GREAT CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONSMESSAGES TOOLS SKILLS

Insights

Differentiation Skills

Positioning

Demand GenContent

Sales EnablementContent

JustificationSkills

NegotiationSkills

THE

CUST

OMER

CONV

ERSA

TION

SYS

TEM

Break Status Quo

Defeat Competition

Increase LeadConversion

Crea

te Va

lue

Elevate Value

Capture Value

GREAT CONVERSATIONSWhen all else is the same, the company with the best story, told the best way, will win.

A DIFFERENT APPROACHDecision-making science vs. best practices

The main problem with a selling approach based on best practices is that it’s fundamentally “seller-centric.” It’s predicated on the idea that your marketers and salespeople are better off forgoing their personal profiles to imitate the behaviors of someone else—usually, the so-called “top performers.”

You’ve hired the team you have for a reason. Why force them to neglect the skills and talents that make them unique to act more like someone else?

There’s a better way.

A more reliable and consistent approach is based on understanding how and why buyers frame value and make choices—a buyer-centric model backed by decades of rigorous research. By employing an approach based on decision-making science throughout the buying cycle, you give yourself the best chance of getting prospects to say “yes” to making a change, and “yes” to choosing you.

Our customer conversation system integrates findings from several decision-making science disciplines, including neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology. By leveraging principles from these fields, and by appealing to the decision-making part of the brain, marketers and salespeople alike will be better prepared to tell provocative, visually compelling stories throughout their customer conversations while staying true to what makes them unique.

People are 2-3 times more motivated to make a change to avoid a loss than they are to achieve a gain. – Daniel Kahneman “Loss Aversion”

Best Practices (imitate someone else)

winner

sales profiles

imitationof winner

losers

Decision-making Science (understand the buyer)

buyer

neuroscienceActivate the part of the brain where decisions are made

social psychologyDiscover what motivates us to make decisions

behavioral economicsPredict irrational behavior

Seller- centric Model

Buyer- centric ModelVS

You, as a company, can do everything right. You can build the right products, invest in the top talent, choose the right strategies, launch the best marketing campaigns.

But standing between you, and your customer saying “yes” to buying what you sell, are your great customer conversations—essentially, your salespeople with their lips moving in front of prospects and customers. That’s ultimately what the success of your best decisions depends upon.

Analyst firm Sirius Decisions found that the #1 reason companies fail to hit their revenue targets comes down to the ability or inability of sales reps to articulate value. In fact, 71 percent of respondents said that value conversations are more important than more leads, better products, better process and better technology.

So ask yourself: How comfortable are you in your team’s ability to articulate value and win the decisions you deserve?Making sure that great conversations happen on purpose, instead of by accident, is a company-wide effort involving products, marketing and sales teams. That’s because it takes three things to have a winning conversation.

First, you have to develop messages that break the status quo and differentiate your solution. You then need to deploy those messages in tools that generate demand and equip salespeople to succeed. And finally, you need to give your salespeople the skills to use those messages and tools to deliver conversations that win.

At most companies, these activities are performed in silos. Only Corporate Visions integrates the three key components of a great conversation—messages, tools and skills—into a system that aligns marketing, products and sales teams in a common effort to improve your ability as a company to

articulate value.

THE CUSTOMER CONVERSATION SYSTEM IN ACTION

Great Conversations

DevelopMessages

DeployTools

DeliverSkills

Cross-functional workshop

Insights research

Conversation roadmap

Demand gen Sales enablement

elearning Classroom hands on

Just-in-timereinforcement

INTE

GRA

TED

AN

D M

EASU

RED

ebooks

infographics

videos

whiteboards

playbooks

DEVELOP MESSAGESMessages and tools that defeat the status quo and differentiate your solution

We often hear about the value of sales methodologies and skills training programs, and how they can transform your most important customer conversations.

We hear far less about its counterpart on the marketing side: A messaging and content program—think a marketing methodology—that’s also steeped in clearly defined principles, and just as rigorously developed and applied.

