What is Insight Selling?
Insight Selling uses data, trends analysis, market research, and – most importantly – your experience to help customers sift through all relevant information, diagnose problems, determine their needs, and ultimately, make informed buying decisions.
The key to Insight Selling is to leverage a deep understanding of customers to establish trust and rapport with buyers. Sales professionals must come to the table prepared to be a proactive source of value for customers. They must have a deep understanding of buyers and buyers’ business objectives.
Why Does Insight Selling Matter?
- Technology solutions are substantially more complex and present greater possibilities than ever before.
- Which means that more people – 7 or more – are typically involved in most buying decisions.
- 62% of the B2B customer journey takes place outside of conversations with sellers.
- 55% of customers say they encounter an overwhelming amount of trustworthy information during the purchase process.
- 44% of customers struggle with the fact that information from various suppliers, while all seemingly trustworthy, is contradictory.
- 15% of B2B customer buying time is spent trying to reconcile or de-conflict information.
- Multiple stakeholders, confusion, frustration, and fear are all factors that can slow down the B2B sales process or worse, bring it to a screeching halt. With so much friction, it’s a wonder any deals get closed at all.
But what if all that friction could be turned into a sales opportunity? According to Gartner, buyers love it when they find B2B salespeople who “consciously work to differentiate themselves by helping buyers navigate, prioritize and, ultimately, make sense of all the information they encounter to make a large purchase with little regret.” Sellers who understand the friction points — and can help buyers through them — are the ones who win deals. Who are those sellers? Insight Sellers who utilize the Challenger Sale.
Why are Insight Sellers more effective? Because they accelerate the sales cycle.
Empower Your Team To Use Insight Selling
Insights Are the Key to Successful Sales Today
Insight Selling puts the salesperson in the role of a trusted advisor or collaborator who offers insights to buyers.
The Challenger Sale positions the salesperson as someone who educates buyers, not only about the product or service in question, but also about larger business issues and trends. As teachers, Challengers aren’t afraid to push back against their “students” (buyers), if it is in service to the buyers’ ultimate goals.
Insight Sellers:
- Connect customers to relevant resources
- Clarifies the complexity of information
- Collaborates in customer learning
Delivering Insights to Your Prospects
At Visible Impact, we develop messaging and assets for your marketing and sales organizations that utilize a modified version of the Challenger Sale. This messaging presents insights to your buyer in a 5 point story arc we call The Compelling Conversation and this Compelling Conversation is repeated and reinforced through the variety of assets we develop for our clients.
The Ice Breaker: An opening, “icebreaker” discussion about key market trends and relevant statistics builds rapport and establishes trust in expertise.
The Breakdown: Current frustrations or “breakdowns” are brought to the forefront by laying out carefully researched business pains.
The Turn: What If?: Hope and motivation to act are provided through a vision of a “turn” — what could be accomplished if those pains were removed.
The Breakthrough: “Breakthrough” solutions that enable the inspiring vision by addressing and curing previously identified pains are presented and discussed.
Proof Points: Finally, the real-life viability of the proposed solution(s) is confirmed by providing actual success stories/case studies as “proof points”.
Sales Enablement Requires Strong Alignment between Marketing and Sales
According to Salesforce, “the root of sales enablement is the ability to integrate marketing and sales, along with other departments, to improve an organization’s sales effectiveness. [Sales enablement professionals] work with sales and marketing to manage content and assets, update guidelines and best practices, assist with sales onboarding and training, and much more. Sales enablement makes it easier for salespeople to sell and buyers to buy.”
Getting sales and marketing to collaborate isn’t always easy, but the potential to generate amazing growth through sales enablement could be the ideal motivation for the two departments to engage together.
3 Critical Elements Of Effective Sales Enablement
At Visible Impact, we believe that successful sales enablement relies on three important factors:
UNIFIED MESSAGING
Across every touchpoint and medium, it’s important to tell a memorable, consistent story that sets your company and solution apart. Making this a reality involves drawing on the collective insights of key stakeholders: executives, marketers, product teams, and salespeople.
SALES ACTIVATION RESOURCES
Coaching sessions, training manuals, videos, and other assets can help salespeople lead and participate in insights-driven conversations that propel deals forward. These resources should be developed from your unified messaging strategy and should be easily accessible to — and actually used by — your sales team.
ACTIONABLE ASSETS FOR CUSTOMERS
It’s important to give your prospects other forms of information that dovetails with every sales conversation, to keep them engaged throughout the buyer’s journey. These assets — social content, whitepapers, success stories, webinars, brochures, nurture campaigns, infographics, banner ads, and more — should also be based on your unified messaging strategy and be vividly articulated and visually compelling.
Without the synergy of these three elements, sales enablement is destined to fail. Even the latest technological bells and whistles of sales enablement, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer data platforms (CDPs), and marketing automation tools, won’t make sales enablement effective without these three elements working together.
When you think about it, when you’re selling B2B you’re really selling H2H—human to human. And that’s why insights and ideas matter in B2B sales. Train your salespeople to be educators and advisors, and make sure your messaging is informative and consistent across every touchpoint.
Empower Your Sales Team and Captivate Your Customers
We hope this guide gives you a great deal to think about when it comes to using Insight Selling to improve sales. When you’re ready to start using Insight Selling, we’d love to start a conversation with you. Connect with us using the form to schedule a meeting.
