudy.

THE POWER OF A SUSTAINABLE REVENUE PERFORMANCE — VERSUS GROWTH — MINDSET

Growth sounds good. It has a nice ring to it — more buyers and more profits. Yet a “growth approach” works in limited situations. And it often ends in failure. At Mereo, we focus on sustainable revenue performance.

A focus on revenue performance versus growth helps you ride out market shifts more strongly. Focusing on revenue growth alone can lead your executives to risky decisions. Risky decisions can wind-up bust in times of market disruption or uncertainty. With an eye to sustainable revenue performance over a longer period of time, your leadership team’s mindset shifts. You build an engine that you can depend on in good times and bad.

A revenue performance emphasis focuses not only on top-line growth but also the broader metrics including profitability, deal velocity, client acquisition costs (CAC), sales yield, client lifetime value, win-rates, average order size and more. These offer a broader perspective for managing both in growth climates and other less favorable conditions as well.

Organizations with sustainable revenue performance command more pricing power. Selling organizations focused on growth alone will be desperate for more sales. They want to see salespeople’s quotas go through the roof. They need more deals closing to keep reaching higher numbers. They want more, more, more. And often, to get there, salespeople will be quick to discount — which is a dangerous practice to the worth of your solution and your long-term revenue performance.

Selling teams focused on sustainable revenue performance still have the motivation to close sales. But they will stand by the value of their solution and the supporting differentiated value proposition. They will earn your organization the revenue it deserves to keep serving buyers for the long haul. As such, they are not worried about making a hundred sales but just one. They can wait for that one. And your company will be in a better position to keep commanding pricing power into the future, no matter the market situation.

GET THE LEADING PRACTICE GUIDE TO PRICING STRATEGY!

SEEK TO SERVE™ — AND THE SUSTAINABLE REVENUE PERFORMANCE WILL FOLLOW

The fascinating reality is that by focusing on supporting sustainable revenue performance, your organization will ultimately grow over time. You will survive the storms of market disruption and hold fast in times of uncertainty — and grow consistently for long-term rewards.

If you Seek to Serve, Not to Sell^®, your sales force will build long-term buyer relationships grounded in value-exchange that will help you achieve sustainable revenue performance. Learn more about this selling approach and culture.

GET THE GUIDE

Your Salespeople Need You to Stress Them Out — Constructively

April 27, 2023

Jay Mitchell

Stress is running rampant in the workplace. The American Psychology Association has found in its Stress in America survey that levels continue to increase each year. All this heightened tension often leads to troubles sleeping, thinking and even staying motivated.

Yet, what if your sales leadership could help foster healthy stress that motivates your team’s greatest efforts and growth — while steering your sales force away from distress and burnout?

In these times of economic uncertainty when organizations are looking to grow through sales efficiency, it is important to get the most from the salespeople you have. This is the difference between eustress — good stress — and distress.

Whereas distress feeds on a blur of anxiety and fear of punishment that falls apart into disengagement, eustress motivates people toward a specific goal or opportunity with constructive, collaborative support.

I want to help you guide your team to a state of productive energy that drives an engaged, powerful workforce and sustainable revenue performance. How can leaders get the good stress flowing? Turn to urgency and accountability.

FEED GOOD STRESS WITH PRODUCTIVE URGENCY AND SUPPORTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY

While distress looms intangibly, good stress binds itself to specific goals and projects. Focus individuals of your team on objectives that to which they can productively contribute. Be fair with their workload. Be clear about their responsibility, your expectations and the key assignment details. Then, keep a pulse on them in a supportive manner. By approaching your team in this way, you are embodying two key leadership approaches: urgency and accountability.

Urgency

Urgency helps drive salespeople. It answers their “Why now?” and “Why keep at this?” But urgency fails to influence good stress if deadlines become arbitrary or unrealistic. Here is how to keep your teams running on good stress with a culture of urgency:

Center your sales forces’ activities around purpose; help them understand what their actions are helping your organization and / or its buyers achieve.
Distinguish between chaotic busyness and focused, productive activity; tools like conversation intelligence (CI) can help you keep tabs.
Embrace the competitive nature of your sales professionals and find ways to lean into that through gamification and awards / rewards.
Leverage different levels and capabilities of sellers to orchestrate the collective activities of your sales team; no single member of your team should feel the full weight of responsibility to achieve the collective overarching goals.

