You’re an expert in your field. You know how it works. You’ve built it from the ground up. You are passionate about your product but you just don’t know why it doesn’t sell.

Or rather you don’t know how to sell it!

You know that it requires a strategic approach and extensive planning to position it in front of the right buyers but your efforts have thus far fallen short. You even have a sales team but you don’t know how you can get the most out of them due to various reasons such as wrong go-to-market approach or not having a product market fit.

As Katherine Barchetti rightly stated, customers look at the business practices and how much you care about building a solution for them rather than making a sale and then disappearing.

“Make a customer, not a sale”

To be able to achieve excellence, sales leaders need to adopt a step-by-step approach to understand their niche where their product stands-out in the market. Identifying the right customer profile is a long game and the more you experiment with your selling techniques, the faster you come closer to the ideal customer profile. After that, you need to scale your operations!

Salespeople need to understand the ideal customer profile and create a focused approach around selling a new product. With an existing customer lineup, it's easier to understand the trend and follow the sales approach to bring new leads; however with new products, things are quite different.

Typically there are multiple stakeholders in a B2B sale but new product sales involve even more stakeholders for decision making because buyers are trying to adopt a new solution and they need validation from as many stakeholders as they can. In such cases, the salesperson is required to have more one-on-one interactions with customers to provide a full understanding of how their solution would impact customers’ day-to-day operations. Even if there is a downside to adopting a new solution, customers need to be aware of that.

Let’s go through some of the key points that are absolutely necessary to keep in mind while building the momentum for a new product. You need to deeply understand how the leadership team & salespeople work together to layout the process and closely work with customers.

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Look to the future

To be able to sell effectively, salespeople need to be able to see what’s happening today and also what is expected to happen in the future. They need to be able to predict what the market is doing and going to do. They need to know the problems that their customers are facing and the problems they are going to face in the future. One of the easiest ways to do this is by being strategic with data and tracking.

Deeper knowledge of what's going on in your customers mind helps you move strategically as opposed to just using your instincts. Many companies adopt Flyte to learn about customer sentiment on their product against their competitor's. This gives them the advantage of knowing what's coming ahead of the time.

Dealing with different challenges

You have to be adaptable. As the market changes you need to be able to change too. Salespeople often get caught up in how amazing they think their product is that they can quickly lose sight of the problem they are solving with that product. There will always be challenges along the sales road and how these are dealt which determines your sales figures. If the numbers are showing you that there is a problem. Don’t ignore it. Adapt.

In a small organization, it's easier to understand each sales rep's challenges and how they are dealing with the deal risks. On the other hand, in a relatively large sales organization, visualizing the deal flow and learning about potential risks earlier helps leaders to address issues in advance and turn an opportunity into success.

Showing perseverance

Successful salespeople don’t give up. That’s not to say that they keep going no matter what, but more than that they are flexible and keep adapting their sales processes. They have a mindset of constant improvement rather than endlessly offering the same thing unsuccessfully. Perseverance is not only the ability to keep focused when times are hard but also the willingness to find a solution.

Although sometimes getting to the depth of the problems to identify the reasons and then solving it may take longer for a salesperson. Having a platform that can work with you as your right hand and keeping an eye on everything that is going on on a deal to provide key recommendations can save a lot of time and improve your productivity by 10x or more!

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Learning at every stage of the deal

Great salespeople use the tools that are available to them. They track data, ask the right questions and listen to what their customers are actually wanting and asking for. They aren’t afraid to keep learning throughout all the stages of the deal.

Flyte provides performance and associated risks at every stage of the deal including stakeholders involved, deal velocity and client engagement to help leaders prioritize those deals that have higher potential of converting into revenue.

Trying to understand customer mindset

Ultimately this all comes down to truly understanding your customers. Once you understand what they want it will become much easier to sell your solution, i.e. your product. To get to understand your customers you need to be asking them what they want, not just assuming that your product will work for their needs.

Are you trying to convince your customer that your product will improve their day-to-day operations? Try out Flyte and build a strategic product roadmap by leveraging competitive insights!

Book a demo today and see the impact!

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Keywords: new products, long term focus, senior leadership, salespeople, coaching, learning process, product teams, strategic accounts