01 Oct What You Can Learn From the Top C-Suite Salespeople

Over the last 20 years we’ve been figuring out what the top performing C-Suite salespeople do in comparison to everyone else. What makes them so much more effective than other salespeople and what do they do differently?

In our upcoming eBook, The Definitive Guide to C-Suite Marketing, we go into this in much more depth, but for now we want to focus on the model that sets these C-Suite salespeople apart from everyone else.

C-Suite salespeople have different characteristics from everyone else. They have extremely high levels of self-belief and choose to always engage with senior decision makers. They know this is where the money is and they’re not afraid to go after it.

What we’ve found most interesting about these top performers, however, is that they sell to the C-Suite in a completely different way to core performers.

Understanding this approach requires us to break down the sale into the four basic questions that must always be answered in a buyer’s mind before they decide to do business with you.

Typically, most salespeople sell to prospects in this order:

1. How does it work?
2. What are the benefits?
3. What is the business case?
4. Why should I trust you?

And they run through the process in that order.

The most successful C-Suite salespeople, however, communicate from stages 4 to 1. This is also the way C-Suite Marketing works. Most people start with features and benefits when presenting their value proposition, but the C-Suite needs a solid business case and some credibility first.

Under this model it’s clear that there are two key factors when selling to the C-Suite. You need to build trust and present value (credibility and business case respectively) before you can begin selling to them.

To put it simply, the questions you must answer are “do I trust you?” and “will I get value from spending time with you?”