Accountability

Too few leaders hold their team accountable to their tasks and responsibilities. Without someone checking-in on them, though, many sales professionals fail to change behaviors, grow in skillsets or push their performance to the max. As one of my favorite sales managers used to tell me earlier in my career: “Do not expect what you do not inspect.” There is so much truth in that simple saying. Here is how to promote good stress with effective accountability:

First, focus your salespeople; do not bog down your team with every little to-do item but rather focus them on the top three to five goals or tasks that matter the most to your team’s performance and the overall bottom line.
Create structures and safe spaces where you can give your team regular feedback. A consistent cadence matters as it sets a drumbeat for the rhythms of the business.
Have a forum where you and other leaders can pass along kudos of recognition when people are performing well and meeting goals.
Repeat and remind your team of your goals, your expectations, your feedback more often than you think necessary — in review meetings, in training sessions, in catchup calls, even in the hallway to and from the kitchen.
Make sure your team understands the “why” for the goals and expectations; this extra motivation not only helps provide as much transparency as possible, but it also helps your people see the bigger and more-motivating picture.

THE ULTIMATE FORM OF GOOD STRESS

A workforce running on good stress results from a healthy and inspiring culture. For the past 16 years at Mereo, we have promoted a culture of Seek to Serve, Not to Sell^® that fosters internal good stress — and in turn helps us serve our external clients and partners at our best. Like everyone else, it is a balance that I am proud to say we get right most of the time — but there are hiccups and learnings from those as well!

Learn how to connect your sales force with a deeper purpose and a value-focused mindset that will drive them in their roles. Check out the Complete Sales Organization Guide to Seek to Serve, Not to Sell^®.

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Re-envision a Positive Light at the End of the Marketing Funnel

April 20, 2023

Jay Mitchell

While B2B leaders keep demanding greater lead generation flow, marketing finds itself stuck in a tunnel of uncertainty. As marketing leaders search for a guiding light, they face a number of obstacles.

Unfortunately the broader economic climate and inflation / recession markers are dictating a season of uncertainty. Business leaders love market upswings, dislike downswings and abhor uncertainty. As I speak with executive team members from across a cadre of companies (all sizes and industry verticals), uncertainty dominates each conversation.

If the market is clearly in a downswing, executives can make necessary expense cuts while also making well-calculated investments that offer a competitive advantage and / or faster ramp once the economic climate pivots. But when there is uncertainty ruling the day, even the savviest business leaders can succumb — for in uncertain times it is too easy to “wait until next week” when the picture may be less cloudy.

Tough times present an opportunity to return to the fundamentals — your marketing funnel — to adapt, enhance and overhaul your approach. Focus on these key marketing tools and activities to “see the light” of success at the end of the funnel.

REFOCUS ON MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS

Your marketing funnel provides the foundation of all your activities. When current demand generation efforts fail to deliver, your marketing leadership could benefit from reevaluating and adjusting current tools and efforts.

Re-evaluate Your Ideal Buyer Profile (Awareness and Interest)

Has your ideal buyer profile changed with market dynamics? Or has the buyer journey changed? Has your organization introduced new solutions that engage different buying committee members? Are your marketing and sales efforts still aligned?

The right target buyer profiles are vital. Just as market dynamics affect your organization and change your greatest pains and needs, they do the same for your buyers too. Ask these questions with your leadership team and be honest about the answers in order to remain an expert on your target market and to continue to Seek to Serve™ their needs.

Review Your Value Proposition (Interest and Consideration)

Are the buyer’s pains and your solution’s potential outcomes still compelling enough to drive a decision? Are the pains still relevant? Are new pains more important — and do buyers see these yet or are they locked in the status quo? Is your solution a “vitamin” or a “pain killer,” and does your approach reflect that accordingly?

As the buying dynamic changes, your value proposition needs to reflect these changes in order to offer the strongest value message for your buyers. Look to building value messaging buckets so your sales teams can tailor content for different buyer segments. And ensure your value proposition still presents a current, compelling pain-solution-gain-proof story for your specific audiences — one that everyone in your organization sells by.

Refine Marketing and Prospecting Activities (Consideration and Action)

Should marketing activities be more targeted? How aligned are you with sales on account-based marketing strategies? What role does sales prospecting play in outbound marketing? Are you enabling sales effectively to scale prospecting?

