Top 6 Sales Methodologies: Customer Focused Selling

What makes a sales organization powerful? What makes a sales organization effective? How are the biggest and best sales teams meeting goals? The most effective sales teams and professionals in the world work within a selling methodology and culture, but they also have something extra. Whether methodologies were born out of decades of in-house teachings or are one of the popularized methodologies, one thing is essential for sales methodologies to translate to real value, and those are perfected soft skills that build immediate connections with buyers at every stage of a buyer journey. 

What is a Sales Methodology? 

Why You Need One

A sales methodology is a set of principles and ethos that an organization uses to train its sales arm in the transition from interest to acquisition. It underlies an organization's culture, and its tenets are the mantras of account executives, solutions architects, and customer success. The playbooks of methodologies include, among other skills, how to qualify leads, how to run discovery, how to handle objections, how to negotiate terms, and and how to close. We refer to these skills as hard skills. These are the basic skills required to make a sale. Sales methodologies are also philosophical, which is where culture plays a role. 

The cultural component of an organization's guiding sales methodology is predicated on the fact that buying is ultimately an emotional decision that we rationalize later. We buy from people and organizations we like. For this reason, the other component of sales methodologies focuses on principles that guide human behavior and the study of behavioral economics. These are the soft skills that teach account executives how people make decisions and how to influence their buying behavior. Most methodologies include hard and soft skill building, where hard skills refer to product knowledge, database building, and prospecting, and soft skills refer to communications, emotional intelligence, and relationship building. 

If you are growing your sales organization and are looking to adopt an established sales methodology these are the methodologies that we most frequently work with. Adopting a sales methodology is an investment. It requires many hours of training, in person, and remote, but their structure confers distinct advantages. When account executives, solutions architects, and customer success professionals are all trained properly in the hard and soft skills within a particular sales methodology, they communicate similarly with customers and are able to provide value at every stage of a sale. Below are some of the proven methodologies that 2Win training complements. 

Top 6 Sales Methodologies

These 6 methodologies are widely adopted across SaaS software and B2B markets. A methodology becomes increasingly valuable when a sales cycle is longer and where multiple voices must factor into a buying decision. Align a methodology with your goals, but also consider the skillset that a methodology teaches and whether that will also align with the individuals you already have on your team and their strengths. 

• Force Management

• ValueSelling Associates

• Challenger

• Sandler

• MEDDICC

• Gap Selling

Force Management (Command of the Sale)

Offering a modern, tailored approach to sales training, Force Management is all about alignment with a company's existing processes and customer buying behaviors. This methodology focuses on improving deal velocity and predictability by:

• Working backward from customer needs
• Defining customer outcomes
• Inspecting and analyzing pipeline opportunities

It involves an in-depth discovery phase to customize deliverables, making sure they are in alignment with the company's objectives. The training is practical, immediately applicable, and focused on real-world scenarios. 

Key Benefits

• Fast, more predictable sales cycles
• Better opportunity qualification
• Strategic decision-making
• Integration with existing sales processes and tools

Force Management's Command of the Sale methodology provides a structured and flexible approach to modern sales challenges. Focusing on customer needs, aligning sales activities, and offering continuous support and training enables sales teams to navigate complex buying processes effectively and achieve the outcomes they are looking for. It is a value forward and customer centered approach to sales. 

2Win and Force Management 

2Win aligns under Force Management and is agnostic of this sales methodology. We help unpack discovery in the Force Management methodology. Our core focus and skills complement the deep discovery process through teaching technical discovery. We teach teams how to integrate resources and assign duties in a seamless manner and integrate the presales team into the sales discovery process. 

ValueSelling Associates

ValueSelling is a methodology that prioritizes the value a product or service brings to the customer over its features and price. The ValueSelling Framework, developed by ValueSelling Associates, is a structured process designed to manage conversations with prospects and establish a mutual understanding of how an organization can add significant value to the buyer's business. This methodology focuses on:

• Uncovering critical business issues
• Positioning solutions effectively
• Engaging with key decision-makers

ValueSelling is an easy-to-adopt sales methodology with decades of proven results. Workshops involve hands-on, interactive exercises to help build muscle memory, followed by reinforcement to solidify your newly developed skills.

Key Benefits

• Increase revenue
• Eliminate discounting 
• Grow deal size
• Close bigger deals faster
• Increase forecast accuracy

ValueSelling Associates emphasizes, "We do not sell training; we sell results." This results-driven approach ensures that all customer-facing professionals have a proven process, with hours of training and tools to effectively engage, qualify, advance, and close sales.