Unfortunately, a consistent, structured messaging program is the exception rather than the rule.

A Corporate Visions survey, which polled more than 500 B2B companies, found that only 28 percent of marketing departments have a well-established messaging development process that everyone follows.

Corporate Visions’ cross-functional approach to messaging will help you develop a provocative and consistent story to dislodge the status quo and highlight your differentiation. Anchored in the decision-making sciences, our approach leverages the hidden forces that shape the way buyers frame value and make choices.

THE POWER OF UNCONSIDERED NEEDS

Corporate Visions conducted an experiment in conjunction with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a professor at the Stanford School of Business.

400 people were divided equally into four groups. Everyone was told the same story: You’re a business owner looking for a financial lending partner to offer you a $10 million line of credit.

Each group heard a different pitch: 1. A standard solution pitch2. Same as pitch #1 with value-added solutions3. Same as pitch #2 with an unconsidered need

at the end4. Opened with the unconsidered need and then

pitch #2

The groups answered a series of questions about these pitches. Here’s what Dr. Tormala found:

Across all UNIQUENESS AND QUALITY RATINGS there was a statistically significant effect based on presentation type, suggesting that Unconsidered Needs FIRST outperformed Unconsidered Needs LAST, which outperformed both the Value-added Services and Standard Response presentation types (and these last two didn’t significantly differ from each other).

Across all of the CHOICE AND ATTITUDE MEASURES, the Unconsidered Needs First pitch outperformed the other three, which didn’t differ from each other.

The results are consistent with uncertainty principles. Highlighting unconsidered needs is unexpected, which can boost decision processing, but this only helps when it happens at the beginning of the message. When it happens at the end, it’s too late.

-

-added

added

added-

No doubt about it, insights are all the rage. A recent Corporate Visions survey, which polled more than 400 B2B professionals, found that 81 percent of marketers and salespeople believe they use an insights-based approach as part of their strategy.

But “insights” remains something of a murky term, with a range of definitions and understandings often attached to it. So, we wanted to take a closer look at what actually constitutes a powerful insight. After all, how do you know what types of insights are most effective at differentiating your solution and defeating a prospect’s status quo? And how do you know whether you’re actually creating action or just recycling facts and data?

Among four categories of insights, we found that respondents regarded “visionary insights”— insights that position a company as a sage-like expert at defining both unconsidered and emerging needs in the market—as the most effective types of insight-based selling content. Curiously enough, companies created these types of insights less than the other, less effective types (“anecdotal,” “authoritative,” “current”).

As you can see, there’s a kind of inverse logic taking place, causing companies to rely most heavily on the types of insights that have the least impact.

The best types of insights occur when you can show an inconsistency or uncertainty in the way somebody’s thinking about doing something today. With our Power Insights product, companies learn how to develop exactly these kinds of provocative and counterintuitive market data points, and then interpret that information in a way that helps prospects see the need to change.

?4

TURNING INSIGHTS INSIDE OUT Most B2B Marketing and Sales professionals believe they use an insights-based approach as part of their strategy.

Marketing and Sales teams typically produce four types of insight-driven content:

CONTENT CONFLICT

But there’s a disconnect between what Marketing and Sales people

view as most effective—and what they

actually produce.

IT COMES DOWN TO CONTEXTAcross all categories of insight-driven content, what really matters is context. Identifying relevant market data points is just the first step. The true keys to success:

Interpreting information to make it meaningful to client challenges

Crafting provocative questions and a distinctive point of view

Challenging the status quo—and differentiating in the market

Research based on survey results from 400 B2B marketers and sales professionals worldwide.

The right skills. The right story. For the customer conversations that matter most, create aligned insight-driven content for each stage of the buying cycle.

What we’ve learned

INDUSTRYANALYST

81%

Our survey results show

Looking to the future…

AnecdotalContent created in-house. Focuses on more tactical, day-to-day issues like best practices or lessons learned.

