After participating in our recent Sales Training Webinar, Engaging the C-Suite Executive, participant Mike Stanfill of French Gerleman asked me:

“I’m a sales manager. What is the best question or topic that my sales team can use to get a C-suite executive to open up?”

Mike raised a great question. To get the C-Suite executive’s attention—in a word, the topic must be results. To relate this to the C-Suite prospect, you must create a results-oriented value proposition

The Basic Value Proposition

Let’s start with the basics. Specifically, the value proposition has three parts:

As a sales management training coach, I often get asked, “What is the best way to engage C-level executives?” The answer is simple — to reach these strategic decision-makers you MUST ask strategic sales questions. These questions must focus on vision, growth, market differentiation, competitive threats, market pressures, and productivity. The emphasis must be on the customer and not the product.

Questions to Engage C-level-Executives

1. What’s the #1 reason why customers choose to do business with you?
2. How are you looking to position your company in this market three years from now?
3. How’s that compare to where you today? …Versus a year ago? 
4. What do you see are the challenges ahead? …Opportunities?  
5. What steps are you initiating to prepare for these challenges/opportunities?
6. How would you describe the one key attribute your company has that will help you drive growth and expand market share? 
7. What would you say truly differentiates your organization from the many competitive choices that exist today?
8. What’s the problem you're sharing with me costing you in terms of resources, quality, output, customers, revenue, employees, time, overhead, etc.?
9. If you could eliminate that problem what would it enable you to do that you're not doing now?    
10. How would others in your organization interpret or perceive these issues you shared with me? 

A good rule of thumb for salespeople is to actively seek out new business relationships, rather than limiting their sales efforts to a dwindling customer base. Sure, leveraging and strengthening an existing customer base is important, but it’s all too easy to become complacent and keep calling on the same customers.

Sometimes the sales relationship has run its course, or the well has simply run dry. In an economic climate like the one we’ve been in lately, your best customer may now be in dire straits because of mergers or downsizing — the salesperson’s timing is off. He’s better off investing his time and efforts on fresh new opportunities.

Sales managers need to coach their salespeople to leverage existing client relationships by gaining access to other decision makers and influencers. When your sales reps win accounts and develop good rapport with a particular contact within an organization, they may gravitate towards that relationship and become protective of it. But they need to be careful not to be too protective or even complacent.

For various reasons sales reps are often hesitant about establishing new contact relationships with existing clients. The most common being that they’ll step on their key contact’s toes and possibly offend them. Or, a contact may say, “Oh, you don’t need to contact anyone here but me,” — a red flag signaling that the sales rep would be better off reaching out to others in the organization.