CVI Perspectives: Why Your Pipeline Problem is Actually a Conversation Problem

By Eric Nitschke, Director of Product Marketing and Sales Enablement, Corporate Visions

Baseball season is upon us—it’s an exciting time in my household, but it also comes with discouragement since this doesn’t seem to be “the year” for my team. The coach’s explanation for the team’s lackluster play? The players are young, the team is still coming together—and in the end, we get the answer no sports fan ever wants to hear: It’s a process.

Unfortunately, I often hear the same answer from sales organizations looking to improve the conversion of leads and opportunities to billable revenue. A client recently noted that their deals either close right away, or take forever to close—if at all.

Naturally they want to know how and why that happens, so they embarked on an exhaustive pipeline progression analysis to find out why. They looked at marketing and sales qualification of leads, broke down the timelines, determined how long leads were in the pipeline, and calculated the quote-to close-ratio.

Their result? Reps weren’t following “the process”—they weren’t developing their engagement plans, filling out their opportunity sheets, or checking off all the boxes in their CRM system.

That’s all important, but it misses the point. Studies show that 89 percent of first sales meetings fail to get a second meeting because the seller hasn’t shown business value. And business executives value that level of expertise and four times more than just having a great relationship with a seller. In fact, 74 percent of executive buyers will choose to work with the company that creates a buying vision.

Fixing sales process issues only helps fix the few deals that manage to get to the second call. And often those opportunities are doomed for reduced prices and squeezed margins because they didn’t start from a position of differentiation.

Even sellers who are “leading with insight” could be hurting their pipeline progression. One recent study by Corporate Visions and Dr. Zakary Tormala revealed that asking diagnostic questions and providing insights requires a very specific cadence and timing if you want to get prospects to admit their pain. Similarly, another study by the same team found that creating risk with a great insight is only the start of a status quo-busting conversation. To actually open prospects up to change, you need to also show how you can resolve the risks you’ve identified with the alternative, safe scenario you’re proposing.

Solving the challenges in pipeline progression isn’t a process problem—it’s a conversation problem. If you want sellers to close long-term business, you have to help them succeed in the first sales call. Here are a few tips to help:

• Defeat the status quo with neuroscience: Sellers that jump right to the conversation about why your company and products can help solve buyer challenges miss the fact that many buyers still haven’t committed to doing anything different. That’s called the “status quo bias,” and as sellers, it’s a bigger enemy than the competitors in your market. The good news: You can overcome buyer inaction with a “why change” story that reveals inconsistencies or uncertainties in the way your prospect is doing business today. By making prospects aware of the costs of doing nothing, you’ll bring about a shift in the way they perceive change, and make them more open to the possibility of doing something different with you.

• Create a buying vision with social psychology: Researcher Daniel Kahneman noted that people are two to three times more motivated to make a change to avoid a loss than they are to achieve a gain. Sellers can inject uniqueness and urgency into customer conversations by messaging to prospects’ unconsidered needs—challenges or issues they’ve overlooked or underestimated. By basing your selling message around unconsidered needs, you can show prospects how the pain of doing nothing is actually far greater than the pain of change. That will create the buying vision you need to get to a second meeting.

• Use behavioral economics to tell visual stories: The Picture Superiority Effect points to the profound impact that simple visuals can have on a customer conversation, and speaks to the idea that prospects process change emotionally, not rationally. Visual storytelling through a simple “why change” story provides the insights and contrast you need to convince your prospect that he or she is unsafe in their current situation, and that you are uniquely qualified to guide them to a new and better change scenario.

In baseball, teams and managers who ask fans to “trust the process” may be glossing over a weak farm system and clear skills gaps in their current players. And much like those managers, companies that think the sales process is the key to fixing pipeline progress may be missing the point. Pipeline progression can only be successful if reps are equipped to nail the first conversation—it’s the only way to get customers to “play ball.”

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You’re Only as Good as Your Last Idea

By Conrad Smith, VP Consulting Services, Corporate Visions

Have you ever sold the big deal that eventually became the big customer and is now your company’s top account? Winning the big deal is one of the rewards of a sales effort done well. Long-lasting customer relationships are rewarded with repeat revenue. You achieve your quota, get rewarded with club trips, and your quota increases, which is good because your company is growing. It’s all a wonderful thing, until it isn’t.

The nightmare begins when you get the call informing you, “We decided to make a few changes.” In that moment, the relationship seems lost without reason. Your subconscious recalls that buying and consuming doesn’t always equal value and you remember from all your sales training and business experience that business value is different than product performance. Then you break into a cold sweat. Losing a big account is never a good thing.

We work with thousands of salespeople every year and when we ask why customers buy from them, we hear answers like “we’re embedded,” or “we’ve got long-standing relationships.” The one I like the most is, “it’s just too hard to change”. Getting a customer to change their status quo is far more difficult than it seems. In fact, 60 percent of customers will choose no decision when faced with a purchase decision. Changing vendors without business value is rare. If changing is so hard, why do some companies end long-standing relationships?

You only get credit for the value you create.