AuthoritativeContent incorporating the work of respected third parties like industry analysts.

CurrentContent centered on original, company- generated research and surveys.

VisionaryContent that leverages in-house expertise but looks to the future of the industry and defines what’s next.

1 2 3

As an objective expert…

MOST EFFECTIVE

Visionary

Current

Authoritative

Anecdotal

LEAST EFFECTIVE

MOST FREQUENTLY USED

Anecdotal

Authoritative

Current

Visionary

LEAST FREQUENTLY USED

INDUSTRYANALYST

INDUSTRYANALYST

POV

OURCOMPANY

OURCOMPANY

OURCOMPANY

®

DEVELOP MESSAGES: INSIGHTS

and giving them no compelling reason to leave their status quo.

Forrester Research found that 74 percent of executive buyers, once they commit to making a change, will go with the company that’s able to create the buying vision. That’s the company that’s able to drive unexpected urgency and uniqueness into the customer conversation. It’s the company that identifies unconsidered needs, and matches those needs to your unconsidered strengths.

Through our unique messaging development approach called Power Positioning, you’ll avoid the commodity messages that cause you to respond to stated needs with expected capabilities. Our approach allows you to develop content that creates the buying vision—showing your prospects a pathway to change, and giving them the urgency to do it now.

If you base your messaging on what your customers are telling you their needs are, you’re more likely to respond to those known needs with a set of expected capabilities.

The problem with creating this kind of “voice of the customer” messaging is that you’re going to be delivering commodity messages that won’t differentiate you. Why? Because your competitors are most likely relying on the exact same inputs from prospects and customers. And more often than not, you’re all responding with similar offerings.

As a result of this commodity messaging, your prospects will see little difference between your solution and their current approach. It also puts you at parity with your competitors in the commodity box. This is all a prescription for making your prospects and customers indecisive

DEVELOP MESSAGES: POSTIONING

74 percent of executive buyers, once they commit tomaking a change, will go with the company that’sable to create the buying vision. - Forrester Research

What percentage of your leads is converting to qualified pipeline? What about actual closed deals?

When it comes to marketing and sales enablement performance, these are the questions that matter most. That’s because there’s been a shift in how companies measure their performance. It’s now about demonstrating hard dollar impact on sales metrics, such as pipeline and revenue. And most companies are finding their content isn’t up to the task.

What’s your biggest challenge? It’s something we call the conversion gap, which is caused by a lack of alignment between the demand generation conversation and the sales-directed dialogue. As we discovered, the lack of coordination between these teams is rampant.

A recent Corporate Visions survey found that only 10 percent of companies believe they have complete coordination between demand generation and sales enablement/training. The survey also found that companies who shore up this area are seeing positive gains: 68 percent of companies who describe their teams as “coordinated” or “completely coordinated” believe this has a positive impact on their lead conversion efforts.

With Corporate Visions’ Power Tools, you’ll help marketers and sales enablement/training professionals develop a consistent, status quo-busting story that generates interest and converts it into opportunity. Our aligned content program will help you realize the pipeline impact you need.

DEPLOY TOOLS Closing the “Conversion Gap” with powerful demand generation content and sales enablement assets

MAXIMIZING THE PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT

Studies have shown that you remember only 10 percent of what someone says just two days after they say it. But that number jumps all the way up to 65 percent if what they say is accompanied by a visual. It’s called the Picture Superiority Effect.

But which type of visual actually maximizes the picture superiority effect?

Stanford University Business School professor Dr. Zakary Tormala asked over 700 people to watch a selling message delivered in one of three online videos. Each video included the exact same story being told the exact same way. The only difference was the visuals used to support that message.

1. Traditional PowerPoint – simple bullet points and stock photography

2. “Zen” PowerPoint – large metaphorical photograph and one simple, key phrase

3. Told as if someone was drawing it live for you on a whiteboard

The participants were then asked to answer a series of questions and asked to retell the story as they remembered it. This was done immediately after watching the video, and then repeated two days later.