What has worked in the past will not always work in the current market environment. Ask these questions as you refine your marketing and prospecting efforts. Consider a different mix of marketing / prospecting activities (e.g. digital, calls, webinars), for example. Or better yet, go meet with your existing clients in-person. The market uncertainty provides a perfect platform to engage in a dialogue with your clients’ leadership teams. What are they seeing in the marketplace? What concerns them? How are they responding? How do they need your organization to help them (especially where you are not helping now)? But bring some insights to the conversation yourself — maybe a new infographic reflecting some market trends or a slide that they can use in their next board meeting to summarize the climate. Bring value to the table in your meeting.

FIND THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE MARKETING FUNNEL

When your foundational marketing strategy and activities reflect the market environment, your B2B organization will continue to better serve buyers where competitors lag behind. Your organization can look out for new and changing buyer issues and opportunities as a trusted advisor. And your organization can keep buyers moving through the marketing funnel even when uncertainty and market pressures breed buyer indecision and tighten budgets.

After following this course of action, the light your marketers are searching for will transform from a train racing toward them at full speed to a light of success at the end of the marketing funnel.

Start finding your way through the tunnel with the Mereo Value Proposition Formula Worksheet to align your teams around.

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The B2B Thought Leadership Approach to Set Your Organization Above the Noise

April 13, 2023

Jay Mitchell

Our parents, teachers, mentors have said it, and it still holds true: just because we think it does not mean we should share the thought aloud. The same sentiment applies to your B2B thought leadership approach. Your B2B thought leadership strategy needs to be driven by purpose and value. And as B2B buyers prepare for and respond to the lurching economic downturn, thought leadership remains a vital tool to prove the worth of your organization and its solutions.

A lot of noise exists in the thought leadership arena. Actually, in the 2022 Thought Leadership Impact Report from Edelman and LinkedIn, 4 out of 10 B2B decision makers said the marketplace is oversaturated with thought leadership.

Likely every selling organization aims for high-quality thought leadership. But is what your organization considered high-quality the same as what your buyer considers valuable? Even more, is your high-quality content standing out from all the noise? At Mereo, we follow proven approaches to help you Seek to Serve, Not to Sell^® your buyer with thought leadership. Find these below.

A WINNING B2B THOUGHT LEADERSHIP APPROACH

SHOWCASE YOUR BUYER-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE

For your thought leadership to resonate, it must be grounded in your expertise and insights into your buyer’s business and market. This is not the time and place to show off your knowledge of your own solution. Touch on topics important to them at the right time. Prove you understand their greatest challenges. Help them perform better and more efficiently in these challenging economic times. You do this, and you will catch key decision makers’ attentions and establish credibility as a trusted advisor they turn to for help when they need it in the future.

What stands in the way of their goals, and how can they overcome them?
What industry status quo is hindering their business growth?
How can they navigate the economic realities of today?
What opportunities or threats to their business are on the horizon — and how can they prepare?

DO NOT SHY AWAY FROM DIFFICULT TOPICS

Buyers want you to challenge their status quo. In fact, the Edelman and LinkedIn survey found 48% of decision makers want to see more provocative ideas that challenge their assumptions. In a recent Sales Mastery report, 75% of executive buyers indicated that they could be motivated to involve salespeople earlier in the buying process when presented with something new, risky or complex.

What new perspectives can be brought to your buyer’s situation?
What are others in similar situations doing that they may not be aware of?
What innovative insights can be shared that are specific to their issues?
What familiar information can you leverage to turn on its head for some new insight?

BE SPECIFIC AND SHARE ACTIONABLE VALUE

For your thought leadership to have true value, your buyer audience should have a clear action they can take upon reading or hearing your words. While driving buyers through your marketing funnel is important, thought leadership demands more than that. This specificity and action should also be applicable to their business practice. What small actionable insights can you impart?

Are you presenting a solution to challenges that your buyer can act on here and now?
How can you share real bites of value without “giving away the whole farm”?
Can your thought leadership be found elsewhere online — or are you providing specific value based on your experiences and expertise?
Is there a clear call-to-action for your buyer to take next to learn more or to engage your solutions (and are you including this in your content)?

BACK IT ALL UP WITH PROOF

Opinions differ from experience and insight. If you want your buyers to trust your word, you have to back it up with either credible research or your own experiences — and better yet, other buyer stories. The good news is that industry research too is saturated, and often by backing up your own thought leadership with relevant research and data, you are not only adding to your credibility but you are also alerting your buyer to new insights.

