Make sustainability
works in sales
More than ever, customers seek cohesion, accountability, and shared values ​​in the search for products, suppliers, and partners. Both public and private companies implement responsible procurement guidelines and are purposefully looking for partners and suppliers that support and match their sustainability focus and ambitions. This offers a unique opportunity for meeting customer demands and differentiate through value-based sales with CSR and sustainability as the focal point.
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There is great value in not just sending salespeople off to customers with the company´s sustainability and ESG report. Many companies have a solid foundation for actively using sustainability to attract and retain customers. Cleverly including sustainability in customer dialogues and value propositions, is where it pays off.
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By combining our years of practical experience with sales and sustainability we have developed a bulletproof methodology to help our clients succeed with sustainability in value selling. We systematically implement the actions below enabling your salesforce to use targeted sustainability as an additional market differentiator.
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Initial Mapping: We map your company’s sustainability efforts and characteristics of selected core products and services.
Customer Portfolio Screening: We equip the salesforce with business-driven sustainability and teach them to perform an initial customer segmentation based on sustainability to identify key target customers.
Competitor insights: We equip the salesforce with tools and knowledge to help assess competitor performance on sustainability to support product or company positioning and differentiation in customer dialogues.
Strategic fit: We help incorporate sustainability into the specific value proposition: Practical actions on sustainability on specific customers, to link the customer's approach and needs with your performance and product sustainability attributes. We find that many sellers receive a wake-up call when we collect information on customer's CSR efforts, scores in CSR indexes, and media statements from the customer's executive members on sustainability - and link it to the value proposition.
Power mapping & entry point strategy: We enable a targeted customer approach based on their priorities: What message will motivate the customer to buy into your specific value proposition on sustainability? Identify the key individual(s) to approach at the given customer and establish contact.
We all too often find that when companies decide or are encouraged to bring sustainability into customer dialogues, it ends up being a last-minute exercise.
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Typically, the head of sustainability, who rarely holds practical sales experience, is tasked with upgrading the company salesforce resulting in a very theoretical and academic approach to sustainability.
In many cases, it ends in a review of the CSR school curriculum and global goals without focusing on the value proposition, salesforce skills, and actual customer dialogues.
