Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Productivity | Scaling Sales
Experienced investor partners have an opportunity to help portfolio companies generate consistent alignment on their buyer-focused messaging. Generating a value-driven sales message can have a strong impact in helping sales organizations align to support rapid growth.
Establishing and implementing a value-selling approach to the sales message has supported NS1’s sales organization in driving revenue growth. Their Chief Operating Officer, Brian Zeman, said, "If you’re going to hire people, grow your business, spend millions of dollars on talent, it’s simply not worth it if you don’t have a solid methodology in place to make them productive."
Developing a Value-Driven Messaging Approach
The first critical step is to ensure leadership has alignment around the problems their solutions solve for their buying community. Here are some critical questions to explore with your portfolio company's leadership team:
- What problems do you solve for our customers?
- How do you specifically solve them?
- How do you solve them better than competitors?
- What’s your proof?
- When your sellers win, why do they win?
In our Command of the Message workshops, we work with company CEOs, product leaders, sales leaders and other executives to align their answers to these critical questions.
These workshops are enlightening because more often than not, the no two answers from each executive leader is the same. There's usually a disconnect among company leadership on the business value their solutions provide to customers. Leaders quickly realize that if their answers to these critical questions are inconsistent, they can’t expect consistency in how their sales team is answering these critical questions in front of the customer — where it matters most.
Once portfolio company leaders establish consistent answers to the questions above, they can move on to finding actionable ways to operationalize these answers, in the form of a custom sales messaging framework.
Operationalizing a Custom Sales Messaging Framework
As an investor, CRO or CEO, you know that implementing processes into a sales organization to ensure the success of new strategic sales initiatives is no simple feat. Consistent improvements to sales productivity and revenue margins are dependent on how well a new go-to-market message is reinforced and adopted into the sales organization. In my experience, launching a strategic sales training engagement and a plan for on-going reinforcement has been crucial to ensuring the sales transformation sticks and drives lasting results.
Here are a few examples of ways we provide operational support to help drive results:
- Work with C-suite leaders to develop easy-to-use content and tools that sales teams can use to map out deals and align their offerings to their buyer’s biggest business problems
- Train front-line and mid-level managers to be experts in new messaging methodologies and coaching best practices, so they can provide valuable support for their sales teams and reinforcement of key concepts
- Help to integrate a management cadence into the sales process to ensure managers are working with reps regularly on every critical opportunity
- Work closely with sales leaders, managers and reps to effectively merge high-value sales activities into the everyday roles and responsibilities of each member of the sales team
- Develop a customized, on-demand learning hub and integrate custom messaging methodologies into the sales team's Salesforce CRM, to accelerate adoption of concepts by new hires and provide a resource for driving consistent execution across the entire sales organization
60% Increase in Company Growth
We make it a goal of our strategic sales engagements to ensure every member of the sales team knows what’s needed from them to continually increase sales productivity, average deal size and customer retention. See how NS1 enabled their sales team in driving rapid revenue growth and cut ramp up time in half.
