Use a well-informed sales process to pull ahead of competitors. Customize each step with account insight to position your solution as the obvious choice.
Prospecting
Zero-in on the most promising accounts quickly and use business intelligence to kick start a successful sale. Start building relationships early and understanding the key business issues your prospect is looking to solve and in turn, you will have a partner that can help you better navigate the organization and build a deal that can gain buy-in across all departments.
Listen to Emissary Advisor Amy Haney, a former procurement executive at Abbott Laboratories.
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Prioritize Accounts and Manage Funnel
To prioritize accounts efficiently, you need to know what’s going on in that account and the industry. An Emissary Advisor draws on experience as a former executive to help you find these high-value targets quickly and accurately. With better prioritization, your team focuses their time and energy on the real opportunities, not the mirages.
Research Prospects
Research needs to get you into selling interactions, not keep you on a goose chase through the internet. Today’s research problem isn’t finding information about your prospects; it’s wading through the flood of irrelevant data to pull out crucial details. Consulting an Emissary Advisor will help you identify the most important information quickly. And Emissary Advisors share insights you won’t find on popular websites. You get the right intelligence quickly and move on to meetings.
Engage With Your Customer
Once you’re ready to impress, how do you reach the right people and start engaging? You can attend industry conferences to get connected or try to find someone with a useful contact. But if you want to get inside quickly and successfully, involve an Emissary Advisor. With their account experience, they help you connect to the right people, suggest the best times to reach out, and advise on the best contact channels to get buyers’ attention. You’ll have an easier time getting past the front door and getting in front of decision-makers.
Learn More about How Emissary Accelerates Sales Teams:
Managing and Accelerating the Deal
Draw on your understanding of the business and industry to move quickly to solutioning and closing.
Ask Smart Questions in Account Discovery
Smart questions will turn discovery hunt-and-peck sessions into a meaningful conversation because you demonstrate an understanding of the business, how it operates and what it needs to succeed. Review your discovery plans with an Emissary Advisor to craft an arsenal of targeted inquiries based on what buyers care about. Your discovery phase will elicit the right information to speed the deal ahead.
Present a Meaningful Demo
The successful demo will make it easy for decision-makers to see how your solution will work for them. Customize the demo and presentation to highlight features which are most important to your buyers. If possible, include a use case very close to your customer’s pain point. To ensure the best reception, test drive your demo on an Emissary Advisor, who has witnessed many technology demos and can let you know what will fall flat and how you can hit the grand slam.
Design the Solution, Proposal, and Pricing
A well-executed proposal will help convince each decision-maker of your offering’s value and make the next step easy to take. While many sellers use a proposal template, customize the template as needed to present the solution as the customer wants to see it. To maximize your proposal’s impact, have an Emissary Advisor review it with the eye of a seasoned buyer. They can ensure the right messages are getting through loud and clear and increase your chances of moving from proposal to procurement.
Navigate the Buying Process, Negotiation, and Procurement
The buying process can be long, bewildering, and even contradictory as procurement, legal, risk management, and budget offices weigh in. It’s easy for a deal to get sidetracked at this point. Emissary Advisors, with their experience of the process you’re going through, help you understand the priorities of each player and how you need to respond. Their tips will save time and help prevent your hard-won sale from getting bogged down.
Complete a Successful Pilot or Proof of Concept
As with the demo, the pilot or proof of concept (POC) needs to prove value to the client and may require customization. It’s also important to consider that buyers may be looking to see how easy your company is to work with, how competent the employees are, and whether you can meet schedules and timelines. Involving an Emissary Advisor for pilot or POC planning and presentation keeps your team focused on what buyers need to see to declare the effort a success.
Learn More about How Emissary Accelerates Sales Teams:
Retaining and Expanding a Successful Account
Build on your good will and success by growing your deployment, adding more products, or expanding to a new business unit.
Align Marketing, Sales and Customer Success Teams
Once a successful deal goes live, sales, marketing and customer success teams all need to understand the account and your goals. Each person facing the customer can improve your ability to win additional sales. Many of our clients involve Emissary Advisors at this point to provide organizational insight and help you align the players. They also help identify opportunities in other business units, determine who to contact, and transform the initial success into enterprise-wide deals.
