Driving customer obsession across your sales team starts with values. 

In my career I’ve worked with companies of all sizes to help develop their sales values, and bring them to life. Often considered a topic only for large companies, I insist that sales values must be established regardless of the size of the team.  

Sales values provide the anchor to any sales transformation. While at salesforce.com, my team and I created sales values that formed the foundation for all sales training & onboarding, deal cadence, and sales conversations. At another large technology company we developed sales values to align and motivate sales teams to become more customer focused. Both initiatives led to not only a measurable increase in revenue, but better sales team engagement and customer engagement.

Consider a set of accepted and adopted sales values to be synonymous with a ingrained organizational culture. Once you have a version of them created, your leaders will see how they can drive the messaging at their level and this long lasting impact this will have on your business. Additionally, you will gain a set of values to manage and coach to, and sales teams will have a value compass to influence their individual behavior and decision making.

How to create customer-obsessed sales values

The guiding principle of customer obsession is to know your own customers intimately, and to understand your customers’ customers. The creation of customer-obsessed sales values is best born from your customers, employees, and partners. Assemble a team with representatives from each group. Interview your teams. Ask your customers what is most important to them. Listen intently. Watch for themes. Prioritize what is most important. I’ve seen different teams lead this kind of initiatives from Marketing, Sales Operations, and Human Resources. Executive sponsorship of these initiatives is critical for implementation and longevity. 

While your customer-obsessed sales values become part of your DNA, the evolution of the best practices become fluid. You want to build a culture of sharing stories and experiences across your sales teams. The spirit of your sales values is nurtured with peer-to-peer sharing best practices. Document those best practice stories and celebrate them broadly across your entire organization. 

Operationalizing customer obsession within the Sales process

Being customer obsessed means understanding your customers’ most critical business issues and solving those problems. With customer-obsessed values in hand, your next step is to operationalize them -  or “bring them to life” with technology. 

You’ll want to map your customer obsession values to your sales process and systems. Look at each stage of your sales process and ask yourself : “How can we be more customer-obsessed in every stage of the selling process?”

One example for the prospecting and qualification stage, borrows ideas from the world of social selling and also reminds us to prioritize what is most important to our customers and prospects. Operationalizing this aspect of customer obsession in the sales process starts with full transparency of customer interactions across channel and department and could also demonstrate itself in the form of social integration/notifications, custom relationship mapping and workflows, reporting, and value driven coaching conversations in the sales process.

The options for operationalizing sales values and process via technology are endless and range from simple to complex. No matter what, the goal should always be to empower your sales team to seize every customer moment by equipping them with the right technology and processes to stay one step ahead. 

In our next two blog posts, we will share customer examples of how leading companies are operationalizing customer obsession within their sales processes.

Did you miss the first blog post in this series? Check it out here: Creating a Customer-Obsessed Sales Team.