Why Your Sales and Marketing Teams Need an Outomes Framework

Why Your Sales and Marketing Teams Need an Outomes Framework

As we have previously written, Buyers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Outcomes. I see a perfect example of this as I look out my window into my driveway. I bought a car to get to the places I need to get to support the outcomes that I need:  

  • Enjoying our home in the mountains to bike and ski.
  • Get to the airport to fly somewhere to visit a client or an occasional trip for fun.
  • Sustain day-to-day life at home.

I don’t drive very often, but the car I drive is reliable, it allows me to transport my gear and delivers the outcomes I need. Quite frankly, it is less than impressive for anyone that would consider themselves a car junkie. Sounds like I may be cheap but trust me that the outcomes I need require plenty of investment over and above a car.

The outcomes that your business delivers should be woven throughout the operational as well as the sales and marketing aspects of your business. Let’s focus on sales and marketing given this is your focus if you landed on this blog.

Outcomes are in play at each stage of the process that you have in place to help your ideal prospect to become an ideal client:

  • Marketing/Prospecting: Your marketing plan should be targeted to attract businesses that are looking for outcomes that your company can deliver. Remember, Buyers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Outcomes, so product-centric messaging makes it challenging or impossible for the target to understand what outcomes they might get from your product.
  • Qualifying: The goal of the qualifying stage of a sales cycle is to determine if the buyer is a good fit for the outcomes that your company can generate and if they have resources to pay for your product or service.
  • Discovery: The idea with the discovery stage of the sales cycle is to explore areas of need that your prospects have. Needs for all potential outcomes that you can deliver should be explored. 
  • Proposing/Recommending: Your proposal should be communicated in terms of the outcomes that your clients will receive if they invest in you.
  • Enjoying your services: Your operational team should be focused on maximizing outcomes for your clients. From a sales perspective, you need to gather outcomes — actual, quantifiable metrics — from happy clients when you conduct periodic business reviews. Those metrics should then be used in the other stages of the buying process to help communicate your value.

Having a resource, let’s call it an Outcomes Framework, shared by the sales and marketing team that is updated regularly, and shared centrally between sales and marketing provides many benefits:

  • Alignment: Historically, sales and marketing teams are at odds with each other. Sales teams need marketing to communicate properly to prospects in a language they understand (outcomes and value, not product specs). On the other hand, marketing relies on sales to gather outcomes to help them create messaging. Both need each other to be on the same page, and an outcomes framework is a great place to start!
  • Effectiveness: Outcomes-based messaging resonates with prospects, so win rates go up when communicating in terms of outcomes.
  • Efficiency: Having a centrally-shared resource in place for an entire sales team makes it significantly easier for sales teams to prepare for all calls. Better yet, it can take fewer calls to achieve the same result. How happy would your sales team be if you were able to cut in half the time that sales reps spend preparing for meetings and helping them win more deals?

Leveraging an Outcomes Framework with real-world client success stories can be a game-changer for your revenue generation team. 

Download the Outcomes Framwork Worksheet

How to Conduct An Effective Virtual Meeting

How to Conduct An Effective Virtual Meeting

work-from-home

4.7 million people work from home in the United States [source]. The need for collaboration and meeting with co-workers does not go away when people transition to working from home, so it is no surprise that products like Zoom Meeting have realized huge growth.

The recent Coronavirus spread is creating challenges for sales teams that did not need to make this transition to meeting virtually until now. My anticipation is that the number of people that work from home will be drastically increased for the long-term once we get back to normal.

Virtual or not, We have all been in our share of meetings that were good, productive meetings and others that were a waste of time for all involved. So, ensuring that you can effectively conduct a meeting is critical in business continuity during these times.

The 3 keys to having quality virtual meetings are:

  1. Planning
  2. Use of tools and technologies
  3. Engagement techniques

Want to learn how to conduct more effective meetings? Get the Cheat Sheet

Planning

Failing to plan is planning to fail. The nature of virtual meetings makes planning even more important. Here are some specific things you can do to plan for a fantastic meeting:

  • Prepare an agenda, and stick to it: Your agenda should include items that you would be able to cover given the time allotted. Send the agenda out to all participants prior. One good practice is to present each topic as a question. If the topic does not answer a question, then you may want to consider the relevance of the topic.
  • Prepare questions: More on engagement later, but the last thing virtual meeting participants want is a lecture. Asking the right questions in a meeting promotes healthy thinking. Asking the low-value questions compromises the integrity of the message. Prepare high-value questions that generate thought and support the intended message.
  • Prepare your environment: Prepare your background. Ensure it is professional, yet has a bit of character in it as well. Arrive early so that you are able to test out all technology and be there when participants arrive to set the tone and ensure they use a camera if at all possible. Ensure you are dressed appropriately and positioned properly in front of your camera such that you are close enough to be seen.
  • Plan meeting key points and takeaways: For all topics, ensure you are ready to summarize the main points and any follow up items from the meeting. You will likely add to the list during the meeting as well if you succeed in creating an engaging environment.

