Insight-Led Selling: How to Build a Sustainable Insight Engine

Learn How Sales and Marketing Teams Can Develop, Distribute and Refine Customer Insights That Create More Valuable Sales Conversations

Just as gravity pulls objects down to earth, competitive markets pull companies toward parity. Over time, once-distinct offerings begin to look more alike, leaving customers to choose from similar vendors selling similar products. At the same time, customers’ ability to use easily accessible information and dictate what they want puts vendors further on the defensive.

When customers perceive little difference between vendors, products or services, sales conversations can quickly default to features, benefits and price. Sellers may respond by introducing a broader portfolio of solutions, but more options do not necessarily make the decision easier for the customer.

Insight-led selling gives sellers a way to elevate the conversation by bringing customers a meaningful perspective on their business, market or future.

What Is Insight-Led Selling, and How Does It Differ From Solution Selling?

Insight-led selling brings a meaningful perspective on the customer’s industry, business model, performance, competitors or future into the sales conversation. That perspective should clarify an important issue, reveal an opportunity or help decision-makers consider their business in a new way, while connecting naturally to an action the company can support.

Both approaches move the conversation beyond individual product features, but they begin at different points. Solution selling starts with an identified customer need and determines how to address it. Insight-led selling starts with a perspective that helps the customer better understand, clarify or reconsider the issue itself. The insight establishes why the issue matters; the solution provides a practical way to act.This distinction changes the seller’s role. Instead of responding only to needs the customer has already identified, the seller contributes information and perspective that make the conversation itself more valuable.

Comparing Insight-Led Selling and Solution Selling

Insight-led selling and solution selling are complementary approaches, but they create value at different points in the customer conversation. Solution selling helps customers determine how to address an identified need. Insight-led selling helps them better understand the need, its implications or an opportunity they may not have fully considered.

Delivering that kind of perspective consistently requires more than asking individual sellers to develop insights on their own. Organizations need a sustained process for drawing insights from the teams, data and customer interactions already available to them.

How to Build a Sustainable Flow of Sales Insights

Based on hundreds of consulting projects with Global 2000 companies, The Alexander Group has identified two key challenges leaders must address to effectively conduct insight-led selling:

1. Developing a sustained flow of insights
2. Maximizing the impact of insights in the sales process

This article is focused on the first challenge.

Organizations often possess valuable customer, market and performance information, but that information does not automatically become a sales insight. It may remain scattered across teams, confined to individual engagements or disconnected from field conversations. Creating a sustained flow requires a process for gathering that information, evaluating its value and equipping sellers to use it. The first step is identifying the people and functions that can contribute to insight development. Insight development is inherently cross-functional. Sales teams contribute customer questions and objections; marketing and vertical experts add market context; analytics teams identify patterns; and training and frontline leaders help translate those findings into repeatable sales conversations. The goal is not to generate more information. It is to identify perspectives that are broadly useful, connect them to customer decisions and improve them through continued seller and customer feedback. Moreover, it requires coordinated insight-sourcing across the following processes:

1. The Sales Process: A systematic process is required to harvest insights from sales reps and equip other reps. Being at the heart of the sales dialogue, reps are a key source of customer insights and feedback. However, rep insights tend to be improvisational, anecdotal, highly personalized and customer-specific. And when a rep has a great insight, it’s typically not shared due to internal competition.
2. Marketing Analytics: Marketing Analytics is an increasingly common subgroup in the marketing organization tasked with conducting research on customer needs. Because the focus of this group is often on product development, pricing or ranking vendors (on price, service or product), they don’t typically identify breakthrough sales insight—let alone package them up for sales reps as part of a guided selling process (i.e., sales playbooks).
3. Sales Training: Training leaders typically see the need for insights to optimize sales effectiveness but lack the resources and expertise to develop them. With increasing pressure for a clear training ROI, they are acutely aware of the danger of “spinning,” “advantaging” or “challenging” customers without the compelling insights to back it up (i.e., argumentative reps don’t close).
4. Customer Data Mining: Vendors have data on how customers use their products, often coming from their customer service team or cloud applications. However, sales insights only emerge if someone with a strategic perspective systematically reviews the data to identify common challenges, usage gaps and best practices. Looking beyond traditional sales optimization ideas, this process needs to find breakthrough insights to capture the attention of senior buyers.
5. Account Planning: An effective account planning process forces reps to analyze customers more deeply, often yielding valuable insights to be systematically extracted and shared. The real insight payoff comes from joint-planning with customers, particularly when senior buyers participate. But here again, the challenge is systematically extracting these insights from reps throughout the sales force.
6. Win/Loss Analysis: Win/loss analysis is a major source of great insights (albeit some insights gained here are already being used by competitors) and should be a standard practice. The challenge is sorting through the different perspectives (including buyers if possible), to identify real strategic insights and not settling for operational buying criteria such as price, product or company platitudes.
7. Vertical Marketing: Large marketing groups may have several experts focused on developing collateral to help reps sell to specific industries. These often contain  useful insights for sales, but typically at a generic industry-wide level. Too often these experts are also product-focused and out of touch with sales realities.
8. Value Realization: This is an increasingly common function, designed to ensure customers get full value from their purchase so products don’t become “shelfware” and get displaced. This role should be an excellent source of insights as it combines elements of on-going impact analysis, training, evangelical selling, account management and best practice dissemination.

Building Insight-Led Selling into an Ongoing Business Process

All of the inputs needed for insight-led selling also need someone to own it. Oftentimes, that group sits in Marketing but can also have some regular participants from Sales and Product teams as well. More important than where they report is that they have a strong leadership charter, highly-capable personnel who understand sales and sufficient capacity to stay focused on generating new and fresh insights.

This is not a part-time job! Indeed, the best practice companies we have seen manage insight development as a continually running business process, with inputs, processing steps, quality control, outputs and constant readjustment based on user feedback.

That discipline is what turns scattered information into a sustainable flow of insights sellers can use. When sales, marketing and product teams contribute to the process, sellers are better equipped to bring customers meaningful perspectives on their business, market or future and connect those perspectives to action.