Sell More Effectively to Manufacturing Industry Buyers

The accelerated change within manufacturing can lead to inconsistent selling methods. Sales professionals with a long tenure have an established approach while those who are new have a different style. As these disparate groups come together, an unevenness sets in.

This challenge intensifies as the organization’s solutions grow and change. As the products and services become more holistic and sophisticated, they often require new selling skills to fully articulate the breadth of their capabilities. Too often, the selling organization becomes a patchwork of inherited practices and new initiatives. The solution is to adopt a consistent selling methodology and a common sales language across the organization. This approach has three key benefits.

First, a universal sales methodology enables consistent performance measurement. Consistency drives accuracy in performance measurement because all sales professionals are measured against the same framework. It is true that some metrics like win rate, quota attainment, and contract value are general enough to capture the overall performance of differing styles. However, if any of those figures reflect poor performance, leaders will not be able to uncover the underlying reasons unless a universal selling methodology is in place.

Second, when all sales professionals follow the same selling framework a cohesive support network develops across the sales teams. This outcome is important because enterprise and ecosystem selling is a team effort. Increasingly sophisticated and complex products require the presence of subject matter experts, executives, and implementation professionals. Bringing these non-sales roles into a selling environment requires careful planning, rehearsals, and communication. When there is a single, shared sales methodology, it is easier for those who are not sales professionals to learn the framework once.

Third, a single approach enhances the customer experience by providing consistency. This consistency allows the customer to develop confidence in the sales professional and their solutions. Moreover, consistency drives efficiency which is important because competing priorities and limited time mean that sales professionals must get to the root of the challenge earlier. A universal selling methodology uncovers the customer’s needs without wasting valuable time.

When the sales organization unites around a single methodology the business experiences peripheral benefits. One such example is the sales enablement function. As enablement becomes accustomed to working within a uniform methodology, they develop more resonance with the touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. They develop a sense of what will motivate the customer given their advancement through the purchasing process. This feel for the sale matters because sales enablement teams do more than dispatch materials, tools, and marketing collateral. They also make judgments about which of those tools is most appropriate given the customer, their need, and the progress in the buyer’s journey.

3. Sophisticated Solutions Require Intensified Deal Qualification

The enhanced capabilities of solutions today demand more resources. The reason: sales professionals need more time, preparation, and conversations to fully articulate the value of the solution within the customer’s unique environment. Selling has become a high-stakes, front-loaded pursuit as the approach moves from a product-focus to a business- outcome model. Therefore, it is crucial for sales teams to adopt account-oriented thinking. Doing so will allow them to meet the customer’s broader needs. Importantly, this approach will also improve the sales team’s ability to correctly identify the pursuits that are within their strike zone and offer a strong enough financial reward to warrant the pursuit.

The sales professional has an obligation to measure their strengths and weaknesses relative to the specific selling opportunity in question. In most cases, the sales team develops an intuitive sense of their strengths in the context of a particular sale. However, too often this consideration lacks a thorough, and rigorous review. Therefore, boosting win rates means overlying a formalized process for making an early determination about the stage of the sale and what the most appropriate next steps are.

With a specific methodology in place, sales professionals can determine how well the opportunity is positioned for a win, identify any gaps that threaten forward progress, and target the most important customer information early in the pursuit. These three capabilities serve one goal: to direct the right skills to the right sales opportunities so that selling efforts generate more results. Making this approach work means considering the specific factors that influence the customer’s needs. 

Those factors are the following:

Pain

Many sales opportunities emerge from a pain experienced within the customer’s world. Examples include missed opportunities, difficulty navigating an industry change, or an emerging competitor threat. Sales professionals need to confirm and reconfirm their understanding of the customer’s pain.

Power

Power refers to the stakeholders who are authorized to make a purchasing decision. Sales professionals need to ensure that they are accessing this group and positioning the solution in a way that resonates with the decision makers.

Vision

The most sophisticated sales professionals do more than track the customer’s current challenges — they also help the customer gain a buying vision. In doing so, the sales professional has a valuable opportunity to shape the customer’s thinking.

Value

Sales professionals need to contextualize the value of the solution within the context of measurable business factors like expected revenue gain, gross margin, or long-term savings. The value of the solution must exceed that of the status quo and competing solutions.

Consensus

More than ever buying decisions are unfolding in a group setting. As more roles are present among the buying team – CEO, CFO, IT, COO - it is critical that the sales professional accounts for the differing needs and concerns of each persona.

Each of these factors represents a critical juncture in the sale. Introducing structure to this list means assigning a numerical value of 0-5 to reflect the degree to which they have satisfied each of the five areas. A zero indicates no movement, and a five indicates complete success. This scale offers measurability that is critical for success, as seen by research from Bain indicating that metric-driven initiatives “increase profitability by as much as 25% over sustained periods.” Metric-driven initiatives also bring much-needed stability to an unstable and uncertain world.

Selling in manufacturing is more challenging today because solution value must be contextualized within the customer's broad, and interconnected operation. Adjusting to this setting means articulating how the solution has immediate, and downstream benefits, using a universal sales methodology, and a formal, thorough deal qualification process.

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