Strategies for Elevating B2B Companies’ Consultative Sales Using Product Managers
Introduction
A product manager’s job is to connect the dots between what a company sells and who its customers are. They bridge the gap between what customers need and what a company can offer. As the customer’s advocate within the company, it’s up to them to see the whole customer experience from beginning to end and work with teams across the organization to make sure every touchpoint is excellent.
But in order for product managers to be effective advocates, they need to first understand consultative selling. Consultative selling is a style of selling that emphasizes building relationships and understanding customer needs before proposing a solution. It’s a more collaborative approach that requires more effort upfront but can result in longer-term relationships and more sales.
If you’re looking for ways to elevate your consultative sales using product managers, look no further. Below, we’ve outlined three strategies that will help you get started.
Identifying the KPIs to Gage Success
You don’t want to be churning and burning through product managers every few months, so you need to set some key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you gauge success.
Some things you might want to consider include revenue growth, customer satisfaction, market share, product adoption rates, and more. Once you have a good understanding of what you’re trying to achieve, you can start setting goals and measuring progress.
Before you can determine if your product is successful, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure success. This will vary from company to company, but some common KPIs for B2B companies might include:
- Defining business goals and then choosing relevant KPIs
- Measuring user engagement and feature usage
- Identifying key actions and churn rate- Determining customer satisfaction
- Monitoring product adoption rate
- Analyzing market share
- Keeping an eye on revenue growth
- And more
No matter which KPIs you choose to track, the important thing is that you have a system in place to measure progress and identify areas of improvement.
Developing Product Knowledge to Inform Sales
As a product manager, you are in a unique position to help elevate your company’s consultative sales process. You have the product knowledge and an understanding of how your products can help solve customer problems. You also have the ability to see the customer’s perspective and understand their needs.
This knowledge can help you inform your sales team about how your products can be used to solve the customer’s problem. You can also help the sales team develop strategies for how positioning your products in order to meet the customer’s needs. In addition, you can help the sales team understand what objections they might face and how to overcome them.
Your knowledge of the product and the customer will help you be a valuable asset to your company’s sales team as they work to build relationships and close deals with customers.
https://blog.originlearning.com/6-ways-product-knowledge-can-improve-sales-success/
Designing Solutions and Streamlining Processes
You can also help by designing solutions and streamlining processes. This is where your experience with the product and your knowledge of the market comes in handy. You can help the sales team develop proposals and presentations that are both accurate and persuasive.
You can also work with them to identify potential customers and map out their buying process. This will help the sales team to focus their efforts and come up with more persuasive arguments. And, by keeping your finger on the pulse of the market, you can help ensure that the company’s products are always aligned with customer needs.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hunkemoller-selects-bamboo-rose-to-support-digital-plm-and-sourcing-operations-amidst-growth-plans-301712574.html
Offering Value-Added Services With Each Sale
As a product manager, you can help B2B companies elevate their consultative sales approach by offering value-added services with each sale. For example, you could provide guidance on how the customer can get the most out of the product or service they purchase.
This could include providing tutorial videos, lending assistance to professional customers, or helping to answer questions they have related to the product or any extras that come with it. For example, your company could offer free consultations to customers who purchase a specific software solution. This value-add helps cement loyalty and build trust with your customer base — which is always important for any business.
When offering these services with each sale, be sure that you are constantly tracking and analyzing customer feedback to identify areas where you can improve or expand upon your value-add offerings. Doing so will not only help your B2B customers enjoy a better experience, but it will also help you continually improve upon how you offer consultative sales solutions within the B2B space.
Using Data Insights to Drive Conversations
The product managers can leverage the data insights to have more meaningful conversations with the customers. Data insights provide key indicators and trends, which can help product managers identify customer problems in a better way. This allows the product managers to provide tailored solutions to the customer and make their sales pitch more effective.
Data-driven research is essential for consultative sales as it allows product managers to identify opportunities, anticipate customer demands, and stay ahead of the competition. Product managers should use data analytics tools to collect customer information such as buying behavior, preferences, likes, dislikes, and other relevant data points. With this information, they will be able to develop strategies that enable them to answer customer questions before they are even asked. This can give the customer an impression of expertise and boost their confidence in your service or product.
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/future-of-sales-2025-deliver-the-digital-options-b2b-buyers-demand
Building a Connected Ecosystem of Partnerships
As a Product Manager, you can look for opportunities to build partnerships with other companies. In a B2B environment, creating an ecosystem of partners that serve a cohesive purpose and offer is the key to success. By creating ties with other companies, you can more effectively offer customers a complete package that is tailored to their particular needs.
For example, if you are selling a product related to online marketing and want to offer customers comprehensive solutions, partnering with agencies that specialize in content creation or analytics can help you unlock greater value from your offerings. Furthermore, since these partnerships can provide the back-end services required by customers, they can be used as selling points during consultative sales conversations.
Ultimately, building partnerships can create real benefits when it comes to consultative sales. They provide access to resources and expertise in areas such as customer service or fulfillment that may be missing from your own organization. This not only helps accelerate customer onboarding but also ensures customers get the most out of their purchases.
Conclusion
Product managers have a unique opportunity to help their organizations elevate their sales efforts. By leveraging their knowledge of the products and their understanding of the customer, product managers can help bridge the gap between sales and engineering, and create a more consultative sales process.
Product managers are in a unique position to help their organizations upscale their consultative sales process. They are experts on the products, and they also have a deep understanding of the customer. By bridging the gap between sales and engineering, and by creating a more consultative sales process, product managers can help their organizations sell more effectively.
