The Nearbound Daily is now officially the ELG Insider Daily!
Welcome to the ELG Insider Daily—the #1 newsletter in the world keeping thousands of GTM professionals on top of the latest Ecosystem-Led principles, tactics, and trends. Join the movement here.
PRINCIPLES
The power of personalization
According to the recent 6th edition of Salesforce’s State of Sales report, 59% of business buyers say reps fail to grasp the unique goals they aim to achieve.
“Whether accurate or not, this perception could indicate that reps aren’t doing enough to personalize their communications and show they understand their prospects’ unique perspectives,” reads the report. “In an increasingly competitive environment, this lack of personalization is a critical missed opportunity, as 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy when vendors understand their objectives.”
While keeping this reality top of mind, it’s also important to recognize what “personalization” is and isn’t. Don’t mistake understanding a prospect’s business goals and pain points for being overly familiar.
How many of us have gotten a sales pitch trying to relate to us as humans by bringing up a common non-professional interest gleaned from social media accounts?
If you’re not selling wax, don’t compliment your prospect on their IG surfing reels. It’s a little weird.
However, if you can dig into your prospect’s objectives from sources like partner ecosystem intelligence, and propose a customized solution with the right integrations, your odds of success will grow like a killer Big Island swell.
TACTICS
How to master personalized sales: Become a tech stack expert
The best sales reps don’t sell products, they sell solutions, and every prospect is going to have a different set of problems. The teams that best understand those problems and how they relate to the potential customer’s goals will be the ones that close deals.
This means investing time and resources into educating your sales team (and yourself, if you’re a rep) about your customers’ tech stacks — not just your piece of the real solution they need.
When your sales team is aware of the wider integration ecosystem they will:
- Know how your product fits into solution-selling
- Tap into the pain points of their opportunities and leads
- Show value by giving value. Make informed tech stack recommendations, becoming more consultative and irreplaceable to customers
- Be a resource when customers need help decoupling their all-in-one solutions for more customized tech stacks
Your team should know your product, the other products people love, and the products that fall short.
Tips for developing your tech stack training program:
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Teach reps about product functionalities that conflict with and complement your product
Could the tools in your prospect’s tech stack hinder the sales conversation? Perhaps your omni-channel marketing automation platform overlaps in functionality with the prospect’s current help desk software.
Your sales rep should be able to pivot the conversation to focus their pitch on the value of using both products together — specifically mentioning complementary use cases — or the value in replacing your competitor’s product entirely.
Is there friction between your product and another product during particular workflows? For example, maybe your video management platform isn’t compatible with TikTok. Your team should learn how to anticipate and manage workflow conflicts their prospects might have — including offering a workaround if one exists.
On the flip side, if your product works well with other products — tech partners or not — your team can learn to speak knowledgeably about specific workflows to support their customers.
Prepare your sales team for a variety of circumstances that can arise from the prospect’s unique tech stack.
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Help reps build trust through consultative practices
Do your customers call your sales team for advice about products outside of the one you offer? If they do, maybe it’s because they trust them.
If your sales team can show their customers value beyond your core value proposition, it can go a long way.
In fact, they just might:
- think of your sales reps first when they have a question requiring a high level of product expertise
- think of your sales reps first when making product recommendations to people in their network
- think of your sales reps last when they need to remove products from their tech stack due to budget cuts
Ryan Sholin, Director of Customer Success and former Head of Technology Partnerships at Automattic (WordPress VIP), says he looks for partnerships that go beyond the standard plugins so that his team has relevant, top-notch tech stack recs in their back pockets.
“We’re saying ‘here’s a solution that works well on VIP, that our customers are interested in, that enterprise publishers and marketers need, that our team understands the value prop of.’ When our customers say, ‘What do you have for SEO,’ we can have an answer and say, ‘Here’s an enterprise-grade solution,’” says Ryan.
As an open source content management system (CMS), WordPress VIP acts as a “central hub” that welcomes other products to build on top of its product. Sholin’s team can help fill out their customers’ tech stacks by building a vast partner ecosystem — including tech and channel partners — and using their ecosystem as a database of sorts for making trusted product recommendations to their customers.
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Show reps how to decouple the “almighty” all-in-ones
The Salesforces of the ecosystem may serve as the best solution in some capacities, but in others, your customer may just want something a little different — a best-in-breed.
It’s possible that as ecosystem giants, or supernodes, grow from fledgling startups to Multi-billion-dollar businesses, some of the functionalities of the products within them become outdated, less affordable, or less customer-friendly.
The result? Customers sometimes ask their reps for product recommendations that can help them decouple their all-in-ones.
When an account manager or sales rep can be the one to provide a quality recommendation that saves their customers money and improves their workflow, their relationship with that customer goes up a few notches. Be that team of experts.
Learn more about how to master Ecosystem-Led Sales.
FROM THE ECOSYSTEM
The Future of Revenue survey
For the second year, we’re partnering with Pavilion to gather insights from revenue leaders like yourself for the Future of Revenue survey.
It’s a quick 7-minute survey aimed at understanding the strategies and trends shaping the industry.
Your perspective would be incredibly valuable, and as a thank you, you’ll receive early access to the report before it’s officially released this fall.
Share your experience here.
Stuff you don't want to miss!
- August 28th — GTM is Better Together — Join GTM Partners, Demandbase, Clari, G2, MadKudu, ON24, TechnologyAdvice, Totango + Catalyst Software, Vidyard, ZoomInfo, and an elite group of leaders to discuss around what a modern, enterprise, GTM team and tech stack should look like and how it can be best optimized for efficiency and scalability. Get your ticket here.
- 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 17 — Join us at Hubspot Inbound's Partner Day in Boston! Swing by the Crossbeam booth to meet the team, attend the Crossbeam x Gong yacht party on Wednesday, September 18th, and attend Chili Piper, Sendoso, Surfe, Splash, Mobileforce, and Crossbeam’s after party that same night.
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