How to Win More Deals by Flexing Your Consultative Selling Muscle
High-touch sales are hard to scale. But the good news is — they don’t need to be. Winning only a handful more large deals a year, or accelerating the closure of even one large deal a quarter, can make a tremendous impact on your company’s performance. This is even more true during a recession when businesses are more cautious with their spending and seek greater value and personalized solutions to address their specific challenges and uncertainties.
Enter consultative selling, a customer-centric approach that puts value over pitch. It allows anyone in a sales or sales-supportive role, to foster meaningful relationships, understand customer needs deeply, and provide tailored solutions that genuinely address their pain points.
What I love about consultative selling is that it’s more of a mindset than a framework. Ideally, it could also be practiced by any non-sales function in your company, especially product, design, and engineering, when speaking with a customer or prospect.
Hi, my name is Ofer Luft and for the last 6 years I’ve been building partnerships with companies who either power their own products and services using the Kaltura video platform or resell our platform to their customers. Before transitioning to sales and business development, I spent 8 years in Kaltura in pretty much every customer-facing role, which gave me different perspectives on where enterprises want to go, the challenges they face on their way and approaches to help them accelerate getting there.
The “Future Acceleration” Approach
If you’re considering a switch to sales or are already selling but feel you’ve hit a ceiling, I’d like to share an approach I call Future Acceleration. This can help you more quickly feel comfortable in the consultative selling mindset, and is somewhat similar to Stephen Covey’s “Begin With the End in Mind” principle. But here, we empathetically and altruistically begin with our customer’s end in mind, not our own.
With Future Acceleration, we try to envision the best future for our customers where they get to where they want to go without us, and then we try to figure out how partnering with us will accelerate their getting there.
Applying Future Acceleration to Pre-Sales
Let’s look at some of the key components of a Future Acceleration pre-sale engagement:
- Always be on brand
This includes any experience you create to communicate with your customer, be it the traditional deck, or a highly-customized demo. Learn your customer’s brand style guide and incorporate their colors, fonts, and tone of voice. Except for one media company who told us in advance, “Please don’t demo using our brand”, I find that communicating your value using your customer’s brand is perceived favorably.
It also serves as a soft, subliminal unifier across the stakeholders you’re talking to, regardless of their role or intent. Not only does it show you went the extra mile to get to know them, but it makes it nearly impossible for them not to envision what their future could look like with you as their partner. High-touch deals can often involve between 20–60 different stakeholders during a sales cycle, and in the case of a horizontal platform like Kaltura, which can offer value to multiple BUs across the enterprise, this number is only increasing.
The only way to accelerate the closing of a high-touch deal is to reach stakeholder alignment faster. Adopting your customer’s brand when communicating your own value makes stakeholders ease in much… well… easier :)
2. Speak in your customer’s voice
- Learn what’s top of mind for your customer by reading their latest 10-K, watching a video interview with your buyer’s C-level, or researching their latest product launch. In less than an hour or two of research, you can form a short list of value points and align them to your own company’s values. This alignment will help you feel, and convey, a stronger sense of partnership from the get-go. You then turn these into talking points which you can use as anchors during your pitch or even turn them into story segments during your demo.
- Use your customer’s content to tell your story as their future story. During your research, collect publicly-available digital assets produced by your customer’s marketing teams and incorporate the messages they convey into your story. This can not only help you visualize what’s top of mind for your customer when presenting, but you can now add your own spin in a way that feels more organic to their story. The result: multiple stakeholders can now spend fewer cycles figuring out where your company’s story meets theirs.
- Become a loyal fan. Understand how the customer differentiates themselves from their competition, note their sources of pride and buy into their vision. If you’ve invested in proper research this one will almost come naturally.
Consultative selling is often interpreted as applying FOMO and FUD, where you are expected to ‘nudge’ your customer towards where their competition already is. While pain is a great motivator, especially during recessions, I often find that it’s easier to build mindshare, especially across multiple stakeholders, when you buy into their company’s vision. When you can all gaze together towards your customer’s north star, I find it’s easier to show them how to get there faster.
3. Success patterns
You might be thinking right now, “I get the value, but this sounds too tailored, too labor-intensive and I will need to start from scratch with every customer engagement.” Your first few attempts at Future Acceleration will indeed require more effort and investment, and as with any consultative engagement, you will indeed need to tailor things per customer.
But, you can create repeatable success and lower your efforts moving forward by thinking, and working, in patterns. Borrowing from the world of Pattern Language, “success patterns” are a set of best practices combined into one experience, demo, code recipe, or project plan that, once adopted by the customer, can help them take the fastest path to their best outcome with the minimum effort or mistakes. Interview your delivery teams or professional services, learn how they meet their goals faster, and incorporate generic versions of their project plans, code recipes and workflow diagrams into your pre-sale engagements.