What perspective do your thought leaders have on buyer-relevant industry research?
What insights outside of your buyer’s industry and purview are you seeing that could affect their business?
Can you give a voice to your current and past buyers and their experiences in your thought leadership content?
Where can you invite outside perspectives and guest thought leaders to round out your value to your buyers?

ENABLE YOUR ORGANIZATION TO TAP INTO THIS VALUE DURING BUYER ENGAGEMENTS

You can create the highest quality thought leadership, but it is only powerful if your targeted audience is actually seeing and reading it. There are a number of approaches to increasing search engine optimization (SEO) and social engagement. And while thought leadership is driven by marketing, all other departments should be involved too. This is a collaborative effort that benefits your buyer and your entire organization. Your leadership needs to communicate this importance and their expectations of everyone’s support. And your teams can help overcome algorithms and get your content seen by tapping into buyer conversations, emails, social sharing and more.

What social media channels are your buyers using, and how can you catch their attention with these important messages?
How can your marketing team keep salespeople tuned into thought leadership so they can pass along relevant pieces of content throughout buyer engagements?
Are you engaging a mix of thought leaders from your organization?
What social selling support can your marketing team provide to salespeople to boost thought leadership content?

STAND OUT WITH SEEK TO SERVE™

When you approach thought leadership from a place of Seek to Serve, Not to Sell, you can help forge long-term bonds with your target buyer built in value, support and authenticity. Learn more about this philosophy, mindset and strategy with The Complete Sales Organization Guide to Seek to Serve, Not to Sell.

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The Real Value B2B Decision Makers Want to See in Your Thought Leadership

April 6, 2023

Jay Mitchell

As a fog of economic downturn hovers on the horizon, selling organizations must face a reality of steep selling challenges that will take all-hands-on-deck to overcome.

The new B2B buying journey that cuts salespeople out of all but 5% of the process has already made things hard enough. The growing number of members in the buying committee has added pressures and roadblocks as well. And with economic pressures, many B2B companies are tightening budgets, increasing efficiencies and not taking a second look at products and solutions not deemed vital. This is no time for gimmicks and flash. The situation demands your selling organization lead with value above all else.

The late 2022 Thought Leadership Impact Report from Edelman and LinkedIn has found that a key tool to showcasing your value is not through traditional product marketing but rather with thought leadership. While most organizations share some regular form of thought leadership today, many B2B buyers are not finding in it the value that grips their attention, educates them and, ultimately, inspires them to change their uncertainties and indecision. Keep reading to learn what B2B buyers really want from your thought leadership.

THE GROWING VALUE IN THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

If you are worried your thought leadership content is all for naught, hear this. The Edelman and LinkedIn report discovered B2B decision makers actually read your thought leadership — and are influenced by it (if done well).

61% of decision makers believe thought leadership moderately or better demonstrates the potential value of your solutions when compared to traditional product marketing.
50% of C-suite executives admit that valuable thought leadership has a greater impact on decision making during economic downturns than during economic booms.
Especially for sellers offering solutions that are not essential to operations, 55% of decision makers say that they must prove their worth with high-quality thought leadership during an economic downturn.

Effective thought leadership does not push solutions, though. It does not focus on your selling organization and why it is so great. This is not a time to show off. This is a moment to Seek to Serve, Not to Sell^®.

THE KEY TO THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: THINK OF THEM, NOT YOU

Thought leadership works only when you focus on your buyers, with a deep understanding of their needs and goals — and what they find valuable enough to act on.

While your targeted buyer will have specific pains and needs, a recent Sales Mastery study found that many B2B decision makers today expect their seller to prove:

An understanding of their business, situation and needs
The ROI or value of the relevant solution
That you are actively listening to them
A unique expertise and perspective
A creative and compelling solution
How your solution can be implemented and incorporated into their business

These criteria can improve your thought leadership as well. How can the topics you touch on and the tidbits of value you impart in your thought leadership show that you understand your buyer’s business on an intimate level? What success stories can you share that bolster the potential ROI of your offering? What unique perspective does your organization bring to serve your buyers?

Answer these buyer expectations in your mix of thought leadership, and you can better not only help your target audience with small pieces of value in the short-term — but increase your credibility and stance as a trusted advisor for a long-term relationship of value-exchange.

BUILD CONSISTENT VALUE

While your thought leadership will vary based on subject matter expert, domain / theme and target audience, it should remain grounded in your overall differentiated value proposition.

