Win Deals by Getting Personal

Tailoring your pitch to your customers’ business realities is no longer optional. 

When making a purchase, customers nowadays demand more. They scrutinize options, review business cases, weigh the pros and cons of each solution, evaluate the expense against other internal projects, and once they buy, they look for who will provide an ongoing partnership to maximize success. With a seemingly infinite number of solutions offered in today’s SaaS-driven world, they can afford to be picky.

To stand out and gain their business, sales teams need to get personal. That means centering the customer in every interaction, demonstrating a deep knowledge of who they are and what they need, and connecting the product and what it offers with their specific business challenges and goals. It’s about demonstrating the real value your product can deliver to the customer. Leveraging value in this way helps your team gain an edge over competitors and win more deals.

Personalization matters more than you think
Most sellers know the importance of a strong client relationship. It’s a good start, but not enough in today’s turbulent markets. Personalization takes that relationship one step further by adapting the sales process to each individual so that every figure quoted reflects client-specific variables. Clients appreciate this attention to detail.

As value management tools make it easier to personalize your sales approach, customers have begun to expect it more and more—and companies who do not use them fall increasingly behind.

A recent McKinsey report found that when B2B companies have a modern, omnichannel go-to-market process that encourages personalization, companies see 5-10% revenue lift from increase relevance and engagement and 20-25% higher sales productivity and efficiency.

If you’re not implementing a personalized approach with prospecting, it can actively work against you. By reframing every conversation about what matters to each unique buyer and persona, your results will soar.

The customer is the key to the sale
At the end of the day, customers don’t care about the features and functionality of your product. Their only priority is what it can do to help them meet their business priorities. To them, your product is a means to an end. Sales teams need to be able to connect the technical details of your offerings directly to clients’ goals to be successful. This is the essence of demonstrating the value you can deliver. And the first step in doing this is to understand the customers’ situation and what they want the product to do for them.

Before meeting the client, sales representatives should do research. Check out the content their company has posted on its public communications, the talks its CEO has given, letters to investors, and other public filings. It is essential to go into the first conversation ready to ask informed questions and gather more information. Your prospects can help you determine which variables matter most in the value equation and give important input to shape the solution you propose.

This level of customization may sound tedious, but it’s a breeze with the right customer value management software. Solutions like ValueCloud make it easy to enter publicly available information, client-supplied data, or even collected industry benchmarks to prepare an initial hypothesis.

And with an end-to-end system, once you’ve gathered more information from a prospect, its easy to rework the value proposition without having to redo each calculation. Plus, they are flexible enough to accommodate each client’s unique information. It’s also easy for sales teams to use, no matter their number-crunching skill level.

Once you’ve identified your prospect’s priorities and how your product can deliver on those needs, you can present them with a business value hypothesis that addresses their unique situation. Because the client contributed to the process, they feel more attachment to the result, and are willing to continue the conversation. Remember, this isn’t a one-and-done presentation. Personalization requires ongoing dialogue. Your initial value proposition is a starting point, but because you’re speaking directly to their realities, you have greater likelihood of success.

Even better, all the effort you put in at the beginning of the sales cycle pays off throughout the customer relationship. Beyond value selling, the right customer value management platform sets your team up for effective value realization, as well. That original business value hypothesis that helps you close the deal becomes the baseline for measuring your ongoing impact. It’s the initial personalization that closed the deal, but it’s the ongoing attention to results and opportunities for improvement that will keep the relationship strong. Personalization is a long game that will keep you winning for years to come.

Ready to give your clients the personal touch? Contact our team of value experts.