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Communicating Value
Facilitating value and creating alignment with the customer through interactive sales meetings
 Program Benefits
The days of sales calls dominated by slide presentations are coming to an end. In today’s business-to-business environment, customers expect interactive discussions. Communicating Value, from BTS, provides salespeople with the skills to facilitate sales meetings that involve groups of people. Based on global research with customers across multiple industries, BTS reveals what customers are really thinking and how they assess value during sales meetings. This program equips salespeople to align with what customers value and use an accelerated approach to selling.
Communicating Value helps salespeople:
- Gain credibility, create an advance, and understand what customers expect from a sales meeting.
- Analyze customers’ expectations and learn how to communicate using an accelerated approach to selling.
- Learn and use the Communicating Value model by role-playing the beginning, middle, and end stages of a simulated sales meeting.
- Establish strategic call objectives and key messages.
- Align offerings to customers’ business challenges. • Use stories and models that provide memorable references for the customer.
- Maximize listening skills and aid customer comprehension through high-impact questions.
- Understand different communication styles, how they interact, and how to accommodate different styles.
- Understanding the competing needs in a meeting and learn how to manage conversations.
Program Description
This innovative salesforce training program explores a subject that is often overlooked by salespeople—the interactive sales discussion. Using contemporary research from customers around the world, Communicating Value challenges salespeople to facilitate value and take an intentional approach to their sales meetings. The program features a customized, three-layered case study focused around a sales meeting with a typical customer organization.
Communicating Value embraces the principles of both experiential and action learning. Each implementation is strategically customized to ensure relevance and participant retention. This one-day program includes four components that leverage breakthrough map technology. Participants learn in teams of six, tapping into the full power of their collective knowledge and experiences.
The first part of the program helps participants learn how to align with the customer in the sales meeting. They explore how to gain trust, build credibility, and create an advance as they consider the evolution of customer expectations. Participants then learn a model to help them take an intentional approaching to sales meetings that communicates value and aligns with customer expectations. Then, they consider the tools and techniques—call objectives, key messages, business challenges, storytelling, and models—used in the exploration stage of the sales meeting. Next, participants examine how to facilitate reflection through listening and high-impact questions. Last, participants learn how to conclude and inspire action in their sales meetings by understanding different communication styles and balancing competing needs. The program is interspersed with a three-layered case study used by teams to role-play and process the beginning, middle, and end of a sales meeting.
Map One: Aligning with the Customer
1 – Gaining Trust and Credibility
Participants examine how customers view the opening of an initial sales meeting between a customer and a salesperson. Then, they learn which actions customers believe create credibility during an initial meeting and consider how customer responses might differ if they were meeting with salespeople whom they already knew.
2 – Creating the Advance
Participants analyze the end of the meeting, reflecting on actions of salespeople that customers say makes them willing to schedule a follow-up conversation or continue their discussions. They determine the customers' top choices for the advance and reflect on common themes. Then, they consider how customers assess the value of a meeting with a salesperson.
3 – What Customers Want from a Sales Call
Participants consider the opening and closing of a meeting. Then, they determine what they think customers expect from a sales call and report out to the group.
4 – New Expectations for Sales Calls
Participants gain insight into customers' changing expectations and the different approaches salespeople take. They consider the different communication needs for each sales approach and consider new skills they might need to develop to communicate in a way that supports the accelerator approach to selling.
5 – The Communicating Value Model
Participants analyze the Communicating Value model and its stages of Align, Explore, Reflect, Conclude, and Act. The entire program is configured around this model. Then, they use the first layer of a customized case study to role-play the first ten minutes of a sales meeting. Two participants act as salespeople, running the initial stage of the meeting, while the rest of the group takes on different roles within the customer organization. Tables debrief after the role-play.
Map Two: Exploring an Approach
1 – Call Objective and Key Message
Participants establish their call objective for the Explore stage by considering how they want the customer to Conclude and Act at the end of the meeting. They also establish their key message and how it differs from a call objective.
2 – Business Challenges
Participants read through business challenges or opportunities their customers might have and discuss which challenges are most important to the customer in the case study. They consider the three challenges most critical to the customer and discuss how their company's offerings can address those selected business challenges.
3 – Storytelling
Participants look at how to use stories to communicate the value of their offerings. They explore the elements of a good story and consider a situation where a customer had similar challenges to those of a customer in the case study. The debrief includes best practices for storytelling in the context of sales meetings.
4 – Models
Participants learn how simple models and visual pictures can provide a powerful platform for interactivity as well as a strong, memorable reference for their audience. Participants practice using models and discuss which one would be most useful with the customer in the case study. Then, teams role-play with two salespeople and at least one customer to deliver a three-minute presentation to the customer in the case study.
Map Three: Facilitating Reflection
1 – High-Impact Questions
Participants consider how they can help customers process what they have heard through high-impact questions. They review questions they might ask a customer and write high-impact questions they could ask the customer in the case study.
2 – Listening
Participants learn that listening is not passive and requires a specific set of skills. They listen to an audio recording of an interview and test their listening skills. Then, they determine techniques for effective listening and also reflect on their client's non-verbal communication.
3 – Practice
Participants engage in layer two of the case study and engage in another role-play of the next ten minutes of the sales meeting set up in the same manner as the first, focusing on the Explore and Reflect stages of the model. Tables debrief after the role-play.
Map Four: Inspiring Action
1 – Styles
Participants examine various communication styles, including their own. They analyze how these styles interact and the best ways to communicate with each style. Then, they consider their most challenging customer's style and how they can better accommodate this style.
2 – Balancing Act
Participants discuss how to facilitate and balance competing needs in a meeting. As a team, they decide where each balancing tip that describes key actions salespeople can take to manage conversations falls on the five key continuums and whether it moves the conversation more to the left or the right.
3 – Practice
Participants engage in their final round of practice, the Conclude and Act stages in the third layer of the case study. They role-play the last ten minutes of a sales meeting. Tables debrief after the role-play.
Implementation/Customization
Communicating Value is a one-day program. It requires one trained facilitator per four to five teams of six people each.
This program features a customized, three-layered case study focused around a sales meeting with a typical customer organization. Participants role-play the beginning, middle, and end of a sales meeting throughout the program. Specific language, forms, and best practices may also be integrated into the learning experience as appropriate.
BTS - World leader in Customized Business Simulations
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