So which version won?

RECALL More accurate and informative

ENGAGEMENT More interesting and thoughtful

CREDIBILITY More trustworthy, higher expertise

QUALITY Clearer and more compelling

PERSUASION More likely to follow and share

IMPACT Influenced communication

In each of these areas, we found a statistically significant difference in favor of whiteboard-style visuals

VS The advantages offered by whiteboard-style visuals are clear, and they give your team added incentive to drop the clicker, turn on the lights and pick up a marker.

DEPLOY TOOLS: DEMAND GENERATION CONTENT Insight-driven content for Demand Generation Teams

A Corporate Visions survey found that 80 percent of marketing and sales professionals feel their demand generation campaigns are insufficient when it comes to helping them achieve sales success. The same survey found that 65 percent of sales teams use less than half of the demand generation content their marketing department produces.

If your campaigns don’t give buyers a compelling reason to leave the status quo, you may be creating a lot of virtual consumption—meaning they like your content online, but they don’t do anything different as a result. And if your sales team isn’t using the content your marketing team creates, you could have as many rogue messages being made up and shared with your customers as you have salespeople.

To rise above the noise in the self-service conversation, your campaigns need to be geared for the “why change” conversation. Your assets, such as infographics, eBooks and videos, need to carry a unique and urgent message into the customer conversation—one that helps your reps get meetings and create the buying vision.

With Corporate Visions’ demand generation content, you can deliver insightful, provocative campaigns that capture buyer interest and create urgency around their status quo situation.

VideosInfographics eBooks

Being able to consistently create opportunity during the sales enablement phase is vital for your overall success. A recent Corporate Visions survey, which polled more than 400 marketers and salespeople, found that respondents identified the opportunity creation conversation as having the highest impact on helping salespeople achieve quota. Yet, the same survey found that only one in two salespeople believe they are prepared to deliver a compelling opportunity creation conversation after the lead hand-off.

It’s exactly this dynamic that’s behind the conversion gap. To connect the dots between demand generation and sales, you need the right content for this tricky enablement phase. That’s because you likely still have to convince your buyer to make a change and leave their current situation.

If your sales enablement content is geared for the “you versus them” conversation (“why you”),

DEPLOY TOOLS: SALES ENABLEMENT CONTENT Convince your buyer to make a change and leave their status quo

instead of the “why change” one, you may be giving your salespeople the wrong content for the wrong phase of the buying cycle.

For that first meeting, your salespeople need to lead a conversation that’s engaging, memorable and delivered with an eye to creating opportunity. Our Opportunity Creation Playbooks help your salespeople create urgency around a buyer’s status quo situation, while showing how your solution is uniquely qualified to resolve those risks.

Our Point of View and Solution Whiteboards empower your salespeople with a presentation that’s dynamically assembled in front of prospects. This tool addresses the “why change” conversation by helping your reps conduct a seamless hand-off between your campaigns and the first meeting. A visually dynamic tool, our point of view whiteboards give you a specific choreography that takes prospects from a provocative insight to your solution.

Opportunity Creation Playbooks

Point of View and Solution Whiteboards

You know how much is riding on your reps’ ability to articulate value in front of prospects and customers. So ask yourself: Are your reps telling your story on purpose, or by accident? Do your delivery skills integrate the provocative messaging from your demand generation campaigns? Are they consistent with the sales enablement tools you’ve deployed? And are they actually linking your solutions to your prospects’ business challenges?

Our skills training, backed by the decision-making sciences, helps your reps tell an engaging and memorable story for the three value conversation “moments of truth” that take place in every buying cycle.