2Win and ValueSelling 

The ValueSelling Associates Methodology aligns with 2Win training, particularly Demo2Win. It emphasizes building practical skills and workshopping solutions, and the 2Win demo training is a particular area that helps ValueSelling go the extra mile. While it focuses more heavily on discovery training and skill building, we supplement and integrate these trainings with our customer success training and presales training. Part of our core values in all of our training is adding value throughout the sales cycle, which is shared with ValueSellling Associates. 

Challenger

The Challenger Sales Methodology, developed by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, is built around a sales process that focuses on teaching, tailoring, and taking control of the sales experience. The Challenger Sale challenges customers' assumptions by delivering high-quality insights. This helps establish the account executive's credibility and trust early in the relationship and shows how their status quo is costing them or what opportunities they've missed. This methodology focuses on:

• Your sales messaging
• Sales team training and development
• The sales process and execution

Challenger-trained sellers learn to reframe opportunities to avoid risk, win more business, save money, or steal market share. Sellers identify customer pain points and motivate customers to address them, resulting in more engaging and thoughtful customer conversations.

Key Benefits

• Offer value differentiation that challenges customer assumptions
• Establish credibility early, building trust and strong customer relationships
• Create tailored messaging that helps you stand out from your competition
• Uncover your organization’s biggest growth opportunities

Challenger sales training programs don't focus on perfecting a sales pitch. Instead, they teach account executives to challenge customers' thinking and provide new insights. Delivering a stellar customer experience is super important, as the sales experience accounts for 53% of customer loyalty. The Challenge Sales Methodology helps account executives differentiate themselves from the competition, ultimately driving growth and expanding customer relationships. This is a very popular methodology that disrupted many conventional notions of selling when it was introduced, and it can be very effective for organizations that align with the approach. 

2Win and Challenger 

2Win helps organizations deploy Challenger effectively by softening the sometimes harsh delivery of insights. The Challenger methodology requires scenarios and storytelling to bring audiences to adopt the challenge to their status quo and thinking. Through the deft use of storytelling, for example, you can disarm your audience if they become defensive when exploring pain. Challenger is incredibly effective, provided the customer does not retreat or go into attack mode during the pain point discussion. These moments are what we train for. 

Sandler

The Sandler Selling System, founded by David Sandler, equips your team with proven behaviors, attitudes, and techniques that help boost sales performance. This system has seven steps, allowing the account executive to act as an advisor to the customer, asking questions until both sides are convinced the product is a great fit. The seven steps include:

• Establishing bonding and rapport
• Setting an up-front contract
• Identifying the prospect's pain 
• Uncovering the prospect's budget
• Identifying the decision
• Presenting your fulfillment of the agreement
• Confirming the post-sell process

This methodology focuses on the qualification stage rather than the closing stage, which has a significant impact on how sales teams close deals. By encouraging open, honest communication with prospects, account executives can effectively tailor their approach to meet the prospects' needs.

Key Benefits

• Build better habits
• Reinforce positive beliefs
• Execute innovative strategies
• Drive performance

The Sandler Selling System allows sales teams to accelerate their success by elevating their execution. By continuously improving with accountability and coaching, sales professionals can excel at selling. This approach improves individual performance and the overall effectiveness of the sales organization, leading to sustainable growth and long-term success. The Sandler Selling System is a high touch from the beginning and has an excellent reputation amongst sales leaders and buyers. 

2Win and Sandler 

The 2Win programs offer tactical and technical skills training to supplement the Sandler Sales methodology. Both the 2Win and Sandler methodologies are high-touch and skill-oriented, with interactive sessions. 2Win is also aligned with Sandler's ideologies, including building connections, deep-dive discovery training, and pinpointing exact organizational challenges. Organizations that employ the Sandler sales methodology and are experiencing challenges in aligning all teams through discovery to customer success benefit from 2Win training. 

MEDDICC

The MEDDICC Sales Qualification Framework, along with its variations MEDDIC and MEDDPICC, is used by the world's most successful sales teams to drive efficient and predictable growth. MEDDICC is a methodology for enterprise sales organizations that helps sales teams engage with multiple stakeholders and address complex solutions. MEDDICC stands for:

• Metrics: The way you measure the value you provide to your customers
• Economic Buyer: Who the overall authority is inside the customer's organization
• Decision Criteria: What criteria the customer is basing their decision upon
• Decision Process: The process of obtaining the decision
• Implicate Pain: The pain you are solving and its seriousness
• Champion: The person or persons supporting you internally
• Competition: The other factors competing for the same resources you are

MEDDICC's strength lies both in its simplicity and depth. It introduces a common language to define all factors of an opportunity, keeping sellers focused on what matters throughout the sales process. This methodology ensures clarity and consistency, making the qualification process efficient and effective.

