Categories: Sales Messaging | Scaling Sales
Startup portfolio companies have a unique challenge that you are likely all too familiar with; selling a solution that is so new and innovative that it isn’t a line item in buyer budgets.
Selling a product that represents a new way of doing business, demands that the sales organization is equipped to be relevant to their buyers’ business-level challenges. When you’re looking to scale sales success in groundbreaking companies, consider how you can help their customer-facing organization solidify alignment with their buyer and close premium deals repeatedly.
One portfolio company changed the mindset of its entire customer-facing organization and solidified alignment with a buyer-focused sales message and process. Sysdig’s Chief Revenue Officer, Keegan Riley, recently shared insight about the process his company underwent and the company-wide results they have achieved. Your portfolio company leaders may find value in what he has to say. Here's how Sysdig equipped their salespeople to sell on business value and scale sales growth:
Empower the Sales Organization to Sell on Value
When selling technology that is new to the market, it can be easier for salespeople to lean on the bells and whistles of the product during their conversations. In these high-growth, startup companies, the technical conversation can unintentionally dominate the sales process. While salespeople (and even their prospects) may be eager to jump straight into demos about the solution — that jump will likely result in reps missing an opportunity to attach to relevant business pains that demand urgency, funding and long-term contracts. In Sysdig’s case, CRO Keegan Riley shares, "Customers wanted to get into demos and we went right into it … But, when it came time to do the deal, our sellers would say 'they love our tech' but there was no connection back to the business. They couldn’t outline a champion or a big business problem."
To grow a company, everyone needs to be equipped to sell just as well as the founder does. Is buyer business value widely understood throughout your portfolio company’s customer-facing organization? Can reps map business challenges back to the company’s solutions in a way that’s meaningful to their buyers?
Align Around the Four Essential Questions:
Selling “the art of the possible” requires salespeople to find ways to make their solution relevant to their buyer’s business challenges and desired outcomes. Help your portfolio company leaders ensure their entire customer-facing organization can map these customer outcomes back to their innovative solutions in a way that ensures a win, and long-term account success. Generating cross-functional alignment around the answers to the essential questions is a good place for your portfolio company leaders to start building alignment with their buying audience. There are four essential questions every revenue-driving organization can answer consistently.
Review these four essential questions with your portfolio company’s cross-functional leaders. Test for agreement and opportunities to improve alignment in their answers:
- What business problems do you solve?
- How do you solve them?
- How do you do it better or differently than the competition?
- Where have you done it before?
Generating cross-functional alignment on answers to these questions provides the consistency your portfolio company leaders will need to operationalize a buyer-focused sales message. Generating this consistency and operationalizing it takes a concerted effort. When executed correctly, like Sysdig, this alignment can increase retention revenues and drive other company-wide benefits. Keegan Riley shares, "We've always put the customer at the center of everything that we've thought about. I genuinely believe that that's been true for the entirety of our growth, but I think what Command of the Message forced us to do was to step back and think about the customer's experience much more diligently. Our net retention revenue and our gross retention revenue have skyrocketed over the last 12 months. We're better at making our customers successful at their projects because we understand their actual pain.”
Provide a Sales Consumable Toolkit
When shifting salespeople toward a buyer focus, and away from conversations centering on features and functions, salespeople need easy-to-use tools that enable them to execute. With the right mindset and sales consumable tools, reps can uncover and attach to big business problems in a way that causes buyers to see the urgency in their challenges and open up discretionary funding. Steer your portfolio company leaders towards building and operationalizing a framework that equips their reps to execute buyer-focused sales conversations.
Your portfolio company leaders may want to consider a Value Framework. The Value Framework isn't a script, and it doesn’t take away from your salespeople’s selling style. It’s a navigational aid that helps sales teams engage in consultative conversations focused on value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to their buyer. When the framework is customized to a company’s industry, buyer and sales organization, individual reps can tailor it to their own selling style and leverage it to discover and attach to big business problems.
When it’s built in this way, reps can use the framework repeatedly to get their buyers to anchor on a need that opens up funding for your portfolio company’s solution.
It's critical to customize the framework. Before your partners start to build it, it's important that they commit to aligning with their buyer and generating cross-functional agreement around the essential questions. Alignment on the essential questions [above] creates the foundation that successful leaders use to operationalize an effective Value Framework.
Solidify a Buyer Focus to Grow Conversion Rates
Sysdig faced a unique challenge: they are not just a startup with a new product offering, they are operating in a new market segment altogether. Their solutions empower organizations to confidently secure containers, Kubernetes and cloud data. Many of Sysdig's economic buyers are not yet aware of the visibility and security problems they will need to solve.
Sysdig underwent a sales transformation to solidify alignment with the buyer, and their hard work is paying off:
- Increasing conversion rates by more than 2x
- Cutting ramp-up time by 50%
- Generating skyrocketed gross and net retention revenues
- Driving clear ROI from the engagement
CRO, Keegan Riley shares how the initiative drove significant results. You can watch their story here.
