Today, the buying landscape keeps changing and staying ahead of buyer preferences and behaviors are difficult. VantagePoint’s innovative approach to sales agility relieves the customers from figuring out how to keep on top of changes in buyer behavior. Their research and practice to sales agility equip client’s sellers to identify the buying factors that matter most, make sense of the buying situations they are facing, and select/execute the sales strategy most likely to lead to a win. VantagePoint is the only sales training company offering this innovative approach to sales agility. The company’s AgileEdge® diagnostic is a proprietary algorithm that uses machine learning to analyze deal-level data to identify the following critical insights:
1. The 5-7 most influential buying factors that impact how your buyer’s buy
2. How those buying factors cluster into unique buying situations
3. The optimal sales strategy for each buying situation most likely to lead to a win
4. The relative capability of your sales force to execute the tactics within each of the four sales strategies
" We are nimble and dedicated to continually looking for ways to use new research to improve the client experience and outcomes "
VantagePoint was incorporated by Michelle Vazzana, who is now the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. She is passionate about research and feels that analysis should identify what high performers do well and that intellectual property should follow from that research. She is committed to ensuring that all VantagePoint solutions are based on empirical research and address underserved needs within the sales force. Michelle ensures that VantagePoint solutions are the most innovative and practical in the marketplace.
“Our framework for agility is based on research into agility from domains outside of sales. We examined the military, professional sports teams, and first responders to learn how they teach agility,” says Michelle. “We ported that knowledge into our own framework for sales agility.” The highestperforming sellers do the following:
* Assess and make sense of the buying situation they are facing
* Choose the sales strategy that is most likely to lead to a win in that situation
* Execute the relevant tactics and continually monitor buyer reactions and feedback
This closed-loop of assessing, choosing, and executing allows sellers to be laser-focused on their buyers and behave in ways that align with buyer preferences, dramatically increasing the chances of winning.
In an instance, General Electric was suffering flat performance and erratic sales forecasts. Leadership determined the root cause to be historically low win rates, deriving from sales pipelines that were bloated with poor quality deals. This was particularly troubling for a company that had invested heavily for several years in technology, processes, training, and enablement that should have prevented this exact situation. In the words of the Learning and Development Director, “It was very frustrating… We knew what we were doing wasn’t working, but we didn’t know how to fix it.” VantagePoint was engaged at this critical moment to inject purposeful coaching and structured management to build healthier, more productive sales pipelines. The company conducted a series of Pipeline Coaching® workshops that:
* Focused management activity toward hands-on coaching
* Established a formal management rhythm to increase the volume of coaching
* Added definition to recurring sales pipeline conversations
* Emphasized pipeline health – qualifying and disqualifying opportunities early in the sales process
Improved coaching skills to improve the quality of sales calls and advance winnable deals The L&D Director commented during one of the early workshops, “This is really, really great. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Over the next 18 months:
* Despite more stringent qualification efforts, average sales pipeline size increased
* Deal wins rates improved from 37% to 71%
* Forecasted revenue ‘realization’ increased from 25% to 54%
The business unit leader later summarized the success of the Pipeline Coaching® workshops in a comment to his leadership team: “This wasn’t just a new training course – It fundamentally changed the way we do business.”
VantagePoint offers three meaningful differentiators compared to other training companies; they research high performers and then develop frameworks to replicate their behavior (most sales training companies design a methodology and then research to prove that methodology works). VantagePoint’s frameworks are simple, practical, and powerful. “We subscribe to the ‘minimum effective dose’ to improve sales and sales manager performance. Our frameworks are powerful and executable because they reflect the real world, not some unattainable ideal,” says Michelle. They use data science and machine learning to isolate critical insights for the clients:
* Which buying situations do their sellers face
* Which sales strategies win in each situation
* How capable sellers are at executing the various tactics within each strategy
* Which activities are most highly correlated to sales performance
* How high performing managers coach those activities differently than their lowerperforming peers
* How their managers compare to a broader benchmark of sales managers
VantagePoint is already serving clients globally, and they will continue to expand their solution set to incorporate a Salesforce. com application that includes a situation builder. The sellers will enter information about the client’s buying factors. The situation builder will determine the nature of the seller’s situation, recommend the best strategy for a win, and give concrete, company-relevant guidance that reflects what the best performing sellers do, say, and show when implementing the selected sales strategy. This application will track buying factors and situations to determine when new problems arise and identify unique selling behavior patterns. It will take the pressure off of clients to stay ahead of buyer behavior and mine the gold that is inside salespeople’s heads to turn it into actionable plans and playbooks that win. “We are small but mighty. We are innovating in ways that companies 20x our size can’t replicate. We are nimble and dedicated to continually looking for ways to use new research to improve the client experience and outcomes,” adds Michelle.
