7 turbocharged tips into overdrive

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7 TURBOCHARGED TIPS FOR SHIFTING YOUR

CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS INTO OVERDRIVE

“Connect. Ignite. Convert.” is about aligning your sales approach with the shifting expectations of today’s B2B buyers. By paying careful attention to your buyers’ pain points and challenges, you’ll strengthen your ability to engage in strategic, high-value conversations with your buyers — regardless of where they are in the buyer’s journey. As you put these strategies into practice, the following checklist will serve as a quick reference tool for TWCBC’s new selling approach.

Teach, tailor and take control. • Teach: Offer your buyers a unique perspective on their businesses, and communicate those perspectives in a way that draws them into the conversation. • Tailor: Use your knowledge of stakeholders involved in sales conversations and their critical business objectives to tailor messages so they truly resonate. Ask yourself these questions to prepare for this conversation: What does this individual care about? How is their performance measured? How do they fit into the overall organization? • Take control: Believe in the value of TWCBC solutions. Be willing and able to stand your ground if a buyer pushes back. One simple way to assert control over the sale: When the topic of price comes up, shift the conversation from price to value. Ask your buyer to rank the various features of TWCBC’s solution in order of importance, which sometimes enables them to see our offering in a different light.

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Lead to — not with — TWCBC’s differentiators. A key element of our updated model is a new approach to sales conversations: First teach the buyer something new and valuable about their business, then lead them to TWCBC’s differentiators — our unique blend of solutions and capabilities that set us apart from the competition. For instance, with more than three out of four mid-market companies describing their businesses as being “network dependent,” network planning has become an operational make-or-break proposition. TWCBC’s easily scalable infrastructure gives us a competitive advantage. By using a targeted, personalized content offering such as our “Planning for the New Network” white paper, you can establish TWCBC as a trusted partner (not just a solutions provider), while choreographing a smooth, productive sales experience in the process.

Build an effective sales conversation through whiteboarding. An effective sales conversation is a dialogue — not a scripted monologue that only tells the vendor’s side of the story. To avoid the “Presentation Trap,” our newest sales training, “Strategic Positioning” (formerly known as “Do More Faster”), recommends the Whiteboard Approach. In whiteboarding, you use writing and drawing to create a memorable, collaborative, brainstorming-oriented conversation. The six-step whiteboarding approach can help you take the buyer logically — but creatively — through the sales conversation, and touch on all the key elements that will help you get closer to closing the sale.

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Leverage marketing assets. TWCBC’s Mid-Market and Vertical Marketing team has developed powerful content and tools to help you build insight-led conversations, connect with buyers and enrich the overall sales experience. These tools include: • Content offerings such as white papers, podcasts, calculators and customer success stories. • Tools such as our “Go Social” program, which helps you widen your top-of-funnel pipeline, develop your personal brand, establish credibility, and connect with buyers via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. • Sales aids and presentation materials that align with the “Strategic Positioning” training. These resources enable rich discovery meetings and can help you easily connect with new buyers at a business level. • The integration of Eloqua and Salesforce software, which is aligning sales and marketing processes to generate more qualified leads and provide better visibility into buyer behavior. Eloqua includes a number of powerful tools such as Profiler, giving you real-time access to your buyers’ online activity and behaviors. • The newly updated Business Class On Demand (BCOD), with better navigation, more intuitive features, refreshed options for sending emails, and an asset library with links to calculators and other helpful content. BCOD saves you time by putting everything you need for sharing content with buyers in one place that’s always accessible and organized.

Use insight to capture buyers’ attention and drive action. Commercial insight combines facts, data, industry trends and other information with buyers’ most pressing business needs. For instance, tools such as Eloqua Profiler help you put your finger on the pulse of buyers’ digital body language, enabling you to serve up content based on their behaviors. This will show your buyers that you understand their needs and pain points, and can provide the valuable resources they need. It can also be used to disrupt buyers’ purchasing decisions, steering them away from the status quo (and the competition) and toward TWCBC’s solutions. To build commercial insight, CEB recommends the following steps: 99 Select a scope (one specific product line, business, category, etc.). 99 Identify differentiators relative to your scope. 99 Articulate the buyer’s problems. 99 Identify an under-appreciated impact that your differentiator has on a key buyer problem. 99 Articulate your commercial insight.

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Engage high and early in the buying cycle. Your probability for success increases when you engage high and early in the sales journey of your buyer. In the context of TWCBC’s new sales model, this means: • Engaging with and solving fundamental business problems for key influencers and decision-makers (usually at the executive level). • Providing unique insight earlier in the buying process, when there’s the greatest interest to do something different or make a change.

Shift your focus, elevate the conversation. CEB cites that 53% of customer loyalty is attributed to the sales experience. It’s clear that winning the hearts and minds of buyers is less about what you sell and more about how you sell. That has enormous implications for how you approach your conversations with buyers. As the “Strategic Prospecting” training explains, it’s imperative to shift from a “self focus” to an “other focus.” Here’s an overview of how to accomplish that:

Self Focus (Low Buyer Focus)

Other Focus (High Buyer Focus)

• Focus on product capabilities.

• Focus on business value.

• Develop a mastery of technical and competitive arguments.

• Develop a mastery of the buyer’s business problems.

• Seek to win with features and functions. • Rely on product presentations and demonstrations. • Compel the buyer with an urgency to close.

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• Leverage significant industry knowledge to provide credible recommendations. • Show how the recommended TWCBC solutions solve the buyer’s business problems. • Compel the buyer with an urgency to deliver results.

Get ready to connect, ignite and convert as you drive customer engagement and fuel sales growth! Find Out More! Check out these other content pieces that can teach you more about the new B2B buyer: Infographic • E-book • Video 4