How to stand out in competitive deals

With very clever use of AI

Standing out in a competitive deal process is getting exponentially harder as the number of similar vendors in every category continues to grow and buyers face increased scrutiny over every purchase they make. Even the smallest purchase requires engaging multiple stakeholders and the number quickly escalates to 4-5 on a $50k deal and 10+ once you hit $100k.

Throw in zoom meeting fatigue and a growing preference for async communication and you have two new realities for enterprise salespeople:

1. You can no longer expect to meet every stakeholder in a buying process.

2. Your stakeholders will hold a number of internal meetings to discuss your deal, to which you will never be invited.

How do you solve these two problems?

Here’s how 99% of sellers solve them (and the problems they run into)

• Force buyers through a rigid sales process. Most sales processes are designed to qualify buyers before showing value. While this approach works when you have one or two stakeholders, it breaks down with larger buying groups because you have to keep going back to discovery when new people join and your deal process grinds to a halt.

• Wait for live calls to add value. Most salespeople are trained to show value on a call to ensure the salesperson can control the messaging and handle objections, for example with demoing a product. However, trying to schedule multiple demos for multiple stakeholders just extends the sales process and risks the deal momentum dying.

• Gate access to key information until a live meeting with a decision maker. Most salespeople are trained to use key information like competitive insights and proposals as a carrot to get a decision makers to attend a call. While this can work for very important purchases, most decision makers are stuck in meetings all day and unlikely to get directly involved in your sales process.

• Send long follow up emails with attachments and links that nobody reads. The more people involved, the more information everyone needs, however people only care about what’s relevant to them. It’s unrealistic to expect your champion to keep track of what everyone needs, let alone repackage all of your materials to make them relevant.

Here’s what the top 1% of sellers do to stand out

• Meet buyers where they are in their process. In every group of stakeholders you have people who are eager to move forward and people who are hesitant to commit. Trying to fit them all into a single sales process is impossible. The best sellers know that fast movers don’t want to be overwhelmed with information whereas the slow movers need their specific questions addressed.

• Stand out through their service rather than relying on product features. When a buyer is looking at three vendors that do the same thing for a similar price, the differentiator is always the quality of service. The best sellers know that the only way to demo your service quality is by giving your stakeholders a personalized experience during the sales process.

• Enable champions to sell internally. Most champions are not trained in how to sell, and even those that do sales for a living are not trained in how to sell your product. The best sellers know that to enable your champion to sell internally, you have to make it dumb easy for them to send the right information to the right person.

• Keep everything centralized for all stakeholders. Nobody has the time to sift through email to find PDFs and links to decks to answer their one burning question. The best sellers know that publishing all the relevant materials in one place maximizes the likelihood of buyers finding the right information.

The new way to solve this is with a digital sales room, like Journey

Digital sales rooms are an exciting new type of tech that allows sales teams to create a centralized communication hub of content for a buying committee, from the first call through to closing and into onboarding. It’s an essential tool for closing enterprise deals that involve large numbers of stakeholders.

I’ve teamed up with Journey, the leader in the digital sales room category to tell you about how they have solved this problem for 100+ companies including Reddit, Insightly, LaunchNotes and Lawtrades.

Journey is a storytelling medium that brings your deal content to life for your buying committee. You can keep telling the story after the meeting ends and drive deal momentum by:

• Bringing slides, videos and mutual action plans together in one place, so your buyers don’t have to sift through email chains.

• Updating content without having to resend it, to ensure everyone is looking at the same version.

• Receiving notifications on which contacts are engaging with which materials, to identify who may be silently killing your deal.

• Prioritizing which deals are most likely to close, so you can get them across the finish line.

Journey also makes very clever use of AI to massively cut down the time sellers have to spend on building assets to put in the digital sales room, making it easier for your team to adopt it and see the value in it. Your team can:

• Create slides and business cases with intelligent prompting instead of having to search for templates or start from scratch every time.

• Personalize the branding in a presentation with a single click instead of having to manually update every slide.

• Summarize call recordings so that stakeholders don’t have to watch the whole video.

• Embed an AI chatbot so that stakeholders can ask questions about the content to find what they need.

Here’s how Reddit is using Journey to close deals with advertisers

Check out Reddit’s Journey here.

Here’s how LaunchNotes is using Journey to help get through procurement

Check out Launchnotes’ Journey here

Want to learn more?

Check out this Journey to learn more - there's a special sign up link which gives Revenue Architect readers 2 months free. Like, literally go see a Journey about Journey. It’s a game changer.

PS thank you to Journey for supporting this issue of the newsletter!

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