Collaborative selling: how to beat the competition

In a highly competitive environment, your ability to differentiate is the key to your sales success.

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At a time when simple product differentiation is no longer enough, the best sales teams stand out thanks to a more engaging and collaborative sales process. They actively involve their prospects throughout the sales cycle and co-construct the solution with them.

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A collaborative sales process breaks down into 7 steps, which consist of:

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• establishing a climate of trust with your prospects from the outset
• accurately explore their needs
• co-construct a relevant and mutually beneficial solution.
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In this article, we explain how to set up a collaborative sales process to engage your prospects and keep your competitors at bay.

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Are you standing out from your competitors thanks to a more efficient sales process?

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Creating a competitive advantage often means differentiating your product/service. That's important, but not enough these days. In the face of growing B2B competition, product differentiation is increasingly difficult to achieve.

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Faced with this considerable challenge, modern sales teams are innovating and differentiating themselves through the sales journey they offer their prospects. They are building a more collaborative and transparent buying experience, and are thus one step ahead of the competition.

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How can you shape a more collaborative sales cycle to differentiate yourself from your competitors?

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This is the question we answer in this article.

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A high-performance collaborative sales process breaks down into 7 successive stages, which we've transcribed for you in the form of practical tips.

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Step 1. Diversify your prospecting channels

Diversifying your points of contact with your prospects not only enables you to stick to their habits, but also exposes them to your entire value proposition.

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For example: invite them to your webinar, share your latest article or Linkedin post with them, send them your latest video, and so on.

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The more time your prospects have had to educate themselves about your offer prior to an initial exchange, the more constructive your interactions will be, and the less they will be tinged with commercial overtones. It will be easier to build on these foundations to position yourself as a business partner (and not a salesperson!).

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Step 2. Establish a climate of trust

As soon as contact is established, your watchwords should be :

• collaboration
• co-construction of a solution
• the desire to establish a long-term relationship.
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These elements will help you establish a climate of trust and credibility right from the start.

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Practical tip:

There's no doubt that collaborating with your prospects is already one of your concerns.

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But are you openly communicating this desire to them during your first exchanges? Have you rethought your sales cycle to make more room for collaboration? Have you adapted your CRM to make it more customer-centric?

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Actively collaborating with your prospects requires in-depth adaptation of your sales processes.

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Step 3. Carefully qualify your prospects

Collaborative selling favors quality over quantity: prospects who don't meet the qualification criteria must be eliminated. This selectivity is not a luxury, it's a necessity: the collaborative approach is time-consuming, so you have to pick your battles. By effectively qualifying your prospects, you'll be able to devote your full attention to those with the highest probability of "closer".

To be truly effective, this selectivity must permeate your entire sales organization: from general sales strategy (high-level) to calls and visios carried out by sales teams (daily tasks).

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Practical tip n°1 :

To optimize your qualification, formalize your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona with your sales team. By making this step objective, you can avoid differences in assessment between sales teams. The quality of your pipeline is homogenized and aligned with the highest standard.

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Practical tip n°2:

Advice to managers: during your transition to a more demanding qualification, you won't be able to avoid certain misunderstandings among your salespeople.

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"Why do I have to give up on this prospect? I'm sure I'll close him!". And sometimes they'll be right.

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But don't let that put you off your approach. Your aim is to create a repeatable sales process with a predictable closing rate (you're not gold diggers!).

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Practical tip n°3:

Stricter qualification means fewer sales opportunities: your sales pipeline is shrinking. This may seem staggering, but it's normal. Concentrate on the quality of your pipeline: your closing metrics will improve over time thanks to more qualitative interactions with your prospects.

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Step 4. Dedicate time to developing innovative solutions

On average, B2B buyers have already covered 57% of their buyer journey before making contact with sales (2). So they've had plenty of time to explore their needs and study competing options.

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What they want from you is guidance in developing a solution that meets their needs.

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How do you achieve this? By combining your business expertise (you know your solution better than anyone) with the challenges described by your prospects. Your added value lies precisely in your ability to contextualize your solution within the problems encountered by your prospects.

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The result is an innovative solution that you and your prospects can work on together. In other words, a solution they wouldn't have found on their own.

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Your priority here should be to create maximum value for your prospects, rather than demonstrating how good your product/service is. Take the time to convince them that you're the right person to meet their needs before you sell.

