The Death of Relationship Selling: Time to Focus on Value & Outcomes

BoostUp CEO Sharad Verma recently sat down with Marcus Jewell, CRO of Juniper Networks, to discuss the trends he sees happening in the revenue space, its impact on sales, and his thoughts on them.

Marcus is a strong believer that the era of relationship sellers is over, and now salespeople must provide value during every interaction to be successful. But it doesn’t stop there. CRO’s and revenue teams must support sellers in this shift.

Revenue teams need to provide sales with the tools, engagement strategies, coaching, and support necessary to deliver insights, rather than connection.

To listen to the entire recording from the chat, click here.

What is driving the shift to value-selling?

In reality, this change was always going to happen, but it has accelerated by the sudden shift to remote work culture. With this shift, the organizational structure has become more fluid, but there is a focus on delivering (and maximizing) value for the business.

Where relationship sellers could make a significant impact before by simply building connections. Now organizations crave value, and they demand that those who sell into them deliver it in spades.

How to use data in value-selling.

“Rather than stage presence, sellers need data skills,” says Marcus. But that doesn’t mean they should just spit out numbers. Salespeople still need to build trust. The key is quality over quantity, “the right activity at the right time.”

If a team focuses solely on activity numbers, they will not succeed. The number of calls placed, emails sent, or meetings held all lack context. Too often, salespeople undertake sales activities just for the sake of numbers. Unfortunately, this only hurts deals.

Especially at the senior levels, any hint of an automated, templated, or pre-made outreach goes straight to spam.

Instead, take the time to come up with insights, says Marcus. Every phone call or email should have an outcome that is useful to the recipient. Sp any ask for time should be accompanied by an insight.

Value-selling gives a competitive advantage.

Rather than focusing on generating the largest activity numbers, sellers need to humble themselves and be passionate about finding data that can actually help the customer. In today’s crowded, highly competitive marketplace, the insights provided by value sellers stand out and sets the tone for highly productive conversations.

Where to hire value sellers today.

When it comes to hiring, training, and coaching value sellers, Marcus says a great place to look is outside of sales. Seek out those who think outside the box and possess data skills—individuals with backgrounds like engineering, data science, and literature. Sales is no longer just a place for hard-driving sellers, and many different types of people can and are being successful.

How to hire, coach, and train value sellers.

Marcus believes that it is incredibly difficult to train people to become data-oriented value sellers. Instead, it is an intrinsic skill. Therefore, organizations should instead focus on coaching to hone the skills that individuals already possess.

Keep coaching sessions open. Marcus says that sales are a process of “next best actions” and to focus on what sellers shouldn’t do while leaving the possibilities of what they can do open.

How sales enablement helps value sellers.

“Sales enablement is the group that curates information that needs to be delivered to sales,” says Marcus. Sales teams get a lot of noise. Marketing, product, engineering, support, all want to deliver messages to them. This bombardment creates a lack of focus and convolution that results in messages losing their true meaning.

Instead, your sales enablement team should focus on gathering the information that sales needs, translating it to a format that they can easily understand and digest, and present it to them in a usable manner.

About BoostUp

BoostUp.ai empowers your entire go-to-market team with the actionable insights required to deliver value during every interaction.
With complete insights into sales engagements, as well as AI-driven risk scoring, BoostUp helps sellers prioritize deals and perform the best next actions within them.

For revenue leaders, BoostUp helps build alignment across your team to improve win rates, shorten sales cycles and drive predictable revenue and growth through efficient forecasting and opportunity management.

To hear the entire recording of this fireside chat, click here.