Lesson 16 - Provide Value to Your Buying Committee

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Sales success hinges on understanding who makes purchasing decisions and providing them with value. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to identify the key roles within your prospect’s buying committee, how each role impacts the decision-making process, and what you can provide to each role that will catch their attention and provide them value. Your assignment will involve mapping out the buying committee for one of your top accounts and writing down what you'll be able to provide to each of them that is valuable.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you are going to learn how to provide specific value to the members of your buying committee for your top prioritized account. Let's break that down in a previous episode, I think it was lesson four, or something like that, you ended up mapping out your buying committee. That was your first experience learning about this concept. And as a quick review, we talked about the importance of understanding who's typically on the buying committee for your solution. We talked about titles or not titles, but people like your end users, your champions, your economic buyers, your executive sponsors, your gatekeepers, detractors, finance, legal. It all of the different members of the committee that you would need to get in front of and convince to buy your solution. In this episode, we're going to take that concept a little bit further and talk about how do you convince them? Now we did that a little bit in the previous lesson, where we talked about how end users are normally going to care about features. Champions are normally going to care about team cohesion. Economic buyers will normally care about ROI. But let's take that a little bit further. In this one, I want to talk about the concept of give to get. Give to get is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone that you get in front of you are wanting to get something from them when it comes to your sale. Now, that could be that you're wanting to get information from them on pain or challenges or priorities. It could be that you're wanting to get a referral to someone kind of up the chain in the organization. It could be that you're wanting to get meeting with key stakeholders, but chances are, you're wanting to get something as you progress the sale towards closure. In order to do that, you have to give something in return. Most people don't just give things for nothing, right? This is not a friendship. It is a sale. And so when you are thinking about the members of the buying committee, I want you to start thinking strategically about what you can give them in order to entice them to give you the things that you need to progress the sale. That's what give to get is all about. So let's break down the buying committee, and let's talk about some of the value that you can give each member of the buying committee to convince them to talk to you or help you out. Let's start with the end users. For an end user, let's think about the things that they like. They're actually using the product, right? So some things that you can give them are new feature announcements. And by the way, as I'm as I'm reading these out, think about how you could possibly leverage these things you could give value during outreach, during your LinkedIn connection request, during your initial discovery meeting, you can give value during your customer calls from a success standpoint, there are so many opportunities for you to give this value to the individuals that you talk to. All right, so end users give them new feature announcements, product updates, product how tos, pro tips, walk throughs, education, video demos, testimonials from other end users on how they're using the product work best practices. So not just product best practices, but like how to do their job better from other people in their role, and invitations to user webinars, experience webinars, product, round tables and events. Those are things that are going to give them value. Those are things that they care about. If you can give them access to beta features or like cool stuff, like that. Even better, um, what can you ask them for in return? So if it's an end user, chances are you can't ask them to sign the contract, right? You can't ask them to sponsor the sale, because they're an end user and they're just they're not at that level of altitude. But what can you ask them for well, you can ask them for their current state, the negative consequences associated with that current state. You can ask them for their specific goals as an end user, you can ask them for to help you build a case for the value that your solution is providing. Today that's really important, and in the future, we'll talk about how to build internal case studies for your product, and you can ask them for a referral to the next step up the chain, which is their team lead. Let's think about senior managers, your directors, your team leaders. These are typically going to be your champions and their. Primary interest is making sure that the solution is going to work at the team level. So for them, and normally they are tied to specific KPIs, maybe not company wide KPIs, but they have team KPIs that they're responsible for, they also want to make sure that adopting the solution isn't going to be a pain in the ass for their team. So you can talk a little bit about change management and some of those things. So the things that bring director, level, manager, Senior Manager, level, champion, level person Value, Customer testimonials, blog posts, case studies, referrals from their end users, discussions with subject matter experts on your team. Product Demos right showing at a high level what it can do for their team. Work, best practices from others in their role, just like we did for the end users, and then things you can ask them for in return, a champion or director level, they're going to be able to talk to you about current initiatives, validating your value ladder, your value hypothesis, understanding the decision criteria that they're going to have. The decision process, what levels it needs to go through, the paper process, the key stakeholders, those are going to be important, understanding more information on the current state, the negative consequences, the goals, the metrics used to measure ROI. Typically, once you get to this level, they're going to be able to talk to you about metrics and numbers, and then again, referral, either now you can ask for a referral across or up. So you can get referrals to other team leaders, other members of other functions, so horizontal referrals or referrals up the chain to a senior executive. So vertical referrals. Now let's say you can get in front of a senior executive. Let's keep moving up the chain. So now you're talking to someone that is potentially your executive sponsor, and the way that you give value is going to be different. An executive sponsor cares about operational efficiency. ROI tying your solution to OKRs or top level business initiatives, and ultimately the things that bring them value are customer referrals, executive dinners, Executive Briefing Center visits, strategy sessions, testimonials and case studies from other senior execs. Roi reports, third party validation management consultants coming in and validating your solution, events or webinars specifically for senior leadership or senior leadership. Roundtables, referrals from their team leaders can be valuable internal case studies that you've built, and like I said, we'll learn how to build those in a future lesson. And then things that you can ask for in return for providing this value are going to be information on the full decision process, any remaining criteria that you have not addressed, any remaining referrals to other stakeholders, finalization of paper process, getting your contracts over to legal. But ultimately, if you're talking to the executive sponsor, they can give you the final decision. They're the ones that can close the sale for you, just like your your economic buyer could. So for here, you should be comfortable asking, you know, are we done? Is, have you do you have everything you need to make a final decision here. I also want to talk about it, because it can come in and really make things interesting. IT security, procurement, they all have their own specific interests, but ultimately, it's very important that you don't overlook them. Procurements typically charged with keeping costs for tools low. They're thinking about toll consolidation, tool efficiency, tech stack, IT and security is going to be charged with making sure tools are safe and compliant. So the way that you give them value is very different from anyone else in the buying committee. You want to be talking to them about security and technical requirements, giving them conversations with your technical and security experts, showing them security documentation, case studies and testimonials, or third party validation from a security standpoint, for procurement, they're going to be very interested in ROI testimonials when it comes to metrics, and then Things that you can ask for in return, you could do some discovery with these folks and learn about any technical limitations with their current solution. But ultimately, a lot of these conversations, a lot of the value you're trying to get are a lot that was bad grammar. A lot of the value you're asking for is for them to stop being a detractor. Basically, you want them to give their go ahead so that everyone else on the buying committee can feel comfortable signing off on the decision. All right, so now it's your turn for. Top account. For your assignment. For your top account, I want you to map out your buying committee, just like you did in the previous lesson. But now get specific. I want you to have names and titles here. This shouldn't just be what title do. I think it is for your top account. Who is on your buying committee. Ask your champion start to go get this information. You won't have it all at first. It's possible you'll need to talk to your champion and learn a little bit more to get it, but once you understand who you need to convince you can begin to strategize your outreach in the right way. Then I want you to use, use what we just talked about, and start to write down the specific value that you can give each of these individuals. So for your end user, potential champion, potential economic buyer, potential executive sponsor, potential detractor, trying to see how many times I can say potential in one lesson, you need to ask yourself, what value can I specifically give them? What are some assets that I have from my PMM team, or that I've created myself, that I can send them in my outreach or give them in our meetings that are going to provide them value? And then you can take it a little further and say, What am I willing to ask for in return? What are the goals of me potentially talking to these individuals once I've given them that value, what should I ask for in return? Your study guide is going to walk you through this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time you.