2021 is finally here – Now is the time to ignite your pipeline
The new year is upon us and we now need to execute against our respective strategies for achieving successful business growth in 2021.
Back in November 2020 we discussed the release of Gartner’s latest “Chief Sales Officer” report. The headline article discussed the key priorities for Sales as we headed towards 2021 and top of the list was Accelerating Early Pipeline and Lead Generation.
Gartner outlined their three-pronged approach for generating early pipe. First and foremost was “organisations can use commercial messaging to improve relevance of outbound communication”
What is commercial messaging?
The most important element of commercial messaging is commercial insight. This is the main theme that’s going to feature in, and drive the direction of, your customer facing activity. The term “commercial messaging” covers all this activity, It’s not just the insight but the work involved to ensure that this insight results in new business for your organisation.
Alignment of your wider sales and marketing organisation is key to creating commercial insight and turning it into effective and impactful commercial messaging.
Why commercial insight?
Many organisations claim to show “thought leadership”, and spend precious time and resources attempting to create the associated content to prove it. The established thinking dictates that by publishing the content, you’ll appear as the thought leader in your given space. Subsequently customers will more likely be attracted to you and trust you, resulting in your brand being enhanced, and therefore creating opportunities for new business.
The critical flaw in this approach is that there is no real catalyst for action. Yes the customer may find the content interesting, even educational, but unless it compels them to act differently, it is just passive content.
It is one thing to be a thought leader and take new ideas to your customers, it is another thing entirely tobe paid for doing so. To drive a financial outcome for your business requires more than just thought leadership, it requires commercial insight.
Rules for creating commercial insights
There are four simple but key rules for creating commercial insights:
1. Lead To Your Unique Strengths
It is all very well compelling your customer to act, but unless this leads back to your capability “sweet-spot” (what you do better than your competition), it will most likely result in a competitive procurement process where the customer makes a decision based on lowest price
2. Challenge Your Customer's Thinking
It needs to make the customer think differently about their world in ways they haven’t considered before. There is huge value to the customer in insight that changes or builds on what they know in ways they couldn’t have discovered on their own.
3. Compel The Customer To Action
There is most likely a lot going on in your customer’s world. Your insight needs a compelling business case as to why prompt action is vital, and why the omnipresent do-nothing option is not viable.
4. Scale Across Multiple Customers
If your whole organisation is to succeed, you’ll need a small number of powerful insights, applicable to a broad segment of customers, that can be individually tailored to those customers by your salesforce. The burden of creating effective insight then falls upon your wider organisation rather than just individual sales representatives. It is here that having your marketing and sales functions fully aligned really starts to pay dividends.
Generating COmmercial Insight – Where Science Meets Art
It was Theodore Roosevelt who said “Nothing worth having comes easy” and in the case of Commercial Messaging he has been proved right.
For your commercial messaging, first you will need to develop the commercial insight. It’s a combination of science and art that makes a great commercial insight. Most likely, your marketing teams won’t be able to force out an game-changing insight because you told them to. Developing insight starts with having a deep understanding of your customer. This is where the hard thinking starts regarding:
- their industry and the industry challenges
- their customer specific challenges
- their strategy and objectives,
- their current tactics, actions and capabilities.
Once this background is established, you can build your customer profile. This is the science.
Now the creativity starts.
- What are their real goals and how do they think about them?
- Where is their current thinking flawed and where can you point out to them that it needs to change?
- What is your vision for their future and what are the capabilities they require to get there?
- How does this all lead directly back to you?
- How are you going to package the reframe to challenge your customer’s thinking and compel them to action, whilst nullifying the omnipresent “do nothing” option.
Success depends on how well you answer these questions and deliver the message to your customer. This is the art.
Enabling Sales and Marketing
At Digital Distance, we know that transforming your sales and marketing functions to lead with Commercial Messaging and successfully drive pipeline growth isn’t easy. That’s why we have developed a portfolio of services designed to enable our customers to do precisely this and ultimately win new business .
Our Leading Sales With Insight training underpins successful:
- Demand generation activities
- Segmented marketing campaigns
- Strategic account growth
- Early sales-stage customer engagement
Ideal for Marketing and Business Development professionals, this training provides a deep dive into developing commercial messaging, and instils the skills needed for the delegates to “teach your customer” something they don’t know about their own business. This in turn challenges their current thinking and causes them to sit up and take notice.
For front-line sales professionals, our Distance Selling for Sales training teaches the key skills required to lead with commercial insight and successfully close the deal, including:
- Creating commercial messaging and advanced message tailoring
- Leading your sale with insight and commercial teaching
- Customer stakeholder profiling and how to amplify your messages
- Building alliances across multiple stakeholders and adapting styles for deeper customer engagement
- Compelling your customer to action by building constructive tension
- Creating sales process momentum and taking control of the opportunity
Our recommended research led coaching ensures the delegates benefit from a step change in the effectiveness of their commercial messaging. As a result, your customers can positvely experence the near instant impact of your new skills.
A transformed customer buying experience
Now is the time for you to transition from efforts aimed solely at improving the“buying from rep experience” of previous years to action aimed at improving the overall “buying experience” for 2021.
Digital Distance is ready and able to engage quickly. We provide scalable and virtual assistance as required. Please contact us for a free consultation and to discuss your specific requirements to enable your flying start in 2021.