Mastering Executive Briefings: Elevate Your B2B Sales Strategy

Discover how to transform your sales approach and outshine competitors with effective executive briefing strategies.

Every once in a while, a sales leader struggles to understand the strategy of using an executive briefing in a first meeting. They reject the strategy because they don’t know exactly what it does. In almost all cases, sales leaders believe the way they sold is how their teams should sell, even though a number of decades separate the sales leader's experience from the environment of today’s ever-evolving B2B landscape.

The following nine outcomes help explain why using an executive briefing works.

1. Secure Initial Sales Meetings Effectively: When most cold outreach starts with a poor offer, one that will have the salesperson talking about their company and their solutions, it is easy to understand why your contacts reject the request for a meeting. By trading the value of an executive briefing, two things are true. First, it will make it easier to gain a meeting, and second, it will also differentiate the salesperson from their competitors, projecting the salesperson as having a higher status than peers.
2. Establish Sales Expertise in B2B Meetings: By starting the first meeting with an executive briefing, you elevate the salesperson’s status by providing their contact with information and insights. Compared to the approach that has the salesperson asking the same, tired, old questions salespeople have used for more than four decades, the salesperson that provides an executive briefing looks like an expert.
3. Create Immediate Value in B2B Sales: In a time when decision-makers and buyers complain that salespeople know nothing about their company or their industry, the executive briefing will prove the salesperson has done their homework. If you wonder why you or your team is treated like a commodity, it is because their approach is not capable of matching the better outcome of the executive briefing.
4. Motivate Clients to Embrace Change: The second most common question I get from salespeople is “How do I motivate my client to act?” They missed their opportunity. The executive briefing answers the question “Why change?” in the first couple of minutes of the first meeting. The insights and the data allow the client to recognize that things have changed.
5. Overcome Outdated Beliefs in Sales: Your executive briefing can help you to remove and replace the contact’s false or outdated beliefs. By providing an executive briefing with the data and the citations that lock in the context of the client’s future decisions, as they know what has changed and what is true now.
6. Engage Decision Makers in Sales Meetings: The first meeting is an audition. The average salesperson often has a difficult time making it out of the first meeting with a second meeting. The executive briefing allows the contact to agree to a second meeting, but it also allows the contact to invite leaders and stakeholders to join the second meeting without the fear of being embarrassed by the salesperson.
7. Build a Preference for Your B2B Solutions: If you believe that your solution is what creates a preference to buy from you, you don’t know how sales works. The sales conversation is the largest variable and the only vehicle you have to cause the buyer to prefer to buy from you. What strategy do you use to create a preference to buy from you?
8. Position as a Trusted Advisor in Sales: If you were a leader responsible for making a rare, critical decision, would you feel safe in the hands of a salesperson that was no different from any other salesperson? Or, would you want a salesperson who has a better understanding of their problem and how best to go about solving it on the first try? The executive briefing can prove you are a potential trusted advisor.
9. Explore and Understand Multiple Perspectives in B2B Sales: When your contact has a different perspective, you should explore it and work to understand how one company will do something different than others. The more you understand the differences, the better you are able to help your clients.

When you begin a meeting with an executive briefing, you introduce the first trend and the data. There are two methods available when starting your executive briefing. The first is to introduce the first trend and the data, then explain what it means. The second is to allow your contact to see the data and give them a minute or two to make sense of it. This allows them to make up their own mind about what a trend or the data means.

Leaving this article, look at each of the nine outcomes and the strategy you use to ensure you are able to acquire each of them. If you have a difficult time being certain that how you sell will allow these outcomes, you may want to look at a modern sales methodology that provides you with the ability to match this strategy.