Lesson 29 - Influence Required Capabilities

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Prospects have specific requirements for solutions. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to influence their required capabilities and align your product to meet their needs better than the competition. Your assignment will involve identifying three required capabilities for a target account and preparing messaging around how your solution addresses them.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, we're going to continue our conversation on the value framework. Now in the last lesson, we talked about the current state negative consequences, future state and positive business outcomes for your prospect. In today's lesson, we're going to take that further to understand your prospect's required capabilities, the metrics that they'll use to measure success, and ultimately, how your solution is going to help. Let's start by understanding required capabilities. These are the specific features or functions that your prospect is going to need in order to drive the outcomes that they want to achieve. Now, when I think about a list of required capabilities, it's basically a checklist, whatever solution they choose must be able to do these things in order for them to choose that solution. If you understand these capabilities, you will be able to more effectively tailor your demonstration to show them that you can meet these capabilities. And that's why we want to do this now. Now, the important thing here is that you are creating this list alongside your prospect. The goal of required capabilities is to influence them. And I want to be very careful when I use the word influence, you're not trying to manipulate their required capabilities. These should be real things that they need from whatever solution they choose. However, a lot of organizations don't know what's even available when it comes to your solution space, they don't know what's possible. It might have been years since they've evaluated a solution like yours. So you want to be able to come in and say, Hey, you might not know that these are features or functions that you can even request. And I want to make sure that you're aware of these possibilities. Now, if it feels like you're building out an RFP you kind of are, but the difference is that you're helping them to build it, and so you can ensure that your solution can meet the needs of these capabilities. You're not talking about your solution yet, though. What you're doing is creating a list of capabilities that they would need from whatever solution they choose, you should be getting this list from every stakeholder of the buying committee. What are the required capabilities from the users, from the team leaders, from the executives, from the IT, stakeholders, security, trust, compliance. You need to understand every angle of what the requirements are before you move to the next step. Now, once you once you understand what all of the capabilities are, then it's time to understand the metrics. What are the metrics that this prospect is going to use in order to identify if what they bought was successful. That was a little bit of a mouthful. Let me see if I can say that easier. Whenever someone buys something, they have an idea of what success looks like. If I'm buying learning management software, success might look like the amount of students that take lessons on this software. Over the next year, if I'm buying social media marketing software, the measure of success might be the number of social media posts, the amount of engagement increase I saw it might be, you know, how fast we can respond. What is our SLA when it comes to social media responses or outreach. There are a number of different you can tell I'm making this up, right? There are a number of different things that you can use to measure success. Your idea of success might be different than your prospects. So once you understand their list of required capabilities, you want to get in front of them and say, a year from now, what would success look like if you were to look back on this purchase and say that was a successful purchase? What are the metrics you're going to look at to understand? Yes or No, being able to understand the success metrics doesn't just help you in the sales process, it also positions you as a partner that is invested in their long term success. It's a really good sign that you're not just going to run away right after the sale is complete, right if you're starting to already think about, what does long term success look like for them? The other thing that you can do is it actually helps your CSM. Once the sale is complete, you'll be able to go to your CSM and say, by the way, I was able to align with this prospect on what success looks like for them. Here are the metrics that they want to measure, and then your CSM can use that in their QBRs with your prospect or customer. So it's really important to understand the required capabilities and the different metrics I. Um, if you get stuck on the metrics, metrics can be tough. If you're stuck on the metrics of the ROI, don't worry. We'll we'll talk about these in a future lesson. Once you have a clear understanding of the required capabilities and the metrics, it's time to pivot to finally selling your solution. You have now earned the right to talk about how your solution is better. And this is where all of your hard work pays off, because you are now so knowledgeable when it comes to what they need, what they're doing, where they want to get to the required capabilities, the metrics they use for success. You have all of this understanding which really sets you up to knock down these dominoes and to show them how your solution meets their needs. So the first thing you want to do is turn around and say, okay, here are the required capabilities that you gave me. Here's how we meet every single one of them. For the ones that you can't meet, that's okay. Make sure that you talk about workarounds. Be transparent, be upfront. Let them know. Here's what we can do, here's what's still on our roadmap, or here are the workarounds that other customers have seen. You definitely want to highlight your differentiators here. You don't just want to say, here's how we can meet your capabilities. You want to say, here's how we can meet your capabilities better than the other competitors that you're going to be speaking with, then you want to schedule a demo. You want to schedule a tailored demonstration of your solution where a technical expert is there to answer questions. And before you do that demo, you want to meet with your solutions engineer or whoever's presenting the demo and let them know the list of required capabilities so that they can tailor the demo to show how your solution specifically meets those capabilities. You want to link those capabilities to metrics. So while you're showing them how your solution meets the capabilities, you want to be saying and by the way, this is going to link directly to XYZ metric that you believe is important for your long term success, customer metrics, not your idea of metrics, theirs. And then finally, you want to connect it to the desired future state. Now that you've seen how our product or solution can meet your required capabilities, that it can meet your capabilities better than our competition, that it will ultimately align to the metrics you believe will make you successful. I want to talk about how this is going to result in the desired future state that you and I have talked about, if you can nail those things, you will absolutely massively increase your chances of making that sale happen. I promise you that make sure that you're working to understand and influence those capabilities. You're educating them on what's possible. You're aligning your your solution with their needs and metrics. All of that preparation will absolutely pay off. It will make things easier for your CSM, for your solutions engineer for you, and ultimately, it will win over your prospects. All right, now it's your turn for your assignment. Today, you are going to choose a current prospect that you're working with, build out a detailed list of their required capabilities by engaging with all of the relevant stakeholders. If you don't have a client you're working with, hold on this assignment. Wait until you have one. So, yeah, build out that detailed list of capabilities. Identify the metrics they're going to use to measure success, write them down. Align on them with the customer. Write down how your solution meets those required capabilities. Highlight the specific differentiators that set your solution apart from competitors, and ultimately work with your solutions engineer to prepare a tailored demonstration which aligns your capabilities with their metrics and desired outcomes. That's probably the most robust assignment I've ever given you, right? That is a long, drawn out assignment. It's going to take some time, but this is so important, and it will ultimately lead to to a sale. So that's it for today's lesson. Make sure you work with your mentor, your manager, your new hire buddy, and as always, your study guide will walk you through it. That's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.