The Compass: Navigating the Enterprise

Value Chain Selling – Execution

In Major League Baseball, pitchers have command of 4-5 different pitches.  Which one they use depends on the situation. Who’s at bat?  What’s the pitch count?  Where are we at in the game?  And so on.  They prepare their pitch strategy ahead of the game.  How they throw it is tactical and depends on the individual style of the pitcher.

In Little League baseball, most pitchers rely on just one pitch, usually a fastball.  Frequently, they are just trying to get the ball over the plate.

Are you playing Little League?

In Enterprise sales, 80% of salespeople have just one pitch and its usually the fastball.  “Bring on the heat”.  They focus on just one type of value: Efficiency. "My offering will help you do your job faster, better, and cheaper."  Their sole deal strategy is focused on the features and functions of their offering and how it is better than the competition. Unfortunately, efficiency is the weakest of the value propositions. It results in high discounts, long sales cycles and missed forecasts. Senior level executives care about efficiency ….. but not that much.

In my previous posts in this Value Chain Selling series, we covered the 6 individual types of value strategies and how to execute them:

·       Efficiency

·       Effectiveness

·       Risk Mitigation

·       Strategic Growth

·       Customer Experience (CX)

·       Intrinsic Value. 

In this post, let’s dive into how to execute them together in a single deal.  While it’s rare to need all of them in a single enterprise deal, I always recommend doing a thorough discovery to see which strategies apply.  Have them ready to use so you can navigate through your deals as conditions change.  Your ability to pivot between different strategies depending on the persona of the people you are engaging with will set you apart from your competition.

Remember, the value of your offering to your Buyer increases as you sell up the value chain.  And just as importantly, the value increases to you the Seller as well.  Selling up the value chain will shorten your sales cycle, reduce your discounting and tighten your customer relationship which improves retention and up-sell / x-sell opportunity.  It’s more revenue & higher commissions.

Here’s how you can tie them all together.  It’s a bit tl:dr but investing some time on this could give you the strategic edge on your critical, must-win enterprise deals.

1. Efficiency

Efficiency is doing things right.  This is the most natural value to start with on most deals.  You initially engage with the potential users & evaluators of your offering who care about features and functions.  Leverage your pre-sales support and marketing resources to bridge with the Buyer’s users to focus on how your offering makes their existing work processes faster, cheaper, and more streamlined.  By focusing on operational improvements, you position your offering as a necessary tool for doing more work better. 

Are you in a competitive deal?  Most of your competition will focus here as well.  If you have a superior offering, it may be ok to stay focused on selling only at this value level.  No need to complicate things.  But, if it is competitive, keep your technical team focused on competing here while you move up the value chain.  Remember to not get single threaded here.  Let your pre-sales or marketing resources take point with the users & evaluators.  Keep yourself free to sell deeper into the Buyer’s organization.

And don’t completely abandon selling at this efficiency level.  The objective is to keep the competition locked here so you can outflank them.

2. Effectiveness

Effectiveness is doing the right things.  Can your offering help execute a new work process that will help take the Buyer’s business to a new level of growth?  This has higher value than simply automating existing work processes. 

Here, I like to recommend using your sales management to bridge with the Buyer’s management to conduct a deeper discovery on potential new areas of opportunity.   This takes some hard work doing deeper discovery & research.  Involve your sales management and pre-sales teams to help find new processes or capabilities that the Buyer isn’t currently leveraging.  The effectiveness value prop gets you into more strategic discussions with the Buyer.  Tell them something they don’t know.  Give them insights they may not see. 

3. Risk Mitigation

Business risks are often top-of-mind for C-level executives. Once you’ve identified key risks through your discovery process, bridge your C-suite executives to the Buyer’s leadership. Demonstrate how your solution helps mitigate operational, financial, or compliance-related risks, positioning it as essential to the future security of their business.  This is a very powerful strategy and one of my favorites.  Why would you delay buying my product when it can eliminate risk to the business?

4. Strategic Growth

Engage your senior revenue executives, like your CRO and CMO, to connect with the Buyer’s executives about strategic growth initiatives. Your discovery is focused on their strategic growth plans for the next year or two.  Whether it’s entering new markets, planned M&A or scaling operations, position your solution as an indispensable driver of their growth strategy. Executives are always thinking about long-term growth, and your solution needs to fit into that vision.  The value here is that Executive comp is frequently tied to meeting these growth targets.  That they care a lot about, so it has very high value.  And, more importantly, there is always funding for these growth initiatives that you can tap into.

5. Customer Experience (CX)

Here, bridge your CMO, Product Managers or other Director level Executives in your company to the Buyer’s marketing and business unit executives. Focus on how your solution improves the customer journey and satisfaction, which leads to increased loyalty and retention. CX initiatives tend to open larger budgets, and if your solution impacts the Buyer’s customers positively, you’re positioning yourself at the heart of their business success.

6. Intrinsic Value

Get 1:1 time with your champion or key decision makers. Get them out for a meal or an event of some kind.  Or simply a cup of coffee in a conference room.  Your objective is to discover what will they gain personally from implementing your solution? Whether it’s career advancement, increased influence, or visibility, position your offering as the tool to help them succeed individually.  Combining business value with personal value gives you the deal velocity required to move quickly to a close.

Executing the Strategy Together

Combining bridging & value strategies is simple to execute but it does require hard work.  You must really dig deep into the Buyers business and industry to uncover the value and bridging opportunities.

By layering these strategies, you can tailor your approach to fit the unique needs of every stakeholder involved. This not only increases the likelihood of a larger deal but also shortens the sales cycle by addressing key concerns at every level of the Buyer’s organization. 

The key is to have similar levels of people or personas from the Seller deliver the value proposition to similar personas at the Buyer. It has a more credible dynamic.

Oh, and your competition?  They are still playing with battlecards and selling how superior their features and functions are.  The are most likely still forecasting their deal while you are closing it for your company.

Call to Action

Combining bridging strategies with value chain strategies are just 2 of the Compass strategies for high-performance Enterprise sales.  Contact us to learn more about how the Compass can help you navigate your deals to successful outcomes.

Navigation:

This was the last post in the Value Chain Selling strategy series.  In our next post we will cover Bridging strategies.   This is a core strategy of team selling.

This was written while listening to ‘wait in the truck’ by HARDY & Lainey Wilson

Artwork by Amy Donaldson