Sales Effectiveness Priorities

The recent CSO Insights report on Sales Management Optimization includes a very interesting finding:

In the section, “Sales Effectiveness Priorities Going Forward”, the results showed that “Improve Ability to Show our Strategic Benefit/Value” was top of the list – 34% of respondents rated this as their number 1 item and 68% included it in their top 3.

I’ll pose a question: How much of achieving this is embodied in presenting demos?

(And I’ll answer it…) In Great Demo! methodology, the value associated with the customer making the change from the current state to the desired future (aka the Delta) is a key component that needs to be uncovered and clearly articulated as part of the demo.

This is an area where many sales, presales and marketing organizations could clearly do better!

In traditional sales presentations and demos, the sales team often verbalizes something like, “…and using our offering will save you time and money…!” Participants of Great Demo! Workshops learn to uncover specific, tangible ways of articulating value, enabling selling teams to present information that is more concrete: “…and using our offering will enable you to redeploy 3.5 FTE and reduce your inventory by $275K on an annual basis.”

Which statement has more impact?



[The full CSO Insights Sales Management Optimization report can be purchased at http://www.csoinsights.com/Publications/Shop/sales-management-optimization]