You now have tried-and-true reusable assets that only require light tailoring using the two other components of our approach. Note that here you’re not even pitching your product’s value; you are literally showing the customer their near future once you partner. Using success patterns helps you pitch not only the unique value of your product and technology but the unique value of your company’s real magic — its people — the delivery teams that will help your customer be successful once you partner. Incorporating success patterns into your story will result in having the customer stay grounded in the future you’re pitching.
The Challenge of High-Touch Sales? Keeping it Fast-Paced
One of the biggest challenges in a high-touch sale is that in each engagement with the customer, you are speaking with multiple different stakeholders, each bringing their own perspective, needs and challenges. Combining all three key components of Future Acceleration can help you design a sales engagement that can assist all the different stakeholders to get oriented, then ease in, then buy into what you have to say.
Now that we’ve defined the building blocks of a Future Acceleration sales engagement, let’s look at two examples to see how our approach can accelerate a high-touch sale:
A. “What if I told you I can help you accelerate your C-level’s vision?”
When researching a large tech company, I came across an interview with my buyer’s C-level, who voiced their intent to make their enterprise product “more consumer-grade”. This hinted they have both a large tech debt and are not meeting today’s users’ expectations of offering a personalized experience.
This info helped us revise our introductory pitch. In our first demo meeting, which had over 20 stakeholders join in, we started with a quote by the C-level from the article. We then emphasized Kaltura’s broadcast-grade capabilities, our consumer-grade experience components, and our track record catering to millions of subscribers in the Cloud TV space. We then showed examples of how we’re bringing our tech and experience to the enterprise world via our Event Platform.
We didn’t spend much time on slides and spent most of our storytelling using a branded, tailored event experience with nothing but the customer’s content and messaging. The demo story was told from the perspective of a loyal customer who loves the brand and its products.
To lead them further towards a future of personalization, we created a success pattern in the form of a standalone demo powered by our APIs and experience components. The demo combined multiple personalization UX and workflows from our own products, with optimal configurations done by our delivery teams in previous projects. The customer could now visualize not only how they could lower their TCO by using us for the heavy lifting of personalization, but also how to launch a consumer-grade experience faster than they ever imagined, using the engineering resources they already had.
Following the “Always be on brand’’ component of the Future Acceleration approach, we built the customer’s demo “on brand” and even used their product’s micro-copy, graphics, and tone of voice. We made it easy for the multiple stakeholders reporting to the C-level to see the vision of their executive accelerated, with us.
B. “Let’s jump to the future and see the simpler, more native way you’ll run <flagship event name> with us.”
One of my favorite ways to research a customer is to attend their webinars and events. By attending a few of those, we picked up how to speak in a certain customer’s voice prior to our first demo. But we also picked up something else — we could see their presenters struggling to maintain focus as they had to not only present but also monitor the chat, bring people on stage, and do other activities that required switching contexts between multiple tools and applications.
We tailored our demo to look identical to their current event experience and plugged several of our experience components (video player, chat widget, virtual live room) right into the UI. Halfway through the demo, we switched telling the story from the perspective of the attendee to that of the presenter and were able to show their stakeholders a near-future where they could do it all from one app, with no context switching.
Seeing our components faux-embedded into their event experience and our ability to tell our story using the customer’s voice had all stakeholders buy into this near future, and into our ability to help get them there faster.
In both examples, the Future Acceleration approach helped create faster alignment across a large number of stakeholders using a small number of meetings, effectively allowing to wrap up the pre-sale phase much faster and move on to the sale phase.
The Impact and KPIs of the Future Acceleration Approach
As you can tell by now, the main KPI we use to measure the impact of the Future Acceleration approach on high-touch deals involves the duration of the pre-sale phase. While the approach requires more effort upfront, we have seen a nearly 50% reduction in the duration of the pre-sale phase of high-touch deals where the approach was used. Given comparison was done against the average duration of closed-won deals above a certain MRR, it would be interesting to add the pre-sale-to-sale conversion rate as another KPI, as the stakeholder alignment the approach offers should also directly contribute to a higher conversion rate. Beyond the faster speed, the approach also helped us defend a higher price and maintain higher margins, impacting both revenues and profit and helped us hit both quarterly and annual goals.
But more importantly, the Future Acceleration approach helped us build a sense of partnership faster, often even before the contract was signed. That in turn helped us during the post-sale phase, especially with any inevitable bumps in the road, which in turn led to faster upsells and impacted account growth.
Are you using similar approaches, or interested to learn more about the Future Acceleration approach? Let me know in the comments!