Download the Mereo Value Proposition Worksheet to improve or to start developing your own differentiated value proposition and enablement plan.

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The True Brains Behind Conversation Intelligence Software

March 30, 2023

Jay Mitchell

When conversation intelligence (CI) software first appeared, many industry leaders questioned whether it would be adopted. Some even balked at it with their sales reps as a form of Big Brother surveillance. Yet, the capabilities and potential of the selling tool have swept the naysaying aside.

Today, CI has become a must-have when it comes to sales productivity and intelligence tools. When accepted, adopted and incorporated into sales enablement programs, sales leaders start generating more-interesting questions and conversations that can lead to deeper outcomes.

The often-unanswered challenges we hear from B2B selling executives today: How can I use conversation intelligence insights to inform my go-to-market strategy? What can I take from the CI solution we already have invested in (and adopted) to capture more value from our investment? How can CI actually contribute to my revenue performance?

We at Mereo — with some bonus insights from our friends at leading sales enablement and revenue intelligence provider Mediafly — have some answers.

SMARTER QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR CONVERSATION INTELLIGENCE TOOL

If your leadership uses conversation intelligence just to record and review calls, your organization is missing out on an invaluable number of actionable insights. CI can and does feed into sustainable revenue performance. It has a solid place as part of today’s sophisticated selling processes. And by asking the tool key questions, your executive leadership can uncover important actions and adjustments to make in your go-to-market approach.

QUESTIONING SELLING SKILLS AND BEHAVIORS

Are your salespeople sticking to your value messaging while tailoring it to specific buyer needs?
Do they have answers to buyer questions (including common objections) or do they need further resources and assets to better serve buyers?
Are your sales teams aligning in messaging and approach across teams and geographies?
How are your sales teams incorporating current resources and tools, what sales tools need to be abandoned, how can others be improved, and which are working well as-is?

QUESTIONING SALES PROCESSES AND REVENUE FORECASTS

Are salespeople getting regular coaching and reinforcement, or are lagging skills and unchanged behaviors signaling a need for more?
Do the most-recent sales calls show a promise in near-term deals or do forecasts need adjusting?
At what stage and rate are your buyers engaging your salespeople?
How much time are sellers speaking in sales cycle conversations (e.g. qualification, discovery, proposal) versus allowing buyers to speak?
When sellers ask questions of the buyers, who is answering the question – the buyers or the sellers themselves?

QUESTIONING BUYER SITUATIONS AND NEEDS

What new pains are arising for your buyers due to market changes or disruptions?
What value messaging, features / benefits of your solution, etc. resonate the most with buyers and engage them on a deeper level?
What are the most common objections buyers have about your solution (features, competitor information, price, lack of urgency)?
What other challenges are buyers grappling with that your organization has an opportunity to solve and that product teams could explore?

INSIGHTS FROM MEDIAFLY: HEED CI SIGNALS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE ENTIRE SALES PROCESS

Mediafly is the leading provider of one of the most comprehensive sales enablement and revenue intelligence platforms, including conversation intelligence integration and more. Their experts have an additional point of opportunity — and caution — to share for executives looking to make the most of CI:

Conversation intelligence provides rich insights to revenue teams that can help improve conversion rates, reduce risk and improve seller skills. Yet, when you think of CI, it’s critical to view these signals within the context of all other activity and engagement data.

The fact is, modern buyers are spending only 5% of their time with sellers. Given CI is focused on conversations, it’s reflecting just a sliver of buyer engagement. Where is the buyer the 95% of the time? What are they thinking? How are they interacting?

CI provides a limited view. Consider a deal where you have two weeks between meetings. If you are viewing only CI data, the deal may look stalled. However when you look holistically at inbound emails, content views, intent data, content shares, new contacts added — you get a different perspective. You now know your buyers are continuing to review the proposal, revisiting to the pricing page 3x and sharing the TCO calculator with other stakeholders. You even have an upcoming meeting next week to discuss an expansion.

Today, with comprehensive platforms such as Mediafly, revenue teams have access to an unprecedented amount of signals — leaders must continue to look holistically at engagement across the entire buyer’s journey to accurately predict their quarter and guide reps on the fastest path to close.

Get Mediafly’s 101 Ways to Get More from Your Conversation Intelligence solution eBook.

FORGE AHEAD WISELY TOWARD SUSTAINABLE REVENUE PERFORMANCE

Conversation intelligence software can collect mass amounts of valuable data and insights as part of your overall sales enablement management — but your leadership must be the brains behind applying those to realize true GTM and revenue outcomes.

