Why Sales Success Hinges on Defining Your Foundations

If your sales team is having alignment issues, one of the first places you need to look is at your sales foundations. You can't build a long-lasting house without a solid foundation. The same is true of sales success. You can't generate sustainable growth without first identifying and solidifying your company's sales foundations.

What are Sales Foundations?

Sales Foundations revolve around core elements of your business. What is your company all about? What does it have to offer? How is it different from the competition? For instance, your sales foundations will typically include:

• The problems you solve. These are the specific pain points that your product or service addresses, and why it matters to your customers.
• Your value proposition. What value does your company create for the customer, and how does it deliver that value? If you're not selling based exclusively on price (and in most cases you shouldn't be), then understanding your value proposition plays a key role in sustainable sales success.
• Your key differentiators. What is it about your company that sets you apart from other businesses in the same sector? If you can pinpoint the unique value that your organization offers, then you can leverage that knowledge to optimize sales success.
• Your offerings. You (and your sales reps) need to have a clear picture as to which products and/or services your company actually offers.
• The experience you promise. What should customers expect in their interactions with your brand? What type of experience do you promise them? This is a big piece of the puzzle. It's especially important since customer experience should be aligned across your marketing, sales, and customer support departments.

​Of course, you don't want to arbitrarily define your sales foundations without any feedback from your key stakeholders. At the same time, you don't want each of your sales reps to guess at what those foundations are, either. Instead, you want everyone to agree on what those foundations actually are, and really buy into them as the starting point for growth.

How Sales Success is Optimized

At this point, you may be wondering: "Why would I really need to define my company's sales foundations? As long as our reps are doing their jobs, does it really matter whether they're onboard or not?" 

There's no denying that your team can earn some wins, big and small, without having clearly defined foundations for your sales process. The problem is, without those sales foundations in place, you'll never be able to make those wins systematic. Sales success will be left to chance. 

For instance, take a sales rep who closes a huge deal with one of your accounts. You're elated! You want to use the rep's experience as training for the rest of your team. But then you realize: You don't really know why the rep was successful. In fact, the rep can't figure it out, either! Here are just a few of the questions that might come up:
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• Did the rep sell based on price or value?
• Was the customer won over because of a great experience?
• Why did the account buy from your company, and not one of your competitors?
• What if other reps are scoring wins by going in a different direction?

You see, things can get real confusing, real fast when you don't have firmly established sales foundations to lean on. Without defining what made sales success possible, it's difficult to repeat that success. 

On the other hand, when you do have those sales foundations in place, then you'll know exactly why your reps are successful - or at least which areas they can improve in. Your well-defined foundations enable you to build a clear framework for your sales process, and make major wins repeatable, instead of one-off occurrences. 

Create a Cohesive Identity

Bottom line? When you define your sales foundations, you give your team a cohesive identity that they can tap into for each customer interaction. And when you know exactly who you are and what you have to offer, it's much easier to win over the customers that you want for your business.

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