Empowering Your Sales Team to Build Customer Preference

In the MedTech and B2B sectors, establishing customer preference is vital for business success. It influences your chances of being shortlisted, favored in tenders, winning deals, and maintaining healthy margins. While brand recognition and product quality are important, your sales channel is the most effective tool for convincing customers to choose your innovations.

All customer-facing staff, from account managers and clinical teams to customer service representatives and distributors, play a critical role in shaping customer perception and preference.

We've previously discussed broad strategies to increase preference for your technology in this article. Today, we’ll focus on the pivotal role of account teams and other customer-facing staff in creating and enhancing customer preference, and we'll delve into specific strategies that support your salesforce to do what they are best at.

To skip straight to 11 strategies to help your sales teams build preference, click here.

The Role of Your Salesforce in Increasing Customer Preference

Your sales team is your most effective channel for building customer preference. Here’s why:

1. Relationship Building and Trust: Sales teams can build personal relationships across the decision-making unit, becoming trusted advisors.
   

2. Understanding your customer’s pain points – Salespeople can quickly customize propositions to meet specific customer needs. Through their intimate knowledge of customer struggles, account teams can showcase how your technology can overcome challenges with realistic and practical examples.
   

3. Quick objection Handling: Salespeople can swiftly address objections and uncover hidden hurdles. They can also engage with clients outside formal meetings to pick up on unvoiced concerns.
   

4. Competitor differentiation. With an in-depth understanding of customer goals and difficulties, sales teams can position your technology as the superior solution among a sea of competitive offerings.
   

5. Experience Sharing: As trusted advisors, sales specialists can share insights and experiences from similar accounts or global examples of your technology’s impact. They can do this at opportune moments, not just in formal presentations.
   

6. Unified  Simple Messaging: Account managers can act as a single point of contact, ensuring consistent messaging across your organization. They can translate complex topics into customer-friendly language, filtering out corporate jargon and unnecessary details which often overwhelm the customer in these complex details.
   

7. Product Demonstrations: Good sales teams provide tailored demos for hands-on understanding of the product. They highlight key points and focus on the drivers that will influence customer preference.
   

8. Human Touch: Finally, and most importantly , personal interaction from an in-person sales manager adds a crucial human element to the sales process, often tipping the balance in favor of your technology.

Supporting Your Salesforce for Maximum Impact

Knowing that your salesforce is critical in establishing and maintaining preference for your solutions, let’s now look at strategies to maximize their effectiveness. Here are 11 practical steps to help the sales teams positively influence the consideration, and evaluation phase of the customer’s decision-making journey, and ultimately close the deal.

1. Comprehensive, balanced and continuous training.  It’s obvious but a sales team needs to understand the benefits of your technologies so that they can effectively pitch and tailor the proposition to their clients. It is however something which is often neglected or is treated with a one size fits all approach. When deciding on a training program, avoid overloading them with technical details; instead, provide enough knowledge to interact meaningfully with clients. Opt for continuous training throughout the year rather than a single information dump. Finally, tailor training to different roles within your company, offering in-depth sessions for specialists like clinical trainers.
   

2. Give them something to believe in.  Fostering belief in your solution and company translates into authentic passionate and convincing pitches. You can achieve this through motivational events, sharing impactful case studies, and providing opportunities for regular interactions with a diverse set of customers. It’s also important to share roadmaps and future visions to instill confidence that your technology will deliver on the promises that your salesperson has staked their reputation on.
   

3. Market Shaping: Use marketing to build awareness and establish your portfolio's differentiators ahead of sales interactions. Promote a clear product proposition via digital channels, newsletters, PR activities, and tradeshows, enabling salespeople to focus on answering questions, tailoring offerings, and building relationships when they meet the customer face to face. Shaping the market towards your innovations ahead of time helps the sales team open doors and build upon that strong messaging.
   

4. Support the entire decision-making journey. Free up time for your sales teams to concentrate on cultivating high-quality leads and developing preference for your technology, by providing support at every stage of the customer decision journey—from demand generation to reputation building to deal closure. Examples of support include lead generation campaigns, thought leadership initiatives, and active participation in trade shows. Additionally, consider smaller yet impactful activities like creating customized benefits summaries for specific customers and refining tender responses.
   

5. Increase the number of engagement opportunities: Create both formal and informal opportunities for sales teams to interact with customers, ensuring comprehensive engagement across all decision-making stakeholders. Consider organizing your own, exclusive programs, participating in industry-wide events, hosting customer-specific technology days, and exploring remote options such as educational webinars to broaden your outreach. Reimagine tradeshows beyond mere awareness-building to focus on cultivating preference. Increase dedicated time and space for intimate, detailed discussions, and connect customers with subject matter experts as well as your management executives. In addition, give sales teams extra reasons to visit customer sites, for example by sharing compelling reports or commemorating company and customer milestones. Don’t just rely on formal meetings and tradeshows.
   

6. Content and Demos: At the heart of preference building Is ensuring a customer has a reason to believe your technology is better than the alternatives. Help your sales teams build this trust by providing relevant content and demo materials, tailored to the different stakeholders within the DMU, which they can use in formal and informal engagements.
   

7. Success Stories and References: Following on from this, sharing success stories, developing reference sites and facilitating peer to peer meet ups all help your sales team to showcase your solution’s effectiveness.
   

8. CRM Infrastructure: Implement robust CRM systems to support post-sale relationships and ongoing customer engagement. Inform customers how to maximize their investment and inspire them with future potential. Keeping up communications connects the customer to you, even when the sales team are not present.
   

9. Competitor Analysis:  Equip your sales team with competitor analysis and battle cards to help highlight your strengths. Your sales team more than most is best positioned to highlight the advantage of your portfolio over alternatives.
   

10. Align them with your brand. Brand is a key pillar of building customer preference. Your sales team is a representative of your brand and so aligning the sales teams with brand messaging, and encouraging them to become product and brand ambassadors, all influences a customer’s belief in your company credibility.
    

11. Raise their profiles as individuals. Elevate key sales teams standing by positioning them as industry thought leaders, company spokespersons, and showcasing their expertise. Invest in their presentation skills and provide talking points aligned with your messaging. This will help give even more credence to their role as trusted advisors.

Conclusion

Your sales team is the most effective way to increase preference for your solutions. By optimizing their role and enabling them to excel, you unlock immense potential for your business. To explore the best sales enablement and preference-building strategies for your company, reach out to Unplain Jane. With our extensive experience in sales excellence, communication, and marketing, we can help you differentiate your technology and drive business growth. Contact Unplain Jane today to start transforming your sales strategy and boosting your business success.