Your sales team is hesitant about new product positioning. How can you overcome their resistance effectively?
When your sales team hesitates to embrace new product positioning, it's important to address their concerns and foster buy-in. Here's how you can effectively overcome resistance:
How have you handled resistance to change in your team? Share your strategies.
Your sales team is hesitant about new product positioning. How can you overcome their resistance effectively?
When your sales team hesitates to embrace new product positioning, it's important to address their concerns and foster buy-in. Here's how you can effectively overcome resistance:
How have you handled resistance to change in your team? Share your strategies.
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To ensure your sales team is fully onboard with your new product positioning, it would be beneficial to engage them early, communicate in a clear manner, offer training, share success stories, create a welcoming and supportive environment, establish achievable goals, and reward those who embrace the change. It would also be prudent to be prepared to adapt as necessary.
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1. Early Involvement: Engage the sales team from the start. Hold workshops where they can share insights on customer pain points, allowing them to feel invested in the new direction. 2. Demonstrate Value: Present data that backs the positioning—market trends, customer feedback, and competitor analysis. 3. Equip with Tools: Provide sales with battle cards, pitch decks, and role-play scenarios. This boosts confidence and gives them language to communicate the value effectively. 4. Showcase Success Stories: Share early wins or case studies from pilot customers, reinforcing how the new approach drives results. 5. Create Open Feedback Loops: Set regular check-ins to gather sales feedback and refine the positioning as necessary.
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Don't roll it out to everyone. I call it anti-enablement :) Find the people who are willing to adopt and exclusively share it with them. Give them all your attention to help adopt. Help them prep for calls, customize decks, and win deals. Then those 2-3 reps begin to close deals with your help, they'll start asking for the materials. Use your evangelist reps to help teach the materials and drive adoption. Oh and spiffs. Spiffs can work too.
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If your sales team is resistant to new product positioning, you can successfully address their concerns by highlighting the advantages of the changes; offering training and resources to enhance their skills in selling these upgraded products; and fostering an environment of feedback and collaboration that promotes ongoing improvement.
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1. Involve Sales Early in the Process 2. Clarify the ‘Why’ Behind the Change 3. Showcase Evidence and Data 4. Provide Comprehensive Training 5. Offer Incentives 6. Create a Feedback Loop 7. Leverage Influencers within the Team At the end of the day, there's no one solution fix all, but what's important to acknowledge is, on behalf of your team, ask yourself, "what's in it for me?"
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Storytelling is a very effective way educate a sales team on a new product position. Examples of what the customer was looking for and why should lead. They need to know what pain points it illustrate before suggesting the new solution. Case studies and beta testing results can push the story to the next level. Within each sales team there are a few key influencers that the team will follow. Do some customer visits with them to train them directly on the story and supporting anecdotes. This will give you the opportunity to test the story and make adjustments as required. This approach has an additional of building your relationship with a sales leader and possibly a key customer.
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I love all these corporate bullshit answers. My take, you need to prove it. Prove your positioning is right with real life examples of those first customers who adopted the product during that alpha/beta stage. Oh you didn’t have real customers solving real problems? Then your position is just conjecture and they shouldn’t believe it.
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Reinforce the Value Proposition by ensure the sales team understands how the new positioning addresses the key benefits and pain points for your customers. When the team clearly understands the value it offers, they’ll be more confident in selling it
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As we always face things with new tech or new products We should always take the team to another level of understanding by in-deep training for all the features of the product and how it can help in customers needs and pain points and the variety of solutions i can give to my customers and the revenues return on them and the company
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