How To Design Your B2B Sales Conversations

You have to talk to your leads. After all, effective sales conversations are crucial to closing deals and building lasting client relationships in B2B sales.

According to a study by Invesp, 80% of leads don’t translate into sales, and failing to nurture those leads is the main reason for this issue. This gap highlights the importance of well-designed sales conversations that address client’s needs and position your solution as the best choice.

Understanding your client’s pain points and leveraging technology are vital as you develop the right message to attract and retain potential buyers. This guide will examine essential elements that will transform your sales interactions and improve your success rates.

Quick Takeaways

• Sales conversations educate and build consensus among multiple decision-makers.

• Thoughtfully designed sales conversations simplify the sales process and provide a consistent framework for comparing performance.

• Alignment with buyers ensures all key points are covered and enhances effectiveness.

• Designing sales conversations provides insights and identifies risks for the entire organization, informing product marketing, training, customer service, and sales management.

Why Design Sales Conversations

For complex B2B solutions or value sales, “how you sell” is more important than what you sell. This sales type requires educating and gaining consensus from numerous buying team members. Square 2 Marketing reports there could be 40 or 50 touchpoints leading up to a sale, so developing a plan is crucial. At this level, it’s ALL about sales conversations.

The objective is to create value for customers and differentiation for vendors through conversations that deliver insights and useful ideas. Sales conversations must be relevant to the interests of each buyer and based on their stage of consideration to optimize sales.

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We’ve learned that emails perform best when developed using proven design principles and A/B testing. Why wouldn’t we apply the same rigor to more complex and important sales conversations?

By thoughtfully designing key touch point conversations, you:

• Simplify a complex and daunting set of tasks for salespeople
• Improve sales team efficiency by not requiring each person to figure out each conversation for themselves
• Accelerate new salespeople’s time to proficiency
• Establish a baseline for comparing performance across rep execution
• Ensure they are aware of all the popular sales terms
• Make feedback happen naturally, with a focus on specific aspects of each conversation

Designing effective sales conversations is an important part of the broader trend of creating “a compelling customer journey.”

Sales Alignment

Poor sales alignment with buyers is a common B2B sales weakness. The problem is that sellers feel a natural urgency to accelerate the sales process.

Over decades of coaching salespeople, we know salespeople regularly fail to complete their full meeting agendas. By not managing their “Air Time,” they miss the opportunity to confirm key meeting points and establish the next steps.

The value of sales conversation design goes far beyond improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and selling experience of individual salespeople.

This exercise also informs people across the organization in ways they almost never experience. It’s an opportunity for specific checklist points to be fully considered and appreciated by product marketing, training, customer service, and especially sales management.

These areas, when considered, are sources of insights and risk identification. They improve understanding of specific support salespeople require.

Examples of client epiphanies we’ve seen include the realization of the need for research, customer explanations, or better proof points. Often, visual and other conversation support tools are identified as well.

Adopting a Provocative or Challenger Customer Sales Approach

The CEB work documented in the book “The Challenger Customer” introduces the idea of developing “commercial insights” based on buyers’ mental models of their business. It provides research that indicates a major selling obstacle is dysfunctional buyer decision-making. Specifically, the buying team’s inability to reach a consensus on the right approach to solving a business problem is an issue.

If you apply this sales approach, you must help your salespeople “make functional buying groups, not just find them, by taking control of the purchase process and ensuring collective learning happens.”

This step involves salespeople facilitating group interaction to “get the entire group on board with a broader vision of what they should be doing in the first place, irrespective of supplier.”

CEB concludes that collective learning is “by far the single biggest driver of deal quality we found in all of our data.”

Clearly, these kinds of conversations require design. Organizations must develop the competency to design many types of sales conversations effectively.

Steps To Design Sales Conversations For Key Touch Points

Pre-planning your dialogue isn’t about scripting every conversation. Think of this as similar to an architect who designs building specifications. The builder then applies their skills in the art of execution. However, the core design is provided by an architect following careful planning, consideration, design, and testing.

These are the primary activities we suggest you conduct:

Map Your Sales Conversations

Leverage your buyer’s decision process from your content strategy or sales playbook development. Assess the conversations and decisions at each buying stage to identify your key touch points. Google refers to these as ZMOTs — zero moments of truth.