When you allow a competitor the opportunity to create, or re-create, the buying vision, you open the door to lose everything. When ideas stop flowing, when the relationship becomes stale, and when the focus comes off the customer, you create the opportunity for your customer to find better solutions elsewhere. Executives don’t wake up in the morning thinking that they’d like to expend the effort, energy, and expense of bringing on a new supplier. So you have to ask yourself: How is it that companies find themselves in a situation where their customer says they have to make a change?

Think about it. Your customer knows you, your company, your products or services, and your processes. They didn’t throw you out after the first trial or even after the first couple of years. They kept buying your solutions and services for years, perhaps decades, and then something changed. Or did it? Every business is searching for new ideas. Executives create initiatives to drive change throughout their organization. Every business is striving to create an unfair competitive advantage by bringing ideas to their organization to differentiate themselves in the market. Executives are going to find those ideas from within their organization, they’re going to seek ideas from their suppliers, or they will go to the market to find the ideas. You can either be part of the solution or stand by and watch as your competitors step up to the challenge. Embrace the expanding pie theory as you bring new ideas. Become fearless and forget about protecting your entrenched revenue. Your ideas will bring growth, not only for your customer but also to your organization. Look to change the way your customer is running their business versus how you can sell more of your product. Challenge yourself to create a list of ideas about business improvements. Constantly refresh the list. Don’t get stuck with trying to find the one big idea. Small ideas executed very well and focused on a specific improvement will end up having a big impact. And no matter what you do, always have the next idea ready.

Stay tuned for my follow-up piece on keeping your most important accounts coming back to your solutions.

Good luck and good selling.

To learn more about making a compelling business case to executives in your existing accounts—and about making an impact in new ones—check out this short whiteboard video: http://cvi.to/ElevateValue

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CVI Perspectives: Do Sales People Really Know What Training They Need Most?

By Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer, Corporate Visions

Many companies rely on asking salespeople what training they think they most need and want when planning their skills training program. Is it possible, however, that salespeople may not actually know what training is best for them? And, asking this question may actually lead your training plans astray?

I’ve talked before about the concept of “declared preferences” (what they say or feel) versus “revealed” preferences (what they actually do). It’s a concept most often referred to by behavioral economists to explain the discrepancies between opinion polls and actual behaviors.

Well, the same can possibly be said for salespeople’s ability to judge their needs training versus what the results of a behavioral outcomes-based assessment says they actually need most.

First a quick backstory: Last year, when we published our latest book, The Three Value Conversations (McGraw-Hill), we launched a parallel self-assessment tool aligned to the key skills and concepts detailed in the book.

Specifically, the assessment measures sales reps’ proficiency in three critical areas: creating value (differentiation skills), elevating value (executive conversation skills), and capturing value (negotiation skills). Since that time, nearly 300 sales professionals have taken the online behavioral assessment.

In each of the three value scenarios, we asked reps what selling challenge they felt was their biggest selling hurdle (from a list of six). And, then we compared their feelings with what their actual answers to the behavioral outcome survey indicated.

In each case, we found a discrepancy. The challenge reps believed was their biggest problem area did not correspond to the one that was indicated by their answers to the questions:

Create Value (Objective: Defeat the status quo and differentiate your solutions)

• Participants declared: Illustrating a sharp contrast between a customer’s current state and a desired future state was their top challenge.
• The data revealed, however: Creating and confirming urgency by stirring emotions is their actual top challenge.

Elevate Value (Objective: Make a business case that passes muster with executive buyers)

• Participants declared: Winning access to executive buyers rather than being delegated down was their top challenge.
• The data revealed, however: Identifying specific financial metrics that their solution will impact is their actual top challenge.

Capture Value (Objective: Protect pricing and expand deal size during tense negotiations)

• Participants declared: Getting customers to reveal underlying motivations was their top challenge.
• The data revealed, however: Gaining agreement to mutually beneficial terms in response to your concession plan is their actual top challenge.

These findings hint at a natural contradiction between the results of personal opinion-based questions (declared preference) and behavioral outcomes-based questions (revealed preference).

In light of these results, you may be wondering: Is my team underperforming where I think (or they believe) they’re underperforming, or does my team have skills gaps I’ve either underestimated or haven’t even considered?

Only one way to find out: Have them take this short self-assessment to see where your team is performing well and where there may be room for improvement.

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IBM, in Partnership with Corporate Visions, Named ATD Excellence in Practice Winner

PLEASANTON, Calif., April 4, 2016 — Corporate Visions’ work with IBM will be honored at the 2016 Association for Talent Development Conference & Exposition, May 22-25 in Denver. The leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, Corporate Visions Inc. is one of two training partners who, in partnership with IBM, will be recognized as a 2015 Excellence in Practice Awards winner. The other IBM training partner set to be honored is Alpharetta, Ga.-based FinListics Solutions.

Specifically, IBM and their training partners will be recognized in the area of Financial Selling Enablement for Sellers and Sales Leaders, part of the Sales Enablement category. The award recognizes practices that foster and enable world-class sales competencies and standards that guide and empower sales leaders and sales training professionals to develop the next generation of salespeople, according to the ATD website.

