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Building Value
Understanding the executive customer’s mindset and creating strategic relevance for product and service offerings
 Program Benefits
Is your salesforce tuned in to the unique needs and interests of its executive customers? Building Value, from BTS, helps sales professionals engage executives effectively by providing them with an entirely new framework for their sales efforts built on how value is created. Combining their own global executive research with customized data from select executives identified by each customer, BTS reveals what executives believe are the essential components for salespeople to be credible, gain executive access, and ensure maximum relevancy.
Building Value helps salespeople:
- Understand the mindset and expectations of the executive customer.
- Establish and build credibility with key executives.
- Understand when key executives are involved in the buying cycle.
- Master an effective model for an executive-focused sales strategy.
- Examine and assess gaps in their skills.
- Successfully partner with above- and below-the-gap customers.
- Understand why it's essential to call on all organizational levels in their accounts.
- Increase their strategic relevance for their products and services.
- Create a specific account plan for their highest-potential prospect.
Program Description
This exciting salesforce training program is based on contemporary research. Using quantitative research techniques, survey and interview data provide specific information on what key customers consider necessary for salespeople to be credible and gain executive access.
Building Value embraces the principles of both experiential and action learning. Each implementation is strategically customized to ensure relevance and participant retention. Prefaced by individual prework, this one-day program includes two half-day components that leverage breakthrough map technology.
The first half of the program focuses on how to create strategic relevance based on data collected from key executives while the second half introduces the Building Value model, an effective tool for identifying and leveraging the interests of above- and below-the-gap players. This program is strategically customized and tied to real prospects and accounts.
Participants learn in teams of six to eight, tapping into the full power of their collective knowledge and experiences. The program concludes with account planning for participants' actual accounts and prospects, using the Building Value methodology.
Map One: Executive Buyers
1 − Mind of the Customer: What do executive customers expect of salespeople? Participants explore the executive’s expectations and discuss the gap between their understanding of an ideal salesperson and that of surveyed key executives. Customization of this module allows salespeople to understand their own executive customers’ expectations.
2 − Establishing Credibility: How can a salesperson build instant credibility with an executive? Participants consider the challenge of building credibility and identify their own best practices. Then, they discover the three specific behaviors executives look for to assess credibility. Once again, data from executives can be customized to reflect the participants' own customers.
3 − Buying Cycle: When are executives involved in purchasing decisions? This module, which can also be customized to the company’s own customers, shifts participants' perspectives from thinking about their own selling cycle to considering their customer's buying cycle. Participants wrestle with research that shows executives are involved in many different stages of the purchasing process. They discover that they can influence the purchasing decision by addressing executive concerns even if executives aren't in the meeting.
4 − Selling Styles: How can a salesperson sell value? Participants examine three types of salespeople: those that sell products, those that sell solutions, and those that sell value. They begin to see that selling value involves different discussion topics, different kinds of partnerships, and different outcomes than conventional selling.
5 − A Look in the Mirror: Participants reflect on customer conversations and examine their current selling strategy. Then, they assess how different types of exploration with customers create different kinds of strategic relationships.
This first half-day session finishes with a debrief in which salespeople consider the specific changes they may need to make to their own strategies and approaches.
Map Two: Becoming Strategically Relevant
1 – Sales Conversations: Participants are introduced to the Building Value model. They determine how conversations with customers above- and below-the-gap differ and consider the impact of value-oriented conversations at the highest levels of the model.
2 – Above-the-Gap Knowledge: Diving deeper into the Building Value model, participants begin to develop an executive-focused strategy. They examine the top layer—their customer’s external environment, how they add value to their customers and compete in the marketplace. Then they look at the next layer—their customer’s internal operations, the business processes customers use to create the value they present to the market. Participants then consider the importance and timing of getting information about these top layers.
3 – Below-the-Gap Knowledge: Participants explore the bottom two layers of the model—solutions and products, where customers are looking to solve problems and fill needs. While these layers are generally managed by people below the executive level, participants learn why addressing them is still critical to making the sale.
4 − Discovering the Gap: Participants explore the gap between the top and bottom portions of the model and review the most important areas of questioning. Participants can now describe the layers as well as identify and leverage above- and below-the-gap players.
5 − Gap Analysis: Working with a custom sales scenario based on their own industry and customers, teams apply their discoveries to real-world, client-specific situations. They strategically analyze an account, determine above- and below-the-gap players, and create questions to ask both groups.
6 − Pre-Call Planning: Prior to the session, each participant identifies a target prospect and comes prepared to discuss the opportunity. Using what they’ve learned, participants analyze their account and prepare a concrete action plan, which they then share with a partner. This module may be included in the program or used as a reinforcement activity in a subsequent sales meeting or coaching discussion.
7 – Final Debrief: To close the session and begin putting their learning to work, participants process the whole Building Value experience and discuss the changes they will make in the field and in their account planning activities.
Implementation/Customization
Building Value is a one-day program, but it may also be implemented as a half-day program using only the first map. The program requires one trained facilitator per four to six teams of six to eight people each. All of the data on the first map is customized as the result of BTS interviews with five to seven of the client's executive-level customers. The scenario used in the second half of the day is customized around current customer and competitive issues. Sample and practice executive conversations are customized to reflect the actual questions participants ask their customers and prospects. Specific language, forms, and best practices may also be integrated into the learning experience.
BTS - World leader in Customized Business Simulations
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