To start overcoming your sales team’s greatest hurdles in landing deals, turn to Derailing the Deal, a Mereo guide to solving the five most common selling issues.

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Conversation Intelligence Is Your Sales Leadership’s Eyes And Ears (But Not Its Brains)

March 23, 2023

Jay Mitchell

In today’s tumultuous market with inflation headwinds and recession fears mounting, leading B2B organizations are pivoting from sales growth at all costs to sales efficiency. A key part in efficiency is making the most of what resources you currently have. This includes your salespeople and your sales tools.

Friction still abounds between buyers and salespeople. B2B sellers say “we are putting you first” — and only 23% of buyers believe it. 71% of B2B buyers said they value client value stories, yet 78% said the salespeople they have encountered do not come with these prepared. 70% of leaders see salespeople straying off-message during buyer conversations, and they lack answers to four out of every 10 buyer questions. It is no wonder 77% of B2B buyers rated their latest purchase as very complex or difficult.

Measuring how well your salespeople are performing can be tricky. While role-play exercises serve their function in the sales enablement mix, they do not always equate to actual on-the-call performance. Sales numbers alone miss the massive amount of time and effort salespeople put in before and after an actual deal lands. It is in these moments where areas for improvements in process and skills can make or break your sales efficiency and effectiveness. But to identify these, your leadership almost needs an all-seeing tool that captures buyer emails, video calls, phone meetings and content shares.

Luckily, this tool exists: conversation intelligence (CI) software. In fact, CI has become part of many sales platforms. Whether your organization has already adopted CI into its sales operations or not, let us look deeper at what this tool can do to help boost your salespeople’s skills — and your organization’s overall revenue performance. Keep reading for a peek at the CI interface of leading revenue enablement provider Mediafly.

WHAT THE EYES AND EARS OF CONVERSATION INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE CAN REVEAL

Conversation intelligence is a simple tool to grasp. With artificial intelligence (AI) technology (like from Mediafly, Gong.io and Chorus.ai), the software records and pulls key insights from buyer calls, video meetings and emails. Both qualitative insights — like recorded calls, meetings and emails to study — and quantitative data — like those displayed in dashboards surfacing analytics, trends and insights — give your leadership eyes and ears into actual buyer engagements.

Heads of sales can apply this tool in a number of ways to boost techniques and behaviors:

Score your salespeople based on CI insights from buyer meetings.
Showcase competencies (or deficiencies) in key skills, messaging and behaviors of successful sales reps during sales meetings.
Identify members of your team who need more coaching and reinforcement.
Expose gaps in sales assets.
Pinpoint misalignment in messages and across sales teams and geographies — and work to bridge the gaps.

What do these insights really look like, though? We got a behind-the-software look from our friends at Mediafly.

TAKE A PEEK AT LEADING CONVERSATION INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE

There are a number of different views within a conversation intelligence solution. Individual call cards, like the visual above, provide details into a single conversation. They show keywords, talk time by participant, transcriptions, etc.

As conversations are ingested, the platform continuously learns and updates models based on your organization’s unique language. Mediafly is distinctive in that it focuses on coaching and provides a Scorecard at the bottom of every card encouraging both managers and reps to score the call, shining a spotlight on strengths and opportunities for improvement.

The data can rolls up to a Performance Dashboard, which looks holistically at a sales professional’s pipeline to track trends and coaching in a single view — as well as leaderboards and other reports that inform account engagement, forecast predictability and pipeline risk.

BUT! THE ‘BRAINS’ BEHIND CONVERSATION INTELLIGENCE REMAIN IN THE HEADS OF LEADERS

Your conversation intelligence (CI) insights can help your sales leadership uncover a number of common issues: incorrect or undetailed buyer profiles, unqualified buyers, unaddressed status quos, me-too messaging, a weak value proposition and more. They can help companies assess product market fit and understand why one seller is excelling against a specific competitor but others are struggling. But having the data and insights is step one. Sales leaders still have to leverage those findings and drive meaningful change through adjustments in processes, training, accountability and more. The key is to not just listen or look at the dashboard but to pivot the go-to-market strategy and tactics accordingly.

As your CI insights roll-in, turn to Derailing the Deal, a Mereo guide to solving the five most common issues sending your salespeople off-track from landing the deal.

DOWNLOAD NOW