Selling Value: A Teachable, Learnable Skill

You know sellers have to bring more than product expertise and good rapport to the conversation if you want to articulate why you’re different and better, or in other words, sell value.

To many, “selling value” is an abstract, complicated concept. But, in this edition of the Sales Evangelist podcast, Corporate Visions’ Tim Riesterer makes it simple and concrete by sharing concepts from his latest co-authored book, “The Three Value Conversations.”

Listen as Tim explains the three “value moments of truth,” and the key skills needed to win in each:

• Defeating the status quo and creating the buying vision
• Building an executive-level business case
• Executing value-based exchanges during negotiations to win larger, more profitable deals.

Enjoy the podcast!

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Corporate Visions Survey Reveals Top Challenges in B2B Sales Negotiations: Inability to Articulate Value and Lack of Faith in Solution Value

Survey Also Finds Almost Half of Companies Do Not Have a Formal Negotiation Skills Training Program to Give Sales Reps the Content and Skills Needed to Close More Profitable Deals

PLEASANTON, Calif., Dec. 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, today announced results from a new survey polling more than 300 B2B marketers and salespeople about price negotiations. The data revealed the number one factor impacting margins is the inability of salespeople to articulate value. The second biggest problem respondents ranked was salespeople negotiating against themselves by not believing in their company’s price. Interestingly, despite these struggles and increasing pricing pressures, nearly half (45 percent) of companies polled admitted to not having a formal negotiation skills program to address this critical problem area.

“The newsflash here is that margin erosion isn’t just coming from customers putting pressure on price concessions,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer for Corporate Visions. “The survey indicates the primary problem is actually salespeople’s inability to create a perception of value and a lack of confidence to claim that value. It’s clear there’s also still a need for companies to provide formal negotiation skills training that’s not focused on the buyer’s tactics but rather, on the salesperson’s skills at capturing value.”

Additional noteworthy results from the survey include:

• Of those companies that do formal negotiations training, 48 percent of respondents said their company focuses on late-stage dealings to avoid excessive discounting and save profit margins during the purchasing and pricing step near the end of the buying cycle. The other 52 percent said they are focused on identifying and plugging potential value or margin leaks that take place throughout the entire complex, multi-buyer sales cycle.
• After the top two challenges: inability to articulate value (28 percent) and negotiating against themselves (21 percent) of respondents ranked the following additional negotiations problem areas:
  • Twenty percent of respondents believe giving away things of value without asking for anything of value in return is the biggest sales negotiation problem.
  • Fourteen percent said their reps are too quickly discounting to their lowest level of authority without regard for the psychology of concessions or a consistent company policy.
  • Nine percent believed the problem is waiting for the client to share budget and price instead of anchoring clients with a higher number.

“In today’s negotiations, buyers are in the high-power position because they have all the alternatives. Salespeople are in a low-power position because their alternatives are no deal or no margin, and those aren’t good alternatives,” said Riesterer. “As a result, companies need to make sure they help salespeople take more creative, counter-intuitive approaches to negotiations where they can actually use the low-power position to their advantage, as opposed to many skills training courses that recommend ways to regain power or retake control. Research shows efforts to raise power equality actually produce worse outcomes.”

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The Biggest Factor to Closing Deals?

Your customer conversations are defined by three “moments of truth”—three distinct but adjacent sales dialogues that reps need to master to win more profitable deals.

Is your team equipped to master them?

A Corporate Visions survey found that 85 percent of companies believe their team’s ability to articulate value messages is the single most critical factor to closing deals.

In this podcast, Corporate Visions’ Tim Riesterer details the three value conversations where your reps need to excel, demonstrating an ability to:

• Create Value by defeating the status quo and differentiating your solution.
• Elevate Value by building a business case that passes muster with executive buyers.
• Capture Value by protecting your pricing and expanding deal size.

Tim’s podcast, based on insights from his new book, “The Three Value Conversations,” appears in two segments below:

• To hear about defeating the status quo and differentiating your solution, check out part one: http://ift.tt/1NIVnnC

• To learn how to make a business case to executive buyers, check out part two: http://ift.tt/1Y5TPFL

Looking to dig deeper into these pivotal sales conversations? Purchase “The Three Value Conversations” here.

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Corporate Visions Names Jennifer Aaker and Juan Corsillo to Board of Directors

Social Psychologist, Author and Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Teams Up With Sales and Marketing Industry Veteran to Help Company Exceed Rapid Growth Goals

PLEASANTON, Calif. – December 9, 2015 – Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, today announced the appointment of industry pioneers Jennifer Aaker, Ph.D. and Juan Corsillo to its board of directors. With more than 25 years of experience in their respective fields, both Aaker and Corsillo will help Corporate Visions exceed its next level of growth success in 2016 and beyond.

