How to Help Your Team Sell New Solutions

The Sellers’ Trap
For a seller, it’s typically exciting when the company develops something new because, with new products and solutions, come new opportunities and good reasons to re-engage with target customers. You have the chance to sell new solutions. But beware. If you approach customers before you have a customer-centric and compelling value proposition, the majority of customers will tune out.

Customers, especially executive level buyers, don’t have the interest or time to learn about you and your stuff.  Your new solution’s “bells and whistles” may be exciting to you, but buyers want to know how you will help them with their most pressing issues.

That is why solution selling training focuses on being buyer-centric.  Selling solutions is about helping your customers succeed both personally and professionally. Approach your customer only when you have a clear message about how the new solution will specifically help them in an important area — only when you can explicitly link your new solution to your customer’s priorities and articulate the solution’s unique value-add.

Help Your Sales Team to Sell New Solutions
To sell new solutions effectively, sales managers and sales teams need a solid game plan to create the confidence and competence to succeed. Based upon proven business sales training best practices, design a new solution sales plan in the following three steps:

1. Know The Customer Impact
   Too often, sales teams mistakenly focus on product training to kick off a new product offering.  This is a mistake.  While sales reps need to know the features and benefits, they really need to know the customer impact if you want to increase your win rate.
   
   Make sure the sales team has a deep understanding of what the new solution can do for your target clients at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The team needs to know the capabilities and the scope of the new solution and where it can best be applied.
   
   Sellers should be thoroughly familiar with the new offering’s impact so they can link the value to customer priorities in a way that makes sense from the customer’s perspective. 
   
2. Know Your Target Customers
   Each team member needs to have intimate knowledge of their customers’ industry, marketplace, competitors, and challenges. It is critical that they do their homework and thoroughly research the client’s business and the personal needs and aspirations of their contacts.
   
   To effectively sell a new solution, you need to know what the client wants to achieve both in business and personally — how they would define success.  Top sales teams create sales battlecards for each key buyer persona.  The most effective sales battlecards are one-page cheat sheets with high-value insights based upon the key sales scenarios that matter most.
   
   Common sales battlecard elements include pressing problems each persona is likely experiencing, insightful questions to ask during the discovery process, responses to common sales objections, answers to frequently asked questions, and customer case studies to back up your value proposition.
   
3. Know the Conversation
   Once your sales team knows the impact and the customer, the final step is to ensure they can have a consultative sales conversation and articulate the solution in a way that resonates with their buyers.  Invest the time to craft and practice meaningful sales conversations that will engage the customer and establish credibility.
   
   Top sellers conduct role plays based upon the top sales scenarios that they are likely to encounter and that have the highest correlation to win rate.  Before you put reps into the field to sell new solutions, have them prove that they can be successful in a simulated role play.

The Bottom Line
The key to help your team sell new solutions is to focus on the client — not the features and benefits — and to prepare your sales reps to meaningfully connect your solution to the customer’s priorities. Is your sales team ready for high stakes conversations?

To learn more about how to sell new solutions, download The Top 30 Most Effective Sales Questions when Selling New Solutions

Tristam Brown

Tristam Brown is a seasoned business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.