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Practical tip:

Prospects often insist on arranging a demo very early in the sales cycle. Be firm and explore their issues in detail first. Explain that you're acting in their best interests: a detailed understanding of their needs is necessary to ensure that your solution is relevant. For your part, use the information you gather to prepare an ultra-personalized and convincing demo.

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Step 5. Engage your prospects in a spirit of partnership and co-construction

Now that you've explored your prospects' issues in detail, you can present your product/service with a view to co-constructing a solution with them. Always approach your solution from the angle of your prospects' issues (customer-centric approach) to position yourself as their partner.

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Actively involve your prospect in the co-construction of the solution. They need to get their hands dirty!

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The benefits are many:

• You co-construct a solution that is truly adapted to their needs.
• You'll establish yourself as a privileged contact for your prospects, and they'll understand that you're there first and foremost to help them. They'll think of you every time they need clarification.
• You strengthen your prospects' commitment to the project. They'll become promoters of your solution and help you navigate their buying journey.
• You ensure that your champion will be able to "sell" the subject internally, especially to the economic buyer.

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Practical tip:

Here are a few reflexes to convey maximum added value with every interaction with your prospects:

• Keep your meetings short but frequent. This will enable you to share your expertise and quickly refine your understanding of your prospects' issues. The closer your contacts are, the better you can control the trajectory of the deal.
• Between each appointment, soak up as much knowledge as you can about your prospects' sector and business challenges, to gain in relevance. Don't hesitate to call on experts (colleagues, ex-employees, mentors, etc.) to quickly build up your skills.

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Step 6. Validate each step with your prospects

An optimized sales cycle is punctuated by formal milestones.These frequent synchronizations enable you to make sure you haven't lost your prospects along the way (a little look in the rear-view mirror is always useful) and to prepare for the next steps.

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Thanks to this "stop and go" approach, it's much easier to identify any objections and deal with them quickly. If a deal-breaker does surface, you can be sure of identifying it as early as possible.So you can allocate your time efficiently between deals.

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By building your deal layer by layer, you gradually remove objections. Closing becomes a matter of time, not eventuality.

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This way, you avoid the collar at the end of the sales cycle. They enable you to make your sale in the short term, but rarely engage your new customers on a sound footing.

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Practical tip:

Formalize these milestones with your prospects and establish objective criteria that allow you to move on to the next stage. This will help you to abandon less promising opportunities more easily, and you'll be better able to manage the frustration linked to the efforts you've already invested (sunk cost).

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Step 7. Keep in touch with your customers, even after the sale

The gong has rung: the sale is "closed".

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Congratulations!

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But this is only the beginning.Remember: collaborative selling is about building a long-term partnership with your prospects.Closing is just one step in this journey.

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First of all, take care of your onboarding. This is a delicate and sometimes anxiety-provoking phase for new customers. An uncontrolled transition between the sales and account management teams can leave your customers thinking they've made the wrong choice.

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Regardless of your internal organization, support your new customers with a clear onboarding roadmap. Communicate upcoming deadlines, train future users, take care of technical integration, etc.

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Secondly, help your customers to ensure that the ROI you've sold them is actually achieved. Customer satisfaction is the key to a long-term relationship, which will bring you many future sales opportunities.

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Practical tip:

Close collaboration with your new customers is all the more crucial if you have a SaaS business model. The subscription logic requires you to repeatedly demonstrate the relevance of your solution over time (the days of multi-year licenses are over!).

The collaborative approach enables you to build a loyal and committed customer base. The result is healthy cohorts (with low churn) and more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

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For a more in-depth look at the notion of the collaborative sales process, you may wish to consult the book Collaborative Selling: How to Gain the Competitive Advantage in Sales by Tony Alessandra and Rick Barrera. We've drawn on it for this article, enriching it with tips to help you integrate the collaborative approach into your sales processes in practice.

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Now you know what a collaborative sales process looks like in practice for a sales team, and how it enables you to outperform your competitors.

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In our next article, we'll take a closer look at how the collaborative approach materializes on a day-to-day basis for salespeople in their interactions with prospects.

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In particular, we'll be answering the following questions:

• What are the methods of the best collaborative salespeople?
• How can you introduce collaboration into your sales cycles?
• Self-diagnosis: how collaborative is my sales team?
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^{(1) Competition is growing in B2B markets, particularly in the SaaS sector: whereas a SaaS company had to face less than 3 competitors in 2012, it now fights against an average of 9 competitors to reach closing.
Source: BMC}

^{(2) CEB}

^{(3) Buck Rodgers, former Vice President Marketing at IBM and author of The IBM Way}

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