“We always knew we had a good story, we just didn’t know how to tell it.”
Thousands of sales and marketing managers have collected their last paycheck with this line, but Lindsay Allen, vice president of marketing for Superior Essex, one of the largest communications wire and cable manufacturers worldwide, was determined not to be among them.
Allen came to Superior Essex in November 2011 and found a global sales force that was “peddling a commodity product to a well-established industry.”
“We were doing OK, but there was an opportunity to do a lot better,” he said.
Allen and his team immediately set to work transitioning the sales and marketing message from a product feature dump to a solutions-oriented pitch.
“We needed to focus on our customers and what’s important to them to help solve their challenges and meet their goals,” said Allen. With sales based on partnerships, Superior Essex primarily sells through authorized distributors worldwide, so the company’s sales reps needed to begin talking solutions to the independent distributors so they in turn could focus on the end customer. To enable the reps in this refocusing effort, Superior Essex enlisted Corporate Visions (CorporateVisions.com), a sales and marketing messaging company that Allen had worked with in the past.
An organization’s transformation
In July 2012, Superior Essex product managers, marketing staff and sales reps completed an initial Power Positioning workshop to develop a message that would differentiate them among their distributors, and effectively position them against competitors’ and prospects’ status quos. Then, through Power Messaging workshops, Corporate Visions trained key Superior Essex sales team members to elevate conversations with distributors.
The Power Messaging system focuses on addressing the customer’s challenges — including some they may not even realize they’re facing themselves — rather than rattling off product features. It also teaches techniques to listen for unique challenges, and how to tailor the conversations around those challenges.
“The sales team now has a better way to tell a story that they have known for a long time. They address things that are important to the customer by focusing on their challenges and various approaches for resolution,” said Allen.
Proof of Power Positioning and Power Messaging’s effectiveness was quick to come. At a time when the communications cable industry was experiencing some instability and declining sales, Superior Essex enjoyed a more than 20 percent increase in sales.
One key to the success, according to Allen, was participation and buy-in from the marketing team. To realize a true transformation in sales, there had to be a transformation among both the sales and marketing teams.
“Marketing understands the sales roles a lot more now, and we better understand the problem-solving cycle,” said Allen.
“In working with Corporate Visions, we realized that different tools are required at different parts of the sales cycle.”
It takes time to realize success
Initially, the sales reps were nervous about making such significant changes to their sales message — and some are still using chunks of the product knowledge approach they trusted for so long — but Allen says he knows the new approach is working because he’s hearing reports that no two sales conversations are alike.
“We never tell the same story the same way twice. Every customer has their own challenges and priorities. The sales conversation must be tailored to address what is important to them,” said Allen.
Today, Superior Essex is confident that its good story is being told time and again — only this time in a manner that matters to its customers.
Lindsay Allen will tell the story at the fourth annual Corporate Visions Marketing and Sales Alignment Conference Sept. 17-19, 2013 in Chicago. Go to corporatevisions.com to register. Enter code SMMAG for $100 off.
