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Articles Sales Renewal Strategy Using the “Why Stay” Message In a sales conversation, a great "Why Change” story is all about disruption. It sets the scene in your prospect’s world, then hammers away on the status quo, casting it as a dark and dangerous place where they can’t achieve their business goals. It’s like the ocean in Jaws. Things might be nice and refreshing at first, but disruption is… August 15, 2017 | Pete Fulford
Articles When Not To Challenge Your Customer The call for B2B marketers and salespeople to always be challenging and disrupting the customer is a great piece of advice when you’re trying to acquire new business. But it’s actually very bad advice when you’re trying to keep your customers and convince them to pay more. In fact, disrupting your customer during a renewal or price increase discussion is… June 30, 2017 | Tim Riesterer
Articles Does Your Message Match the Moment? You might have heard some variation of the idea that salespeople need to be fluent across the many different moments they face in their sales conversations. The same sentiment gets applied to marketers much, much less—but it shouldn’t be. Because that type of fluency is just as critical for those who develop the stories as it is for those who… June 15, 2017 | Tim Riesterer
Articles When Challenging Your Customer Backfires Whether you call it “provoking” or “challenging” the customer, the insights-led sales approach so popular today isn’t effective when you’re trying to renew a customer or get them to pay more for your solution. In fact, for those conversations, that disruptive-minded approach could drive good customers right into the arms of your competition. That’s according to two recent academic studies—one on… April 21, 2017 | Tim Riesterer
Articles Why Pay? How Are Companies Framing Price Increases With Customers? As a precursor to our next academic study around messaging for price increases, we surveyed the market to find out how well they think they’re doing in this area. The findings of that survey are explored below. “I need you to pay more.” No matter how you spin it, communicating a price increase message to your customers is tricky business,… April 5, 2017 | Tim Riesterer
Articles What’s In a Winning ‘Why Stay’ Story? A provocative message is marketing gold when you’re trying to acquire new customers with a great “Why Change” story. Research proves it. But it’s a very different story when you apply that same approach to renewal conversations or your “Why Stay” message. A Corporate Visions study I wrote about recently revealed that the provocative messaging approaches so in vogue today… March 4, 2017 | Tim Riesterer
Articles Prospect Theory… And How It Can Transform Your Executive Conversations All of your road warriors have lived through this. I was in the airport terminal last week getting ready to board my flight home when an announcement came from the customer service desk: The flight was overbooked. The airline was looking for a volunteer to give up their seat and take a later flight home, in exchange for a $500… January 4, 2017 | Tim Riesterer

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