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Use Case Requirements

Start with the most critical touch points. Define conversation and content use case requirements for each engagement. Identify, in bullet fashion, options and considerations for:

• The context for each conversation
• Key stakeholders who participate at each stage or touch point
• Business problems and underlying causes
• The topics or themes you’ll discuss
• Possible buyer decisions
• Activities, questions, info requirements, and sources
• Your sales objectives
• Desired outcomes
• Next steps
• Competitive considerations

What To Say in Your Conversations

The source for “what to say” and “how to say it” should be available from your content strategy work. You can quickly extract and edit it for each stage and context factor. Otherwise, interview your best reps for this information.

Frame the key conversation points based on:

• Business problems-causes
• Impact (Costs)
• Solution approach: Required capabilities
• Topics, key Points, and insights to discuss or deliver
• Value model
• Decision questions or objections
• Customer education points and support

How To Say It

Develop these sections in as simple and modular a way as you can. Focus on providing recommendations and key conversation guidance points more than full narratives. Include specific language, such as words and phrases to use and avoid when it makes a significant difference.

In performing this work, you may discover fresh insights. Be sure to add those to your content strategy frameworks.

You’ll also want to:

• Develop Sales Analysis Questions for diagnostic conversation and the core sales practice of “selling through questions”
• Put language to the “what to say” points
• Develop each core conversation, such as point of view, storyline, value
• Design core explanations of key points and insights, stories, subject expert quotations, metaphors/analogies

Ensure you highlight specific words and phrases to use and avoid and document them in a conversation template. Two important conversation elements that are frequent and egregious omissions from sales guides are analysis questions and stories.

Ask the Right Questions

Sales professionals know that asking the right questions the right way is a primary sales technique. Provide your sales teams with those questions.

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This technique applies to suggestions for conversation starters, ways to raise important points, and the entire diagnostic conversation.

Along with questions, stories are an important conversation technique. However, salespeople, especially new hires, need an inventory of sales stories, customer testimonials, and examples that align with key touch points and selling purposes. Providing well-constructed and easy-to-deliver stories with visual support puts your salespeople on the right track, no matter their experience level.

How To Deliver Your Message

Since many sales conversations are not conducted live and in person, consider how your salespeople will conduct or deliver sales conversations.

Use this exercise to define the visual and other content salespeople need to make their conversations effective. Once you’ve completed this work, you should have a robust list of content your sales organization requires.

If your sales training organization has developed training modules for key conversation elements, capture those links for this work as well. If not, this work will identify the most important and challenging conversations for your salespeople.

Develop sales practicums to help them learn and practice these conversations. We recommend you introduce each discussion with a video that models quality delivery. Then, have salespeople practice with a live, interactive role-play.

Leveraging Technology in Sales Conversations

Technology plays a crucial role in enhancing B2B sales conversations. Leveraging various tools enables your salespeople to streamline their processes, maintain better relationships with clients, and deliver more compelling presentations.

Using CRM Tools to Track and Manage Conversations

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, like Salesforce or HubSpot, are essential for tracking and managing your sales conversations. These tools help you keep detailed records of all interactions with your clients, including emails, phone calls, and meetings.

Using a CRM helps you access important information about your clients, such as their preferences, previous conversations, and purchase history. From there, you can personalize your approach and build stronger relationships, improving your sales effectiveness.

Utilizing Video Conferencing Tools for Remote Sales Meetings

Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet are indispensable for conducting sales meetings. These tools allow you to connect with clients from anywhere in the world, making it easier to schedule and hold meetings without the need for travel.

Video conferencing also adds a personal touch to remote interactions, as it enables face-to-face communication, which helps build trust and rapport. Features like screen sharing and virtual whiteboards can enhance your presentations and make your meetings more interactive and engaging.

Incorporating Sales Enablement Tools for Presenting Solutions

Sales enablement tools, such as PowerPoint, Prezi, and interactive demo platforms, help your team create and deliver compelling presentations. These tools showcase your products or services in a visually appealing and interactive manner, making it easier for clients to understand and appreciate the value of your solutions.

Interactive demo platforms allow clients to experience your product firsthand, which can be highly persuasive. You can tailor your presentations to address the specific needs and pain points of your clients, making your sales conversations more effective.

Craft the Narrative

Designing effective B2B sales conversations involves thorough preparation, structured interactions, active listening, and leveraging technology. Researching your clients, understanding their needs, and using tools like CRM systems and video conferencing help you create more personalized and impactful sales conversations.

Communication starts with the awareness stage, so developing the right brand content strategy is vital. That way, potential buyers will feel like they already know your company, making the sales process more manageable.

Marketing Insider Group can help push your brand forward with our Content Builder Services. Reach out to learn more or book a free consultation with our team.