Use of tools and technology

Improper use of tools and technology can derail any meeting regardless of how prepared you are with your message. Specifically:

  • Use a video conferencing platform like Zoom: We have conducted meetings virtually with screen-sharing tools for some time, but our transition to using Zoom a couple of years ago was a complete game-changer for our meetings. Zoom makes balancing video conferencing and content sharing easy and, unlike previous applications that we used, does so reliably
  • Use webcams: Most people have a webcam integrated into their computers. Use it! If a picture tells a thousand words, video conferencing tells a million. Seeing the faces of participants eliminates the biggest challenge with remote meetings
  • Presentation Software: Many use PowerPoint, we use the Google Apps suite. Highly designed animation can actually be a bit distracting, so this shouldn’t take too much time. Regardless of what you use, ensure you have bullets and visuals as needed to support your message. When you use text, use short snippets of big ideas, and don’t use too much text as you want to deliver the message with your voice.

Engagement Techniques

When I was in college, my Astronomy class (we had to take a lab science!) was a lecture with a couple of hundred students. My literature classes were a lot smaller, which made it a lot easier to create an engaging environment.

There are many ways that you can create an engaging meeting to increase its effectiveness:

  • Proper use of questions: Leveraging different types of questions can be very effective in increasing engagement. Here is a blog that talks to different types of questions. Overhead questions are put out there for anyone to answer and can be challenging to control the group when it is a question that a lot have opinions on. It is also not great when you hear crickets after you ask an overhead question. Direct questions, relay questions, and reverse questions are great in getting your participants to engage.
  • As participants to share ideas or even present a module: Sending out the agenda prior and asking participants to do some homework prior is a great way to get folks prepared to share ideas. If appropriate, delegate topics to others to lead.
  • Use chat, polls, or other tools in your video conferencing platform: Using different tools effectively keeps people engaged. If you can find a good use for a poll in your content, use it! Chat is a great way to gather insight from participants as an alternative to asking overhead questions. The # of participants in the meeting helps you evaluate which might be most effective. Larger meetings may require you to use a “Listen Only” feature and enable users to interact with chat.

Ensuring you are able to facilitate virtual meetings effectively can minimize the impact of our new reality. Put these things into practice to minimize the disruption to your business.

Want to learn how to sell in a virtual environment? Sign up for our Virtual Sales Training Program

Sales Prospecting With a Positive Attitude

Prospecting is hard - and keeping a positive attitude while getting a string of rejections is even harder. Use these tips to stay positive - and bring that positive prospecting to your potential clients.Consistent prospecting is essential for sales success. Without a steady stream of prospects, the funnel dries up. Then you end up taking desperation deals and flipping your base.

Effective prospecting requires a positive attitude. The challenge is that if there is one thing that can chip away at your attitude, it’s the rejection you get while prospecting. As a sales professional, you need a proactive plan to keep a positive attitude.

In today’s negative world, a positive attitude stands out. A positive attitude is contagious.

Don Hutson offers inspiration on the importance of a positive attitude in the first chapter of Selling Value:

“High performers are motivated and ready to make great things happen! If they get some motivation from their boss or significant other, or another source, that’s fine, but they understand that their PRIMARY source of motivation comes from within.”

Our responsibility as sales professionals, sales leaders, and business owners (all of us are in sales) is to maintain a positive attitude.

How can you cultivate a positive attitude to fuel your prospecting? Here are a few ideas! (more…)

What Would You Do If 100 Prospects and Customers Were Lined Up Outside Your Business Right Now?

100 people curious about your products isn't a dream - it's your website's daily reality. Are you taking advantage or are you missing out on net-new business opportunities?Imagine if you had 100 people lined up outside your business right now. What would you do? Certainly, you’d send someone out to greet them. You’d ask how you could help. You’d get the prospects involved in sales situations. You’d do your best to answer customer questions and send them to support if necessary.

100 people lining up outside your business sound like a dream? What if it happened every day? (more…)

The Importance of Looking Trustworthy

Trust is key - especially if you're looking to grow net-new business.“People will accept the advice of insight sellers only to the extent that they trust them.” – Mike Schultz & John Doerr, Insight Selling

Trust is a critical component to sales success. In their buyer research, the authors of Insight Selling learned what we know instinctively: trust is one of the top 10 factors separating first place from first loser in the sales process. Lack of trust pretty much guarantees you’ll lose a deal. Low trust hurts client loyalty.

Companies and sales reps need trust. This means you need to be trustworthy. It also means you need to look trustworthy. Today, I want to assume you are a trustworthy salesperson working for a trustworthy company. Let’s turn our focus on the importance of looking trustworthy. (more…)