Do we have a sponsor, champion or advocate in the account? This is a key question for sales and account teams as they strategize how to improve their performance. Being able to affirmatively answer this simple yet crucial question can be the difference between meeting and missing quotas.
Sales training professionals must ensure their teams fully understand the importance of customer sponsors and that they have the tools to unlock their potential for account expansion. The concept of past proven value, while seldom used to its full potential, is an important tool on your toolbelt to help build relationships with sponsors.
Over the past 25 years, Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI) has found that sales and account teams that understand the concept of past proven value and can effectively develop and leverage relationships with customer sponsors are among the most successful at gaining momentum and driving proactive growth within their accounts, as well as evolving these relationships to strategic partner and trusted advisor levels.
In this article, we will provide a better understanding of the role of the customer sponsor, what past proven value is and how to leverage its power and, finally, how to use this power to gain sales momentum and account expansion with sponsors in your most important accounts.
Understanding the Role of Customer Sponsors
Customer sponsors, also known as champions or advocates, play a pivotal role in winning new business and growing existing accounts. A sponsor is an internal stakeholder of the customer’s team who possesses influence and authority and is willing to put themselves at some level of risk on your behalf because of the relationship you have. These individuals serve as ambassadors for your company, advocating on your behalf and championing your solutions within their organizations; even when you are not in the room.
The relationship with these sponsors is cultivated over time through building authentic, mutually beneficial relationships grounded in trust, credibility and shared objectives. For sales trainers, the key to fostering this level of trust is to coach salespeople on how to positively identify past experiences that resulted in the co-creation of value for both the customer and their organization. It is your customer’s belief in the past proven value that has been co-created between the two organizations that has resulted in their willingness to become a sponsor on your behalf.
When we are successful at aligning with the goals of key customer stakeholders and priorities by co-creating value, and have a proven track record of achieving results in the past, customers become sponsors who are invested in the success of their partnership with you and your organization—because it has resulted in mutually beneficial outcomes in the past.
What Is Past Proven Value?
Past proven value is one of the most potent tools in the contemporary salesperson or account manager’s arsenal. It is a powerful concept that is generally underutilized. Past proven value is created when you and your organization have helped the customer address their external pressures, business objectives and challenges and have been successful in providing them with unique business value that has allowed them to achieve their personal, as well as their organizational, goals.
This value is not merely transactional but, rather, an ongoing engagement whereby you understand their dynamic needs, respond to their evolving objectives and co-innovate in partnership with them to help them achieve success. Remember, past proven value demonstrates that you can be counted on to deliver on your promises and drive meaningful results.
Does your team have a history of helping customers co-create value and achieve their objectives, and does your customer connect this value to your partnership? If so, are salespeople utilizing these past victories and customer success stories to grow and expand the account? PMI has helped numerous clients understand the importance of past proven value and to craft and deliver customer success value stories that can activate past proven value and leverage it to drive results.
Leveraging Past Proven Value With Your Sponsor to Drive Sales Momentum
When it comes time to make a complex purchase decision, customers will do everything possible to mitigate the risk associated with making the wrong decision. This is when sales and account teams need to lean into their sponsor relationships to help ensure confidence that purchasing a solution from your company is the right decision. This is done in two ways: leveraging past proven value and vision casting.
1. Leveraging Past Proven Value.
Past proven value is more than just a historical record of prior transactions. It embodies successful, measurable prior engagements that have led to the co-creation of realized value. Past proven value helps the customer reduce the risk of making a future decision to do business with your company. Past proven value serves as the catalyst in fostering trust, building loyalty and solidifying the support of your sponsors. But first, your sales and account teams need to build a narrative around the past proven value in order to build momentum in the account.
The narrative needs to reinforce the benefits of continued collaboration. Well before a sales call or meeting with the customer, we build a story around specific examples where we were able to create measurable results that helped them achieve their goals. We use case studies with tangible benefits from our past successes to illustrate our commitment to and history of a successful collaborative relationship. This story needs to resonate with the sponsor and arm them with the ammunition to reaffirm the commitment to mutual success on future endeavors with other key stakeholders in their organization. When salespeople are able to secure the sponsors’ buy-in and support through discussions around past proven value, they help them reduce risk, overcome obstacles and objections, and accelerate the sales cycle.
2. Vision Casting
Encourage your teams to practice vision casting by projecting a vivid picture of how continuing the partnership can lead to further successes and solutions tailored to the customer’s evolving needs. The customer already took a chance on engaging with your company, who has now successfully demonstrated that you can co-create impactful value. When customers readily know they made the right purchase decision with you, naturally they will want to continue to experience similar success.
By articulating a compelling narrative built around past proven value co-creation, the salesperson has earned the right to align your other offerings with the customer’s current pursuits. They already understand the pressures, objectives, challenges and expectations. They will instill feelings of continuity and progress as they gaze into the future for potential value co-creation opportunities with the customer. The savvy customer understands that the likelihood of their future success is much greater with a proven provider that has delivered value in the past and continues to do so today.
Conclusion
Engaging customer sponsors and leveraging past proven value are essential strategies for driving sales momentum and expanding account opportunities. By emphasizing these strategies in your training programs, you are laying the groundwork for building sustainable long-term relationships.
Our past proven value remains a strong differentiator. Our prior successes are unique to our relationship with the customer and cannot be easily duplicated by the competition. By creating the narrative through which we can explain our demonstrated track record of success and a commitment to delivering ongoing value, we position ourselves as trusted advisors and strategic solution providers. This strategic approach ensures your teams are seen not just as interchangeable vendors, but as indispensable, trusted partners.
