Our new State of Sales report surfaced an interesting insight: B2B sales pros find return on investment (ROI) to be far more important than price in closing a deal. While buyers might not say they agree, that’s likely because ROI is more nuanced than a simple price point.
By putting ROI at the forefront of sales calls and meetings, your sales team can get buyers to recognize and prioritize the ultimate return over cost. In the process, your reps will overcome a common sales momentum barrier. Here are four ways to change the conversation in your favor.
Lead With Numbers
Businesspeople are accustomed to thinking in data-driven terms, so your sales team shouldn’t be afraid to lead with numbers. Numbers speak volumes, especially when it comes to helping your buyers make their internal business case. With statistics and metrics more readily available than ever before, there’s no excuse for leaving them out of conversations and pitches.
If your organization has figured out the aggregate return on investment across its customer base, encourage your reps to share that number. Or perhaps they can cherry-pick the ROI stats of companies in the same industry as their prospects. Better yet, if possible, task your dev team with creating an ROI calculator that allows your team to plug in numbers so reps can show the potential ROI for their specific buyers and their companies.
Personalize Pitches
Continuing with this theme, it’s a must for your sales professionals to customize their pitches to each prospect’s specific business. Today’s buyers expect personalization at every turn and outright reject most things generic. It’s a real turnoff when reps deliver cookie-cutter presentations to prospects who have advanced past the initial research stage.
Knowledgeable, prepared buyers expect today’s sellers to be just as knowledgeable and prepared, so your reps need to make sure their meetings stand up to scrutiny. Based on the buyer’s situation, needs, and priorities, they should dig up relevant industry benchmarks and other real-life numbers to frame their examples and discussion points.
Let Marketing Enable Your Team
As your reps seek ways to tell a compelling ROI story, check with your marketing colleagues for messaging. They should be able to supply a customizable narrative that position your reps to deliver stronger economic insights.
These value messages might be contained in existing decks, or conveyed in written and video case studies. Marketing might even be able to provide an interactive benchmark survey that prospects can fill out to determine how they compare to their peers – and how much they stand to gain by abandoning the status quo. Simply put, marketing should be able to equip your team with messages that clearly convey the value of investing in your solution.
When your reps are preparing to share ROI-laden content with prospects, tell them to take advantage of PointDrive. The integrated PointDrive functionality in LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows them to professionally package up and seamlessly deliver content. Rather than send an email with a bunch of attachments, they can send a link to relevant documents, PDFs, videos, testimonials, articles, and more housed on landing pages unique to each prospect. This makes it easy for buyers to access the information they find most relevant, whether they are on a desktop computer, smartphone, or tablet. Plus, it means you and your reps can track the recipient’s consumption and sharing of that content.
Optimize Your Content Strategy
Ideally your marketing team calls upon SEO best practices to influence prospects at every stage of the buying cycle. You can pave the way for ROI-focused conversations by working with your marketing department to ensure buyers realize the importance of ROI before they reach sales.
Specifically, marketing should customize your company’s SEO and content strategy to target buyers focusing more on ROI than on price. It should also develop content that “trains” buyers to be less sensitive to price. And don’t forget: sharing and distributing content through social channels helps boost visibility and rankings in the search engines. So be sure your reps share that ROI-focused content on their LinkedIn profiles and in other relevant online channels.
Emotions at Play
Lastly, as your team focuses on conveying return over cost, remind them that emotion still plays into the buying process. When they show how a prospect’s company will realize ROI, they should paint the buyer as the hero of the story. If they do so, their pitches will strike a chord – and be more likely to find their way into the prospect’s business case for your solution.
For more ways to work the odds in your favor, download Proof Positive: Easily Measure and Maximize Sales ROI.
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