Conrad Smith, VP Consulting at Corporate Visions, said companies like IBM rely on Corporate Visions’ Executive Conversations skills training to build confidence and develop the critical competencies needed to deliver the right business conversation to the right business executive.

“IBM’s sellers apply five competencies to an active account to develop a more compelling conversation that’s in the right language for their targeted executive,” Smith said. “The five competencies include business knowledge, customer research, financial acumen, executive engagement and return on investment.”

Smith, who will co-present with IBM’s Dave Jenkins at the 2016 ATD Conference & Expo, added that on the strength of this engagement, Corporate Visions and IBM have been able to forge a true partnership that’s led to above average financial and organizational results.

According to ATD, past award winners in the category have demonstrated “clear and measurable results of achieving organizational goals, meeting a demonstrated need, having appropriate design values, and clearly aligning with other performance improvement initiatives.”

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New Study with Persuasion Expert Reveals Leading with Insight Outperforms Traditional Sales Questioning Approaches

CVI Perspectives: Rethinking “Best Practices” and Whether They’re Really Best for You

By Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions

With two sentences, the magazine Fast Company may have destroyed everything you’ve ever thought about so-called “best practices.” In a recent article they wrote:

“Best practices don’t make you the best. They make you the average of everyone else who follows them.”

Whoa. Mind blown!

There’s an entire industry of analysts who identify and report on best practices and thousands of subscribing companies and professionals who get those findings and attempt to imitate the recommendations.

Admittedly, there’s a deep-seated human instinct to play it safe and follow, rather than to be audacious and lead, at work here. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be paying tens of thousands of dollars to get the annual best practices reports. And, then paying even more to have those analysts come to your company and provide color commentary on their observations of other people’s work.

But, why is the reliance on best practices so pervasive? After all, those who adhere to best practices surely understand the importance of competitive differentiation. And certainly no one wants to look or sound or feel like carbon copies of their competition. So why are so many companies doing something that keeps them in lockstep with everyone else, potentially at the cost of one of the most important business goals—differentiation?

One of the strongest points in the article is that the term “best practices” is itself a misnomer, based on the creaky logic that what is “good” or “smart” now will remain so indefinitely. As the author notes, seldom are people willing to do the work to find out how long a practice actually stays the ‘best,’ or whether it’s applicable across various situations and contexts.

If you’re interested in how this applies to marketing and sales messaging… Download our award-winning eBook to discover why putting too much stock in best practices could be leading you astray.

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CVI Perspectives: Is Your Content Marketing Hurting Your Bottom Line?

By Eric Nitschke, Senior Content Strategist, Corporate Visions

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” often rears its ugly head when our best plans result in side effects we never anticipated…and often really didn’t want.

While it’s bothersome and even harmful when it happens in your personal life, it can be devastating when unintended consequences in your content marketing and social selling actually hurt your company’s profitability.

At the heart of content marketing and social selling is the basic premise that to get closer to your customers’ hearts and wallets, you should align your content and social strategies with what you see and read on social media. Social listening, monitoring blog comments, and tracking analyst reports are all good tactics to stay aware of trends and topics that are top of mind with your customers and prospects. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences come when you count on those customer comments and analyst reports to drive profitable sales.

Classic economic studies point to customer “declared preference” versus “revealed preference” as a real-life buying trend. The idea is that people will say one thing when nothing is on the line, and then behave in a completely opposite way when money and personal reputation are at stake. That’s principle applies to social media. Sure, customers may hint at certain thoughts and ideas on social networking sites and collaboration portals, but when it comes right down to it, they’ll only buy if you present a compelling value.

The other exposure to social listening comes from the influx of data and information that show up in 140-character headlines and sleek infographics. Don’t be fooled: Most of these data points are based on analyst surveys, news headlines, and Google searches. So while they’re interesting data points, they’re essentially worthless without greater context and analysis. Even worse—they’re the same data points your competitors have access to.

The result of basing your messaging and content on well-thumbed analyst reports and buzzy topics? A lack of differentiation, leaving you in a competitive bake-off that does nothing but commoditize your product and force a combative negotiation for your sellers that could end in excessive discounting and eventually hurt your bottom line.

How can you create content marketing and social selling strategies that can fuel profitable engagements? Focus your stories and content around the unconsidered needs of your customers—the challenges or missed opportunities they didn’t know about and didn’t realize could hurt them. Speak to these needs to show them they’re focusing on lower-order, tactical issues instead of the ones that will definitely impact them down the road.

The best way to do that? Assemble a cross-functional team to dig deeper into finding new, emerging threats, challenges, obligations, and opportunities that your prospect may not realize exist, or whose size and speed of impact on her business she’s underappreciated.

Your job isn’t necessarily to tell them they’re focusing too much time, money or effort on the wrong problem. Rather, it’s to use the conversation to point out how their problem is really just a symptom of a different and larger problem. That’s the conversation that will make you truly different, helping you drive buying decisions and avoid the unintended consequence of a commoditized message.

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