Currently the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Aaker is the co-author of the award-winning book “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” and has served on the advisory board of early-stage startups and companies from ADAY to Google X. With an extensive track record of driving growth and business sustainability for leading multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies in the financial and business services sectors, Corsillo recently retired from his role as SVP of marketing and sales at United Rentals, Inc.

“The board is proud to welcome Jennifer and Juan, whose collective knowledge in social psychology and B2B marketing and sales will be invaluable to our company’s overall strategy in the coming years,” said Paul Murphy, chairman of the board for Corporate Visions and partner at Sentinel Capital Partners. “There is no doubt they will help solidify our overall position as the market leader in providing the content, training and skills – all backed by irrefutable decision-making science – to help customers have more effective sales conversations.”

Acquired by Sentinel Capital Partners in May 2015, Corporate Visions strategically selected these new board appointments to further expand its global presence within the B2B sales and marketing space. Since 2010, Corporate Visions has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 43 percent per year through both organic growth and four strategic acquisitions. The news also comes on the heels of last month’s appointment of three key additions to the executive team – Gloria Fan as CFO, Leo Hanna as EVP of international sales and Jennifer Zick as EVP of marketing.

“The appointment of both Jennifer and Juan further signifies the commitment we have as a company to the industry, our customers and our prospective clientele,” said Corporate Visions CEO Joe Terry. “We have very ambitious growth goals for 2016, and Jennifer and Juan’s expertise address critical areas that matter most to our business and will help propel us to the next level of expansion to serve our present and future world-class customers.”

As a social psychologist, Aaker’s research focuses on the psychology and rationale behind how people make use of time, money and happiness, and when and why those choices are associated with lasting value. She also empirically explores how small acts can create significant change and how those effects can be fueled by digital and social media. Noted for her early work on the dimensions of brand personality, Aaker’s current research is rooted in the psychology of choice and the shifting meaning of happiness. She also teaches courses at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). She is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology and the Stanford Distinguished Teaching Award. Aaker earned a Ph.D. in marketing and psychology from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Art degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Corsillo is a seasoned sales executive with a proven track record of building world-class, high-performing and integrated sales and marketing organizations that drive industry-leading growth. Most recently in his role at United Rentals, Inc. – a position he held from 2010 to 2015 – he oversaw all sales-related activities at both the field and national levels, including pricing, sales operations, marketing and managed services offerings. Previously, Corsillo spent 17 years with the General Electric Company (GE Capital) in various capacities, where he held several senior commercial leadership roles, including chief commercial officer for GE Capital Solutions, CMO of U.S. equipment financing and SVP of sales operations of GE Capital Americas. Corsillo earned a Bachelor’s degree in finance with a minor in entrepreneurship from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Sales Transformation That Sticks

If you train salespeople, you know all about the ambivalent feeling that sets in after an event.

In one sense, you’re fired up—your reps are energized, confident and excited to apply the great skills and concepts they’ve learned out in the field.

On the other hand, your optimism is tempered by a very legitimate fear: Namely, that in just a few weeks time, the skills your team just learned may already be eroding.

According to Corporate Visions research, only 23 percent of managers provide a significant level of coaching to the skills after their sales force has been trained. That’s why you need to be prepared to provide “virtual coaching” (link to Virtual Coach solution brief) to reinforce skills when your sales managers are strapped.

Corporate Visions’ Tim Riesterer and MobilePaks’ Chanin Ballance recently blogged about how great virtual skills reinforcement drives high adoption, keeps reps sharp on key skills and concepts, and ensures they don’t have to leave the selling workflow to get the learning content they need.

The two picked up on that topic again in a recent webcast, “Sales Transformation That Sticks.” If you’re serious about creating last behavior changes in the field for your team, so they can articulate value in the way they were trained, you need to give this a listen:

Webcast: Sales Transformation That Sticks

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Insights-based Selling: Everyone’s Doing It…Or Are They?

The traditional approach to insights is becoming commoditized. Here’s how to break from the cycle of “true but useless” information.

Insights are everywhere—at least, that’s the impression in the market. According to a recent Corporate Visions survey, 81 percent of companies say they use an insights-based approach to selling.

But are they actually?

Selling with insights has won such an enthusiastic following so fast that its sheer popularity has outstripped the market’s ability to define it. This has led to various standards—some rigorous, others lax—about what it takes to qualify as an insights provider today.

But, regardless of how companies internally define what insights-based selling is, and regardless of the quality of insights they’re actually delivering, you can bet on this: The approach has been roundly embraced as a key element of provocative selling. In other words, insights, rigorously developed or not, are saturating the market.

What are you doing to make sure yours get noticed?