Key Benefits

• Establish a common language
• Improve deal alignment
• Enhance forecasting
• Increase clarity

By implementing MEDDICC, sales teams gain a structured approach that improves communication, alignment, and forecasting. This methodology empowers sellers to better understand their deals, leading to more successful outcomes. Like Challenger, the MEDDICC methodology emphasizes pain and the resulting losses associated with maintaining the status quo without the seller's solution. 

2Win and MEDDICC 

During sales processes where pinpointing pain is a focal point of a sale and closing technique, the 2Win soft skills and storytelling are a potent addition. Similar to the challenger sales scenario, account executives and presales professionals run a risk of inadvertently losing an audience's favor by discussing pain at an inappropriate time or before they have won trust. Audiences must connect emotionally first with sales teams prior to discussing their pain points. 2Win champions this stage and skillset in Storytelling2Win and Discovery2Win. 

Gap Selling

Gap Selling methodology, developed by sales coach Keenan, CEO of ASG (A Sales Growth Co.) and author of the book Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes, is a unique sales methodology, focusing less on qualification and closing, and more on bridging the gap between a customer's current state and their desired outcomes. Doing this allows account executives to understand pain points and position their products as solutions. Gap Selling focuses on:

• Current State: Understanding the prospect's problems and challenges they're dealing with and the impact of those problems
• Future State: Identifying the ideal outcome and the impact of solving the problem
• Gap: Determining the difference between the current and future states and whether the gap justifies an investment in the solution

Gap Selling is all about the Discovery process. It moves from basic pain points to uncover the root cause of the prospect's challenges. This allows account executives to present tailored solutions that effectively address the prospect's specific needs.

Key Benefits

• Prospect-focused approach
• Enhanced value proposition
• Higher customer satisfaction

This sales methodology helps sales teams uncover and address the real issues faced by their prospects, position their products or services as solutions, and deliver value to their customer. Gap Selling improves sales effectiveness and enhances the customer experience, leading to sustainable growth and success. Gap is also a pain-centered sales methodology. Unlike Challenger, whose focus is on deep insights into the pain, and MEDDICC whose focus is forecasting post pain, Gap uses a pain approach with their solution as the value added.

2Win and Gap Methodology 

Gap focuses on the current state versus the desired state. Impact and metrics are keys to this style of discovery and it relies on deep insights into pain. However, in order to properly approach these sometimes delicate subjects, we will need adoption from our audience. This is where 2Win training supports the Gap methodology. You can discuss the strategic and numeric impact of your product, but where you have not made a connection emotionally, your message may not be heard or accepted. 

Discovery On-The-Fly with the CDIM™ Discovery Framework

Getting the Most from Your Methodology

The 6 methodologies outlined above have a number of approaches to meeting sellers where they are. They can either choose to dive deep into their organization and try to make connections during discovery that last throughout the sales engagement and solidify the solution by that initial connection, or they can use insights or predictive forecasting using pain points to illicit allegiance from buyers. Methodologies are not necessarily predictive of success with all buyers and do not necessarily operate the same across organizations. 

How 2Win Strengthens Sales Methodologies 

Sales methodologies are playbooks at worst and part of daily practice at best. In order for teams to derive the most from sales training, they have to actively communicate with each other and adapt a methodology to their circumstances. Methodologies will not account for real-life scenarios. There are a number of very real-world scenarios where strict adherence to a methodology can miss the mark. 

Say you have an engagement where, unbeknownst to your account executive and solutions architect, a person has experienced a loss on the morning of the meeting. Using a pain-driven approach, the sales call kicks off immediately, pointing to discrepancies or missed opportunities. If your team has not been trained in business empathy or in connection generating, you could lose the opportunity. Similarly, where a team is beyond frustrated with the performance of a key metric, and they need to purchase a solution IMMEDIATELY, and your team performs a deep discovery and tries to be in control of the sale at a pace that is too slow, you will also lose an opportunity. In both instances, there is a failure to read the audience, a failure to make an emotional connection, and a failure to connect your solution to the organizational objective. This is where 2Win comes in. 

How to Make the Most of Your Methodology 

So how exactly does 2Win Global Training make the most of your methodology? 2Win programs including Discovery2Win, Demo2Win, and Success2Win, each focus on the development and execution of the soft skills necessary to strengthen relationships and move deals forward. While sales methodologies focus on what needs to happen in each step of the sales process, 2Win training empowers your team to understand how to execute in each step. Regardless of which sales methodology your organization has in play, 2Win programs are personalized to your needs and provide real bottom-line impact, especially in how your methodology performs.

If you are interested in learning how 2Win programs can transform the performance of your sales methodology, contact us today.