To control every phase of your customer conversations, your salespeople need to:

• Create Value (Break the status quo and differentiate your solution)

• Elevate Value (Justify your business value and secure executive buy-in)

• Capture Value (Maximize the size and profitability of your deals)

These three value conversations are distinct but complementary—distinct in that they have separate objectives and outcomes and complementary in that mastery of each is required to communicate value across the customer conversation continuum. Our skills training program helps your salespeople have great conversations at all three stages—so you can get prospects to say “yes” to leaving their status quo and “yes” to choosing you.

DELIVER SKILLS Train your sales team to articulate value at each critical moment across the buying cycle

Analyst firm Sales Benchmark Index found that 60 percent of qualified pipeline elects to make no decision; they end up sticking with their status quo. The number is even higher in some industries.

The reason? Often times, when reps engage with a prospect, they start out by pitting the features and benefits of their solution against those of their competitors. This initiates a “commodity conversation,” with you and your competitors all scrambling to connect the same known needs to the same specified capabilities. The result is that your buyer sees little difference between you and their current situation, and they end up staying the course.

In reality, the majority of deals aren’t won or lost on a “you versus them” discussion. Analyst firm Forrester Research found that 74 percent of the time, executive buyers prefer the company that creates the buying vision. That means they’re more willing to give the business to the company that shows them a pathway to change—and gives them the urgency to do it now.

With our Power Messaging skills training, your salespeople learn how to defeat the status quo with a great “why change” story, highlighted by a distinct point of view that establishes a buying vision.

In the second part of the training, your team develops Power Positions that allow you to tell a compelling “why you” story—one that underscores your unique strengths and gives you clear competitive separation.

DELIVER SKILLS: CREATE VALUE Objectives: Defeat the status quo and differentiate from competitors

According to analyst firm IDC, 80 percent of B2B decisions are being signed by decision makers with VP or higher titles. Additional research shows that these executives seek conversations about their business nearly four times more than traditional product presentations.

In this value conversation, your reps need to build a business model that speaks to executive-level business concerns. To excel in this phase, your reps have to have the financial acumen and executive conversation skills to make the business case for your solution and free up the budget for an opportunity.

Corporate Visions’ Executive Conversations Skills Training program is specially designed to bridge the business value gap between the conversations you’re having today and the conversations executive buyers actually want to be having.

We do this by helping you overcome the three main causes of executive conversation failure. Our executive sales training gives you:

• Competence in the five key competencies required for selling business value. • Confidence in engaging executives in conversations about their business. • Compelling value proposition strategies that justify customer investment.

Most salespeople only get one opportunity to sell the business value of your solution to executives. You can’t afford to squander it by being unprepared to deliver conversations that speak to executive-level concerns. Our skills training program gives you the skills you need to have great executive conversations every time.

DELIVER SKILLS: ELEVATE VALUE Objectives: Build a business impact model and secure executive buy-in

Most companies push their reps to close larger deals, knowing those deals often come with discounts based on volume commitments.

But McKinsey and Company, an analyst firm, found that for every 5 percent price discount you give up, you need to increase volume by 19 percent. So, while you might’ve thought discounting would help you move the deal along, you’ve just made it nearly four times harder to make up what you lost.

Unfortunately, that 19 percent increase usually doesn’t happen in the field, because most salespeople aren’t prepared to capture or maintain the value of the deals throughout the buying cycle.

Most companies believe their salespeople do a good job preserving the value of their deals throughout the early stages, but that they lose value at the end of the process, when purchasing starts demanding a lower price. That’s typically when salespeople resort to late-game negotiation tactics to retrieve or protect their pricing.

But the notion that discounting only happens at the end of the buying cycle, once purchasing gets involved, is a misconception. In reality, you’ve likely been losing value throughout the course of your deal—not just at the end—through what we call “value leaks,” which happen as decision makers ask for things and salespeople give them away instead of exchanging value.

As a result, most salespeople don’t realize that they’ve been negotiating throughout the buying cycle, and that the things they’ve been giving away—demos, trial runs, early price concessions, meetings—have been leaking value from their deals.