Identify White Space and Unresolved Problems
Helping your customer uncover and address unresolved issues increases your value as a partner and grows your footprint. It may be hard to find that white space though if you’re siloed in one business unit. An Emissary Advisor has experience of the whole company and understands which business units might be facing a challenge you can solve. Among Emissary clients, 86% have created strategies for expansion in existing accounts based on Advisor guidance.
Map Relationships for a Stronger Connection
Beef up your bond with a newly won account by connecting people on your team to people on their team. Now you have a company-to-company relationship that can survive the inevitable shifts in personnel and position you to take advantage of new opportunities. Emissary Advisors help you determine the best roles to map and how to reach essential contacts so you can establish a future-proof partnership.
Plan for a Successful QBR
Successful QBRs confirm your value to your customer, strengthen credibility, and lay the groundwork for additional sales. But in order to get it right, you need to know what the customer wants to see. Emissary Advisors have sat through a number of QBRs and will bring the voice of the buyer to your planning sessions. Advisors act as a sounding board to test out important messaging and set the right agenda to keep this pivotal interaction on-target and productive.
Ready to Leverage the Emissary Human Intelligence Network?
Get more information on working with Emissary Advisors.
Tony Jaros
Chief Executive Officer
A product-focused, customer obsessed leader with a long track record of bringing new ideas to complex markets while building high performing and collaborative teams, Tony most recently served as CEO at Legacy Data Access, a healthcare software company. Other notable roles include CEO of CultureIQ, an employee engagement company sold to Perceptyx in 2021, and President and Chief Product Officer of SiriusDecisions, which he joined as a startup almost 20 years ago and helped build the organization into the worldwide leader in B2B sales, marketing and product management research, benchmarking and advisory services. Early in his career, Tony held product and consulting roles at Peppers & Rogers Group and Simba Information. He holds an MBA from New York University and a BSJ in Journalism from Northwestern University.
Erin Provey
VP Products
Erin has 20 years of experience in B2B product and service innovation and leadership roles, with a consistent focus on growth through customer-centricity. Most notably, Erin spent nearly a decade at SiriusDecisions (now part of Forrester Research) in a range of research and advisory product leadership roles, responsible for the entire innovation lifecycle: discovery, design, development, sales enablement, launch, implementation, and research/voice-of-the-customer-based iteration and enhancement. As part of this work, she was one of the most prolific commercially-viable content creators and public speakers, authoring and presenting hundreds of commercially-viable research briefs, models, frameworks, templates, tools, and one patented methodology – building world-class delivery teams and working closely with hundreds of the world’s leading B2B marketing leaders to operationalize these best practices in pursuit of revenue objectives.
Adam Rice
VP Engineering
Dynamic, results-driven agile technology leader with over 12 years of leadership experience and 10 years of hands-on software development experience. Adam has significant expertise in designing, building, and running highly available software as a service. He loves being part of a team where he can be instrumental in building and running a world-class team of software practitioners based on shared cultural values including collective ownership, pragmatic mastery, and continuous improvement.
Diana Kudajarova
VP of Operations
Diana has extensive experience in senior operational roles at technology startups. Before becoming VP of Operations, she was Emissary’s Chief of Staff and Head of Revenue Operations. Prior to joining Emissary, she was Director of Sales Operations for Burning Glass (a Boston-based job market analytics company). Diana has a PhD in History from Harvard University and was, in another life, a consultant for Monitor Consulting and professor of management at Moscow School of Management. Diana was also a co-founder and operator of four critically acclaimed restaurants in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts,
Morgan Costello
Director, Advisor Operations
Morgan oversees advisor operations at Emissary. Prior to joining Emissary, Morgan spent the last 9 years building and optimizing high performing operations teams from the ground up. Morgan previously ran operations at the home services network, Handy, scaling the professional platform by over 10x before being acquired by ANGI Homeservices. Having worked in professional services and consumer services, Morgan is an expert in how to scale and grow operations.
Seleste Lunsford
Chief Research and Strategy Officer
Seleste has been a leader and consultant in the sales effectiveness space for over 20 years, running professional services, product and marketing organizations. She is a regular contributor to industry publications, a conference speaker and has written two books and countless papers on B2B revenue strategies.
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