Success Story:
Sales Impact featuring the Value Impact Process
How we helped one client bolster their marketing efforts and transform sales to outperform the competition.
Companies in the oil, gas, and chemicals industry often seek process automation, digital learning, and supply chain partners to bring their solutions to market. They execute complex, large-scale projects every year, and they rely on their suppliers to provide technology and process solutions that effectively manage cost, schedule, and risk.
Our client, an industry-leading OEM, had designed a new project execution approach that offered value to clients during any phase of a project’s lifecycle, from design and execution through operation. Their approach leveraged global standards, virtualized teams, established a common methodology, and applied efficient engineering to ensure a consistent and predictable means of delivering and servicing complex systems without cost overruns or schedule slippage.
The Challenge:
Our client’s competitors had a time advantage. They had already been operating their own programs successfully for five years and customers were becoming more demanding. By launching this new execution program, our client was looking for a major change initiative—convincing the market (and their own people) that they had the tools and systems in place to deliver their new project execution approach. They needed clear messaging, extended value propositions, and sales enablement tools to guide their marketing efforts. And they needed to get the sales force to move aggressively to outperform their competition.
The Solution:
Our client asked Sudden Impact Marketing to help bring their nascent project execution approach to market. We rolled up our sleeves and proposed a three-phase strategy: 1) Construct an industry-specific positioning and messaging framework to guide marketing content development and ensure a coherent and consistent brand story, 2) Create strong sales enablement resources for launch, and 3) Develop and deliver a sales training program that integrates freshly created sales enablement tools into a selling process specifically designed to meet the challenges of their complex ecosystem.
The synchronized, integrated approach we developed created efficiency in the delivery of value propositions, clear messaging, and a sense of common purpose. Further, equipping the sales force with a common communication platform and shared lexicon shortened the effort to build champions and gain program acceptance.
Our approach to positioning and messaging included auditing existing communications media, conducting interviews with subject matter experts, extracting relevant insights, and distilling complex information into a clear, compelling, and succinct brand narrative.
And our sales enablement package included individual value propositions for each of the elements that form the overall program story, a podcast series to offer a unique delivery mechanism for knowledge transfer, an active sales scenario builder to demonstrate the value of the approach, and an overall sales playbook.
The training was formatted for two different audiences: Leaders and Sellers. Leaders were a select group from across the world who were tasked with championing the program and coaching Sellers during their training. Their program was delivered over two weeks via multiple online sessions in different time zones, focusing on the role of sales leadership, assessing the sales force, mapping out a more aggressive front-end organization and developing the team to deliver results.
The Sellers program was delivered over the course of five weeks via one, 3-hour segment per week. Each segment taught a different technical component, a marketing component and a sales strategy component. The Sellers brought real-world pursuits to this training and the Leaders helped coach them throughout. From qualifying pursuits, planning account strategies, and building value propositions to delivering effective meetings and negotiating to close deals, the Value Impact Process was taught in short segments while working real-world deals and requiring demonstrated knowledge retention between classes.
Sales Impact featuring the Value Impact Process (VIP)
To differentiate yourself during the sales process, you must build a stronger connection between your marketing and sales organizations. Alignment and shared understanding of each other’s roles is essential to producing more opportunities and shorter sales cycles.
Our methodology is:
- Based on more than 30 years of implementation experience and evolution
- Proven through the success of many complex global businesses
- Delivered on-line, in small segments, over several weeks to increase retention by more than 50%
Our selling methodology aligns and integrates with marketing efforts to ensure:
- Competitive analysis that allows the seller to box out competition
- Relevant messaging designed to resonate with decision makers and influencers
- Greater win rates with key clients
The Results:
To date, the launch has been successful. The program is well understood, and initial client responses have been extremely positive. We will continue to track win ratios and test knowledge retention, then adjusting accordingly. Since this initiative represents a major change in approach, reinforcement and periodic checkpoints are planned to ensure long-term adoption and persistence.
Conclusion:
Our approach to combined marketing and sales development works for any company, irrespective of size, that possesses the ambition to grow.
Our marketing efforts are developed around a solid understanding of each client’s unique challenges and needs. And we tailor each creative campaign to present our clients and the solutions they provide positively and purposefully within the business ecosystem they inhabit.
Our approach to sales training focuses on dissecting active opportunities to enhance strategic sales skills and increase win rates, as well as developing the sales leadership team to ensure the successful implementation of those skills.