Corporate Visions has a unique approach to helping you maximize the value of your deals. Through our program, your salespeople learn the behaviors and techniques that expert negotiators use to avoid unnecessary discounting and expand the size and profitability of your deals.

DELIVER SKILLS: CAPTURE VALUE Objectives: Protect profit margins and maintain deal size

ONLY CORPORATE VISIONS USES A THIRD-PARTY MEASUREMENT FIRM TO DOCUMENT CLIENT RESULTS

Enough with the opinions. Isn’t it time to

know if your investment turned into real-

world behavior change and quantifiable

results that can stand up to the scrutiny of

your toughest critics?

That’s why Corporate Visions has partnered

with BeyondROI, a leading third party

training performance measurement

company, to integrate high-level behavior

and results measurement into every sales

skills training investment. The 90-day post-

training assessment tracks the adoption,

behavior change and business impact of your

new conversation skills.

In all, more than 60 companies have been

reviewed 90 days after implementing

Corporate Visions’ Customer Conversation

programs.

By correlating performance to adoption

levels and behavior change, the third

party ROI firm tells us they can confidently

attribute the performance difference to the

Corporate Visions programs. In fact, the ROI

firm tells us that in all their years measuring

programs like this for companies, they’ve

never seen anything perform as consistently

well as Corporate Visions programs.

10-30% hard dollar return on investment

2-3x larger deal sizes of high adopters

On average, companies

have been able to

document a 10-30x hard

dollar return on their

investment in Corporate

Visions’ programs in just

the first 90 days after

they launch to the field.

They’ve documented

behavior change in sales

people. And, they’ve

discovered that high

adopters who use the

messages, tools and skills

more than 75 percent

of the time have deal

sizes that are 2-3x larger

than low adopters.

Furthermore, high

adopters demonstrate a

3-4x greater increase in

quota achievement than

low adopters.

3-4x greater increase of quota achievement by high adopters

The Three Value Conversations will help make you build a sales team that’s adept across the board at the conversations that create the buying vision and win the sale.

“A great conversation requires not only a strong story, but also the skills to deliver it. Three Value Conversations will help marketing—the story-builders—create the right message, and guide sales storytellers in using those messages to have unique, value-driven conversations with customers.” – Eduardo Conrado, chief innovation officer, Motorola Solutions

“Too often we take for granted that salespeople should just know how to have a great customer conversation… after all, that’s why they are salespeople, right? But, being able to talk with customers and communicating value are two different things. Three Value Conversations does a great job providing concrete concepts to help salespeople purposefully practice and master their customer communications skills.” – Juan Corsillo, senior vice president sales and marketing, United Rentals

“If you’re facing the pressures of commoditization and loss of control in the selling process, the Three Value Conversations is a must read. The book offers a “next practice” approach that helps steer the conversation in a way that clearly differentiates your solution from the sea of alternatives and positions you to create, elevate and capture value to set you apart. Thank you Tim, Erik, Conrad and Cheryl for collaborating on such an important topic—this is book will make a difference!” – Jim Ford, Executive vice president, TestAmerica Inc. and chairman of the Strategic Account Management

Association

“Procurement discussions are just that. The Three Value Conversations help us to have the right conversations, with the right people to drive the outcomes our customers want and we need, in order to drive the value that we are both seeking.” – Nick Alfano, senior vice president and general manager - food and beverage north america, Ecolab, Inc.

WE LITERALLY WROTE THE BOOK ON CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS

GET TO KNOW USThe best way to learn more about Corporate Visions is to meet us in person.

Attend a complimentary Executive Insights session in a city near you to learn how companies like ADP, Cisco, Motorola, UPS and DuPont are creating compelling stories and enabling their salespeople to deliver them in a remarkable, memorable way.

Register now for an Executive Insights session near you!http://corporatevisions.com/insights/events/executive-insights-sessions/

Join us for our annual Conversations That Win Conference. This is the only conference dedicated to your customer conversations. Watch prior year videos and learn more.

http://conference.corporatevisions.com/

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