Sales Enablement & Efficiency: End the Hunt
Why it’s essential to create a culture of competitive guidance for sales teams to succeed.
Today, it’s more important than ever for business leaders to do everything they can to empower their sales teams. A salesperson that feels invincible will win more deals. Yet too often, we are met with scenarios like this one:
The sales team is meeting with a need-to-win customer and is up against a tough competitor. When the rep asked the competitive intelligence analyst for something that will give them the competitive edge, they were directed to the intranet or Sharepoint site, to dig around and find something that might be of use.
The problem with this scenario is that every second the sales rep spends digging is time spent not properly preparing. If the data isn’t instantly actionable, it’s time wasted; a way of working that’s not conducive to winning the deal with efficiency.
What they have received is competitive data when what they really need is competitive guidance.
Competitive intelligence vs. competitive guidance
There’s an important distinction here that gets missed between competitive intelligence and competitive guidance: The output from a CI team should not make more work for the consumer of the information. It should provide the distinct and customized “how-to” that tells sales what they need to say or do to win a deal. You might have made sales guides, silver bullet sheets, cheat sheets, playbooks and competitor profiles, but even with the amount of information in them, are they right for each individual deal? Competitive intelligence vs. competitive guidance: The output from a #CI team should not make more work for the consumer of the information. https://ctt.ac/9mh1e+ Via @competeiq Click To Tweet
Too many deals, too little time
“It’s futile to try to make content that is particular to every deal. There are just too many deals!” You’re right. But that’s where the flaw exists in most sales-facing CI programs. CI teams—especially the ones that support sales teams—focus on building content that provides information, when instead they should be focusing on how to provide guidance that can be tailored to each deal.
The main job of a salesperson is to close a deal to bring revenue to the company. Yes, there are several other things as well, but the less time that a salesperson is closing deals, the less profitable your company becomes. If you are making your sales teams dig through hundreds of slides in a playbook, or if you are making them modify silver bullets that aren’t just quite right, you are taking away from the time they could be spending closing a deal and moving on to the next one.
Sales guidance can increase sales efficiency
So what is this guidance that they need? Your sales teams most commonly need answers to a few specific questions in a competitive sales environment:
- What is the competitor product?
- How do I position my product against a particular competitor product?
- What landmines might the competitor have set for me, and how do I avoid or diffuse them?
- How is the competitor positioning their product relative to mine, and how can I deposition it?
- How do all the features compare to my product and the competitor’s product, and which are the strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the main benefits for each of the key features of my product?
If your salesperson knows all of these things, then he or she is probably pretty well equipped to convince the customer that your product or service is better than the competitive offering.
By building a culture of collaboration, communication and guidance in your company, you can help your sales team succeed and improve overall competitive maturity. Organizations with more than 50% actively engaged sales team perform two times better than those with less. And there’s probably not much point in non-engaged sales reps selling your product.
So make it easy for your sales teams. Don’t send them on a scavenger hunt when they need guidance. Empower and enable them to become data-driven, so that they can be more efficient with their time, win more deals and bring in the right revenue numbers for your company.