We’ve talked here and here about four different types of insights—and how not all of them are created equal. Some are simply better than others at revealing deficiencies or missed opportunities in a prospect’s current situation. Some are better than others at opening customers up to persuasion and activating buying intent.

In our survey, respondents deemed “anecdotal” insights (think in-house, tactical, best practices-focused content) to be the least effective in terms of achieving positive selling outcomes. Ironically, respondents said this insight type appeared most often in their campaigns and sales-facing content.

On the other hand, the survey revealed that so-called “visionary” insights, based on original, company-generated research and forward-looking market interpretations, were viewed as the most effective insight type, but were used the least of the four categories.

To be truly visionary, your insights-based message and content must be:

• Original – Carry out primary research or market surveys to uncover market-related data. Ensure that they’re statistically relevant and sound.

• Exclusive – Generate data points that are unique to you and that you can use as the foundation for developing counterintuitive insights about emerging trends in your market. You can then use insights, which you own, to carve out distinct positioning for your products.

• Forward-looking – Develop a content-driven narrative on both sides of the lead handoff that asserts a distinct point of view—a perspective that shapes the conversation and leverages your findings to deliver unique interpretations of emerging issues, challenges and trends.

With insights so pervasive, the bar for qualifying as a credible insights provider is rising, and the traditional “insights” selling model of recycling third party analyst figures, re-packaging the findings and laying claim to the concepts is only going to commoditize your message—because your competitors all have access to the same information as you.

That approach doesn’t deliver insights. It delivers true but ultimately useless information. Well-thumbed analyst reports and established information won’t have the impact on more discerning prospects and customers, who are going to start demanding more rigor behind insights generation. As a result of this shift, companies are going to need to take more edgy, counterintuitive stands, supported by original, research-based rigor—otherwise, you may only be posing as an insights provider.

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Corporate Visions Appoints Three New Veterans to Executive Team

PLEASANTON, Calif., Nov. 2, 2015 — Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, today announced the appointment of Gloria Fan as CFO, Leo Hanna as EVP of international sales and Jennifer Zick as EVP of marketing. Fan will oversee finance, legal, HR, IT and administrative functions, while Hanna will lead all company sales activities, account management, and strategic reseller relationships across the EMEA and APAC regions. Zick will be responsible for the company’s brand, communications and business development teams and programs.

With more than 20 years of experience in providing financial, operational and business leadership to high technology companies, Fan has taken two companies public on the NASDAQ stock exchange and has deep expertise in M&A transactions. To complement Fan’s financial activities in the U.S., Hanna brings more than 20 years of sales and executive sales management experience in the enterprise software, cloud and professional services industries to Corporate Visions’ London office. Zick completes the trio of new hires to the organization’s executive team, adding more than 15 years of marketing experience with innovative, entrepreneurial and accelerated-growth companies.

“As a company, we’re deeply committed to helping our customers have more memorable and effective sales conversations to increase their bottom lines,” said Corporate Visions CEO Joe Terry. “At the same time, we’re also focused on increasing our global footprint to deliver our services to an even greater set of companies around the world. Gloria, Leo and Jennifer all bring a wealth of expertise to our executive team and I’m confident they will help us continue our strong growth by identifying new customers, partnerships and market opportunities.”

Fan most recently served as CFO at ClearEdge Power, Inc., where she led the sale of the company to Doosan, a $20 billion Korean organization. Prior to ClearEdge Power, she spent seven years in the solid-state lighting industry where she was CFO for both Pinecone Energies and Bridgelux. During that time, she raised more than $100 million from private placement and debt financing and participated in the strategic development of the companies. Previously, Fan spent seven years at UTStarcom as VP of finance and global business operations, where she led the company through its IPO, grew its revenue from $186 million to $4 billion a year and completed more than 10 M&A transactions. She earned a Master of Science degree from Purdue University and an M.B.A. from San Jose State University.

Before joining Corporate Visions, Hanna led Saba Corporation’s EMEA operations as GM and SVP for the region. Under his leadership, the company made the significant transition from a software licensing company to a cloud services provider. Prior to Saba Corporation, Hanna held senior sales and marketing leadership positions at Oracle, Symantec and Microsoft Corporation, with roles in the U.K subsidiary, EMEA and APAC leadership functions. Hanna earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computing from Leicester De Montfort.

Zick was most recently the head of marketing for PwC’s Salesforce technology practice, representing the fastest-growing and third-largest Salesforce implementation partnership. Prior to joining PwC, she was a founding member of Magnet 360, where she was responsible for all facets of marketing strategy and execution. Under her leadership, marketing programs influenced more than 70 percent of Magnet 360’s net new revenue each year. Zick is currently a board advisor for the Minnesota chapter of the Business Marketing Association, where she previously served as president and VP of events and development. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from the University of Minnesota.

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