Winning large value customers and high value transactions sounds like an obvious strategy, then why is it so difficult to put into practice?
In my 30 years in sales, I’ve found that there are 10 barriers to Large Value Customers (LVC) success, covering the knowledge, skills and tools required, combined with management direction, coaching, evaluation and feedback.
So let’s look into each of these in more detail:
- Is there a fear of failure or the unknown: how to approach an LVC, who to approach, with which message? How should LVC be qualified, and forecast, when early signs of real LVC potential are so hard to detect?
- Is the sales force stuck in a “comfort zone” by selling features rather than the business value that your solution delivers?
- Is it understood that different sales-mindsets and skills are required in order to close small deals in a quarter whilst concurrently working on LVCs over longer periods?
- Has the team previously handled complex sales? Multiple, senior stakeholders, conflicting requirements, technology integrations/migration, project managing parallel decision-making tracks: technical strategy, technical operations, legal and finance?
- Can each team member: sales and pre-sales, describe (without notes) three reference customers’ business value being delivered by your solution?
- Is there a single owner of the business case sales collateral? Do you have the tools and collateral to support a business value sales process? Do you have value benchmarks, KPIs or measurements of gain / cost? Do you have a defined discovery process, questions and range answers to identify outliers?
- Do Sales and Marketing collaborate to produce case studies, agreeing how to precisely define business value that the customers have achieved?
- Does Sales Management talk about winning LVCs, yet drive everyone to a quarterly number?
- Have you been able to win some early LVCs without a business case? This could mean that adopting the business case selling is a cultural change that may not be accepted, or the rationale for it understood.
- Is the sales force trained to manage, and qualify, LVCs who demand a lot of precious pre-sales resources? Pushing back on such demands, by both qualifying the customer, and securing the appropriate commitment from a stakeholder to the sale first.
If you want to know more about our LVC sales training or how we can hire LVC capable sales people please contact us.