New Sales Conversations: True Fit’s Shift from Product-Focused to Value-Based Selling Leads to 85% Sales Growth

Engagement Highlights

• Shifted the go-to-market team from a focus on leading with product to a focus on anchoring on buyer-defined goals and impacts
• Developed a shared language for discovery and qualification on buyer value plays to support a cross go-to-market team ‘test and improve’ process
• Used team-based learning to support accelerating deals and sharpening market positioning and differentiation
• In 2021 and year after the Winalytics partnership, True Fit grew by 85% over pre-pandemic revenue and achieved the North America annual sales goal two weeks into October

Challenge

True Fit Corporation, like many tech companies, was really excited about its own innovation and focused on selling a transformation product to personalize student engagement with “right message, to the right student, at the right time” and build a deeper sense of student to student connection and community.

And, it is not hard to see why the team would get excited about the product.  The retail personalization platform draws on data from 90 million annual active consumers and 17,000 brands to help their retail partners, including J.C. Penney, Boden, J.Crew and ASICS, make fit recommendations personalized to every single consumer.  There were also great case studies showing an increase of 150% to 200% in conversion rate from a product page and 17% to 20% reduction in product returns — a real and clear ROI.

The sales team was getting a healthy volume of initial discovery calls, but too many of the calls focused on talking up a retail personalization platform without really getting to the business outcomes the platform could help accomplish.  Many initial sales conversations stalled without getting to a second meeting with a decision group or an economic buyer.

Calls that did progress to stakeholder demo too often turned into a generic product pitch rather than being tuned to the buyer problem.   The True Fit team was not experiencing the level of sales velocity that could be expected from a product with a very clear business case and ROI.

Solution

True Fit’s CRO and leadership recognized the need to shift the sales conversations from a focus on product to a focus on engaging buyers and customers around their engagement goals.   They engaged Winalytics to support this transition.

Winalytics led the sales and marketing leadership team through a value positioning process to identify the key business outcomes impacted by our retail personalization platform.   The team agreed on three key areas of value:  converting more browsers to buyers, reducing size sampling returns, and increasing customer lifetime value.  To help guide buyer conversations toward business value, the sales and marketing leadership team also developed value plays with a set of value discovery questions and aligned success stories and content assets for each business area.

Winalytics developed a bi-weekly, team-based learning process to integrate the value plays into sales positioning and execution.  The sessions brought together the sales team, sales leadership, and marketing.   The insights from these team learning sessions were designed to help collaborate across department and close individual deals faster.   Sales leadership carried these team learning forward in weekly  ‘test and improve’ sessions that also brought in individuals from brand and partnerships.

Results

The results of this process were immediate.  Sales calls started to focus more on the business ‘why’ – what problems was the buyer trying to solve – and product discussions became less generic and more focused on the buyer problem.   As a result, each sales rep’s productivity increased dramatically.   A lot more first meetings turned into quality second meetings and closed deals.  The gains in sales productivity turned into a blockbuster year for True Fit in 2021.  The company grew by 85% over the pre-pandemic period and achieved the annual sales goal just two weeks into October.

The store closures and dressing room closures were a big boost to True Fit’s business with a large cohort of shoppers coming online who had never navigated the digital shopping experience.  Sales leadership also credits stronger sales positioning and execution as a big part of the record outcome.