Sales Execution—The Value Proposition

We just finished our Sales Execution Workshop yesterday and we enjoyed a tremendous turnout from our executive teams at our expansion stage portfolio companies. You can find the agenda here.

It was a great opportunity for similar stage companies to share ideas, learn some better ways to execute, and take away some great tasks for 2011.

One compelling piece that comes to mind was our session on value proposition. We asked each company to share their value propositions with each other and give feedback. We positioned the discussion to address the “highly sought after” salesperson we wanted to hire for our companies.

It was eye opening!!! Many struggled. This is very typical, however, in my experience with this stage in a company. It shows confusion in messaging between marketing (product marketing) and sales teams. Quite often, they are not on the same page.

Think about it, the new hire you are pursuing is looking at you like a customer; they are assessing their opportunity to succeed based on your sales methodology and on their answers to these questions, “Would I buy this solution?”, “Will I make a lot of money?”, and “Can I hit the quota based on this?”.

My suggestion is quite simple: build your value proposition and test it with ALL points in a sales process. The prospect, the customer, the market, THE SALESPERSON!!

Most importantly, involve both marketing and sales when developing it. You will nail it, trust me!!!