Closing Sales Techniques: 5 Steps to Increase B2B Sales Win Rates
Classic sales techniques fail to create an educated buyer that can retell your story to their peers. If they can’t retell your story, they can't build the consensus needed to win in today’s complex B2B buying landscape. To succeed today sellers need to adopt a new technique: Creating Internal Sellers.
According to a recent Gartner study on the evolution of the B2B buyer journey, sales reps have about 5% of the customer’s time during the sales process. This time crunch puts tremendous pressure on the seller and highlights a glaring truth: most conversations and meetings happen without a salesperson present. How does your story get told in those meetings when you are not the one delivering the message?
Did you overload your buyer with technical terms, SKUs and industry jargon that makes it near impossible for them to retell the core values of your solution?
There’s a common misconception amongst sellers that you need to ask a lot of questions and immediately showcase the features and benefits of your product. But these classic sales techniques fail to create an educated buyer that can retell your story to their peers. If they can’t retell your story, they can't build the consensus needed to win in today’s complex B2B buying landscape.
Closing sales today requires new techniques
To succeed today sales organizations need to deploy a new sales technique: Creating Internal Sellers.
The average enterprise sale now requires six to 10 decision makers to gain approval. Because you cannot participate in every conversation that happens within their organization, you need someone to tell your story. This is where the Internal Seller comes in.
An Internal Seller can take the form of anyone at the prospect’s organization who learns your story and retells it to other team members. Like a traditional sponsor or coach, the Internal Seller plays a vital role in helping you win a sale.
Proven techniques for closing sales: How to create Internal Sellers
To reach your goal of creating an Internal Seller, you will have to get multiple contacts capable of retelling your story to their peers. To achieve this, you will want to follow the following techniques:
1. Take an educational approach
As a seller, you want to create a competent, confident and capable Internal Seller who will gather other stakeholders and start the proposal justification process. Many times B2B purchases are unbudgeted, so you need to empower Internal Sellers to make the case for a new solution and address the operational and cultural changes needed to adopt what you’re proposing.
To do this, you should take an educational and consultative approach to how you sell. Recognize that your role is to train the audience on how to retell the story. View your role as a trainer, rather than a seller, and you will immediately adopt a helpful tone of someone who wants them to succeed at solving problems rather than a pushy salesperson that just wants to close a sale.
Instead of playing the role of a product pitcher or interviewer, use language that positions you as an expert: “We see customers at your stage of maturity interested in making the move to the cloud, but struggling because of legacy systems and internal skills gaps.” Use framed questions to demonstrate expertise and collect validation, language like, “As an executive focused on customer experience, have you been able to effectively notify your customers when there is action that needs to be taken on their accounts to avoid unnecessary delinquencies?”
Making the shift from question-based selling to value-based, consultative selling establishes you as an expert, and begins to build credibility with your Internal Seller.
2. Deliver a winning “why” story
Demonstrating to prospects your understanding of what makes it hard to overcome their challenges earns you instant credibility. Buyers will infer that you know how to solve the challenge and this saves you from having to pitch your product.
To build a winning “why” story you need to know what attributes you expect to see in a “perfect prospect.” This prospect should match your definition of perfect in terms of the goals they have for their business, the external challenges they face, the internal gaps that limit their ability to reach their goals, and the consequences of not doing anything. Knowing these elements allows you to share why your company has the unique ability to help them.
Start by creating a list of the goals, challenges, gaps and consequences of a perfect prospect. Think of your early conversations with your buyer as a form of “match making” – you will build a situation summary and get them to acknowledge that it looks like them, or redirect you with new information. Earn credibility by showing your knowledge and demonstrate value by offering to share lessons learned from supporting similar customers.
By showing your familiarity with their situation you can spark their interest in learning how you can help them reach their goals and overcome the challenges they face.
3. De-risk the buy
A recent B2B Trust Survey revealed that B2B buyers expect most rewards to flow to the organization they represent while risk will be directed toward them personally and professionally. This explains why 61% of enterprise sales end in no-decision.
Understanding this reality means sellers must reevaluate how they build trust with their buyers. Too often you prove the solution works and maybe even offers greater value than their existing solution but you don’t get the order. What happened? It’s likely that you missed your chance to address some risk that scared the buyers into not moving forward. Anything new has a risk/reward element built naturally into the story. Understanding the buyer’s situation – personally and professionally – clues you into how to de-risk the sale.
It’s vital that you show your solution as an accelerant to the Internal Seller reaching their goals. This requires you to know the common goals of people in their role and to use these goals as the motivation that engages the Internal Seller to be better than the status quo. Making change equals risk and your job is to help them overcome their fears. By aligning your solution with their goals, you empower them to take action on your behalf.
4. Arm them with confidence-inspiring details
77% of B2B buyers say that their last purchase was very difficult. It’s no surprise – Forrester reports that the number of buying interactions – one individual’s buying journey to obtain information about competing offerings or providers – has jumped from 17 to 27. And with many workforces still largely or partially remote, these conversations are even more difficult to conduct and synthesize.
Your job is to simplify this process for Internal Sellers by arming them with confidence-inspiring details and data points they can use to deflect likely objections or questions from their peers. Have you ever:
Worked with a company of their size?
Worked in environments with the same tech stack?
Helped companies overcome similar challenges or internal capabilities gaps?
What does a typical GTM process look like?
What are some common pitfalls or roadblocks they should be prepared for?
You want to proactively address – not avoid – likely concerns that may come up as your Internal Seller works to gain support for the proposal. Stats, case studies, proof points, references and industry analyst awards all provide valuable collateral to your Internal Seller.
5. Assess their ability to retell your story as their own
When communicating with your prospect, you want to evaluate how well you have done in creating an Internal Seller. Do they have the ability to retell the story of why your solution will provide value to their organization? Before leaving the call or meeting, ask your Internal Seller to share how they will talk about your solution with their peers. Listen closely to their language, their verbs and the data points they use to summarize value. The verbs describe the actions your product enables and for this reason they hold special importance. If they use inaccurate or misleading language, correct them with the right language and share why it matters. You can’t put your story at risk of them devaluing your solution or making it sound like other solutions in the market.
Sales Technique Scorecard: Do you have an Internal Seller?
Use this scorecard to evaluate the quality of your Internal Seller:
Can tell your story convincingly to their peers
Tells you what type of data they need to sell the idea internally
Has a high level of responsiveness during the sales process
Asks for help with proposal justifications
Facilitates your engagement with other stakeholders
Shares the criteria their company will use to evaluate vendors
Shares the metrics that they will use to measure project success
Energized by the future vision you painted
Asks you challenging questions to prepare for objections from peers
Agrees the status quo will not help them reach their goals
Acknowledges the need to take action to avoid consequences
Comfortable telling you truth and being honest with their fears/concerns
Finally, don’t rely on just one Internal Seller. A coach, a sponsor, supporter, or advocate can come from multiple sources and you want to empower all of these Internal Sellers with the ability to retell your story of why your solution will provide value to their business. Don’t get single-threaded in your development of Internal Sellers.
Winning sales techniques for an increasingly complex B2B buyer journey
Shrinking time with buyers coupled with changing buying dynamics mean sellers have a very small window of opportunity to influence purchase decisions. Sales organizations today need to reshape their focus on creating and enabling Internal Sellers – evangelists who see value personally and professionally in your solution. When you get someone motivated to achieve the future vision you have painted for them, you have mastered one of the key techniques needed for closing sales.
Does your B2B sales organization have the skills to create Internal Sellers? Contact us for more information about our rapid Sales Execution Assessment.