Value-Based Selling: 7 Tips to Transition Your Sales Team

You’re probably considering making the switch to value-based selling…

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After all — 87% of high-growth companies prefer it.

However, transitioning your team to a new methodology of selling can be a struggle:

• You have to convince internal stakeholders it’s worth implementing.
• There needs to be ongoing training, not just a one-time exercise.
• Sales managers need to advocate for it, not just sales enablement.
• It takes time for reps to ramp up, which may cause deals lost in the short term.

This article will give you everything you need to know to transition your team to value-based selling, so you can see the ROI of value-based selling, faster, and get less pushback from your team.

Table of contents:

• What is Value-Based Selling?
• 7 Tips to Smoothly Transition Your Team to Value-Based Selling
• Transitioning Your Sales Team to Value-Based Selling?

What is Value-Based Selling?

Value-based selling is all about benefiting the customer throughout the entire sales cycle.

It requires your reps to focus more on actively listening to better identify pain points during the discovery phase and throughout the sales process. Instead of constant pressure to close the deal, reps focus on long-term value creation for the buyer.

Doing this lets your reps demonstrate the value of your solution. This allows them to easily connect your solution to the impacted business metrics.

Benefits of Value-Based Selling

Transitioning your team to value-based selling takes time.

But when done correctly, it can help you:

• Land larger deals
• Shorten sales cycles
• Create more urgency to buy

Which will help your team more easily hit your sales goals.

7 Tips to Smoothly Transition Your Team to Value-Based Selling

1. Create Strong Customer Personas
2. Train Your Reps to Identify Pain Points in Discovery
3. Drive Urgency by Leveraging Pain Points
4. Build Trust with Relevant Customer Stories
5. Hold Consistent Training Sessions
6. Leverage real-time sales Enablement Tools
7. Be Patient and Expect a Temporary Dip In Performance

1. Create Strong Customer Personas

Empathy is your friend when transitioning to value-based selling.

This is why creating well-researched customer personas is so important. Because they give your reps a deeper understanding of your target customers.

Leveraging customer personas will allow your reps to better identify pain points. Which they can then connect to the prospect’s impacted business metrics.

When creating your customer personas — you’ll want to directly interview your customers and get answers to the following questions:

• What are their demographics, industries, etc…
• What keeps them up at night? (primary pain points)
• What’s stopping them from overcoming their challenges?
• How does your solution help them overcome their challenges?
• How do their pain points present themselves as symptoms?
• What will happen if they DON’T solve their challenges?
• What will happen if they DO solve their challenges?

Don’t base any of your answers on untested assumptions.

Instead, test your assumptions by asking your customers directly to discover new customer insights.

After answering these questions, you should have enough information to create a few customer personas similar to the one below.

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2. Train Your Reps to Identify Pain Points in Discovery

You can’t demonstrate value to prospects if you don’t understand the challenges your solution solves.

This is why you’ll want to train your reps to ask thoughtful questions that dig deep into the prospect’s pain points. For example:

• “What issues are you currently facing with XYZ?”
• “What’s preventing you from solving this today?”
• “Why is solving this so important to you?”
• “What would happen if you never solved this challenge?”
• “What other solutions have you tried?”
• “What didn’t work about those solutions?”

Asking these types of questions will give your reps a deeper understanding of your prospect's challenges — allowing them to more easily communicate the value of your solution.

The key here is asking thoughtful, open-ended questions. And then actively listening to their response, probing deeper until you uncover the root of their pain.

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An easy way to help your reps perform more insightful discovery is by using a real-time in-meeting enablement tool. So you can be confident your reps are uncovering pain that moves a deal forward. (Also, this makes the transition to value-based selling faster and easier.)

3. Drive Urgency by Leveraging Pain Points

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Want shorter sales cycles? 

Then have your reps create more urgency.

An easy way to create more urgency is by training your reps to connect the prospect’s pain points to the business metrics those pain points impact.

Then reps need to show prospects that the pain of acting now — will be greater than the status quo. Otherwise, prospects won’t buy unless you give them a reason to buy now and not later.

Doing this will help your reps show the prospect they need an urgent solution to achieve a positive business outcome. And that they can’t provide the solution on their own.

However — your reps shouldn’t be directly communicating this to the prospect. Instead, they should help the prospect arrive at this conclusion on their own (because people rarely push back against their own conclusions).

4. Build Trust With Relevant Customer Stories

Humans are obsessed with stories.

They’re one of the best ways to communicate ideas to other humans.

That’s why you’ll want to train your reps to leverage relevant, anecdotal customer success stories – so your reps can show the prospect they understand what they’re going through — and that they’ve helped similar people solve similar challenges.

It’s important these stories describe similar companies, challenges, pain points, desired outcomes, etc. Otherwise, they won’t be as impactful because the prospect won’t be able to relate to them.

Trying to think of relevant customer stories on the spot is hard. And often, they’re not well-documented in a central place.

Luckily, real-time sales enablement tools can solve this exact problem. 

They’re able to surface relevant customer stories based on live conversations. So your reps won’t look unprepared scrambling to think of stories on the spot.

5. Hold Consistent Training Sessions

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70% of learners forget what they were taught 24 hours after training.

To make the transition to value-based selling smoother — you’ll want to hold consistent enablement sessions where you can:

• Explain the new methodology
• Go over playbooks
• Answer questions
• Give actionable feedback

Enablement training sessions should be done with individual reps, as well as the whole team. This way, you can be confident that everyone is retaining and applying the new information effectively.

It’s crucial you hold these enablement sessions consistently and with structure. Or else the whole transition will take longer and more severely impact your team’s performance.

6. Leverage Real-Time Enablement Tools

People are very resistant to change…

They’ll drag their feet, ignore your advice, and fall back into old ways of behaving. 

To limit pushback from your reps — you’ll want to make the transition to value-based selling as EASY as possible. Real-time, in-meeting enablement tools are a great way to make your transition much smoother and faster. 

These tools let you integrate helpful, relevant content within your live calls, giving your reps the tools they need to be successful. While also allowing you to make sure they’re selling YOUR way. Some of the content you’re able to integrate includes:

• Sales playbooks
• Battlecards
• Customer stories

There are lots of great tools to help you centralize content, surface the right content in Salesforce, and even coach your reps after the meeting is over.

However, most sales enablement tools don’t help during live sales calls. Aircover takes a more proactive approach to conversational intelligence. Our Enablement AI platform can surface real-time, in-meeting content based on live conversation, helping your reps increase their win rate and average deal size.

7. Be Patient and Expect a Temporary Dip In Performance

The biggest mistake you can make when transitioning your team to value-based selling is expecting amazing results overnight.

Transitioning to a new style of selling can be jarring. So it’s important you’re patient and understanding with your reps.

You should expect mistakes, expect pushback, and be empathetic to their concerns — while gently guiding them in the right direction.

Expecting too much, too fast from your reps will only make them resist the change more, making the whole transition to value-based selling an uphill battle.

If you want positive results quicker, with less friction and pushback, Aircover lets you surface just-in-time content based on live conversations. So your reps have the tools they need to win more revenue, allowing you to see the ROI of value-based selling, faster.

Transitioning Your Sales Team to Value-Based Selling?

Transitioning to a new method of selling can be challenging and overwhelming for your team.

To speed up the transition and reduce pushback, you’ll want to make the switch to value-based selling as EASY as possible.

Aircover allows you to bring sales enablement to every meeting. By surfacing just-in-time content, based on live conversations — you can give your reps the tools they need, right when they need them.

Help your reps win more revenue.

Request access to Aircover today to implement value-based selling across your sales organization.