One of the top competencies of high-performing sellers is highly compatible with an ecosystem-led sales strategy.
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PRINCIPLES
A new kind of seller in town
It used to be that the characteristics of the best sellers were easy to define and identify — persistent and persuasive got the job done. But modern selling, especially in the complex, interconnected world of B2B technology, is much more strategic and nuanced, and high performers come from a variety of personality types and skill sets.
In many ways, sales has evolved from a practice of demonstration and negotiation to a service enterprise. The best salespeople are advisors who prioritize understanding a customer’s problems and becoming an expert on a holistic approach to solving them that goes far beyond their own products.
Sales has always been a people-focused job, sellers now need to focus less on leading people to a single desired outcome and more on following their unique needs to the outcome that will work best for them.
This builds trust in a way that might not immediately result in a quick win but ultimately results in relationships that deliver over and over.
TACTICS
Match your sales skills with your strategy
In The New High Performing Seller: Essential Skills to Supercharge your Sales Force, leading analyst firm Gartner conducted a range of primary research activities to uncover what makes a high-performing seller in the new and always-changing technology environment.
Among their findings was the prevalence among high performers of a competency known as mentalizing, which involves prioritizing the buyer’s voice, understanding their emotions, and anticipating their behavior. The report found that sellers who possess strong mentalizing skills are almost three times more likely to meet quota.
According to the report, mentalizing is the ability of sellers to uncover the underlying needs, motivations and objections of buyers, even when these are not explicitly expressed. It is a purely human skill that plays a crucial role in successful sales interactions.
- Active listening is the key skill that enables sellers to fully engage with what buyers are saying and respond accordingly.
- Perspective-taking involves putting oneself in the buyer’s shoes and imagining how the situation appears to them.
- Empathizing is when sellers showcase emotional intelligence by considering how the buyer’s journey makes the buyer feel.
- Cognitive decoding involves synthesizing all available information to predict the buyer’s behavior. This helps anticipate needs and determine what will resonate most with the buyer.
Instead of doing whatever it takes to get a deal signed, potentially leading to customer tensions or buyer’s remorse, sales reps who are skilled at mentalizing might determine that easing off on a deal is genuinely in the customer’s best interest. Maybe the customer contact needs more time to get enthusiastic buy-in, or maybe they’re proving out a concept that will make the seller’s solution that much more powerful in a later quarter.
And you probably knew this was coming: This top skill of high-performing sellers is highly compatible with an ecosystem-led sales strategy.
A core practice of Ecosystem-Led Growth is using partner ecosystem data to learn as much about your customers and prospects as possible in order to meet them where they are rather than push them to where you want them to be.
Furthermore, that data and intel helps you and your partners craft narratives and solutions unique to that customers’ real needs. Developing sellers with a customer-first perspective does a lot more than make customers feel like they’re being listened to — it makes your sellers actually listen to your customers and tailor a customer journey to what makes real sense for that customer’s needs.
How to develop top mentalizers
According to Gartner’s report, developing sellers that embody the skills of high performers requires embedding seller skills for lasting behavior change, and identifies the approach taken by Salesforce as a case in point:
“Traditionally, skill development is treated as a training issue, with organizations aligning competency models to training programs. However, this approach often fails to drive long-term skill adoption, as it neglects the need to motivate sellers and hold them accountable for applying the skills. By implementing those strategies, Salesforce successfully embedded seller skill development throughout its sales organization, driving lasting behavior change and skill usage. Sellers were surrounded by skill reinforcements, motivated to adopt new skills and provided with the necessary resources to continuously develop and grow.”
Put another way: If your company is adopting an ecosystem-led sales strategy, you need sellers who will work with partners openly to put the needs of shared ICPs above the desire for deals that might not be a great fit. The way to develop these skilled mentalizers is to align playbooks and incentives with a collaborative, informed customer-centric approach.
Stuff you don't want to miss!
- September 10th — RevOps Playbook for High-Growth Companies — Tessa Whittaker, VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo, and Mollie Bodensteiner, VP of Operations at Sound will share how to start and identify your RevOps approach. Organized by RevGenius. Save your spot here.
- September 12th — Building a Value-Based Partnership Strategy — Asher Mathew, CEO and Founder of Partnership Leaders, and Chad Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Ecosystems, will share how to strategically align with partners to drive value, optimize resources, and sustain competitive advantage in a cost-conscious market. Register here.
- September 17th - 20th — INBOUND 24 — Join us in Boston this September at INBOUND to meet the newly merged team, get the most up-to-date intel on the new merged Crossbeam x Reveal product, and attend the most fun after INBOUND parties. Meet the team at INBOUND.
- September 24th — GTMnow Live: The Future of Outbound: An Ecosystem-Led Approach — Outbound is changing and ecosystems have never been more important. Join go-to-market leaders from Crossbeam, Pattern, and Atlan as they discuss the shift towards an ecosystem-led approach in outbound sales. Register now.
- October 1st — SalesIntel Annual Summit — SalesIntel is organizing a 100% free and virtual summit where you will find specific tracks curated for sales, marketing, and RevOps and roundtable working sessions focused on sharing actionable ways to build pipelines and achieve growth goals. Save your seat here.
- October 1st - 3rd — RevCon — RevGenius partnered with Common Room, Sigma, Avoma, The Juice, and many more to bring you a 3-day virtual conference to reunite your sales, marketing, revops, and cs leaders behind to learn and discuss about the future of SaaS. Save your spot here.
- October 14th - 16th — GTM2024 — Join Pavilion at The Fairmont in Austin, TX to get ahead on your 2025 GTM strategy, learn about market trends, and boost your GTM strategy. Get your ticket here.
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