Most companies today are in either a growth or trouble mode. If your company is not at either end of the growth or trouble spectrum, it’s likely that your customers and prospects are. This presents one of the best opportunities in over a decade to capture more than your fair share of revenue growth.
The key to tapping more than your fair share of revenue growth is an Executive Briefing.
Everything you need to know about Breaking Through with Executive Briefings:
1. What is an Executive Briefing?
An Executive Briefing is a customized and customer-centric dialogue between prospect and customer key decision-makers and individuals from your company with a high degree of business acumen, technical expertise, and a deep understanding of the customer’s business and markets.
The executive briefing provides insight into the trends, best practices, or influences that may impair their business or provide growth or competitive advantage opportunities. You can position your firm to suggest that your perspectives will be useful to them and their business right now and in the future.
The essence of an adequately positioned executive briefing is a compelling value proposition as to how they are going to benefit.
2. Why are Executive Briefings Important Now?
Companies are compelled to change the ways they do business as a result of the pandemic. Since they are already in a change mindset, your offer to share insight on a potential change in the future establishes your credibility as a source for knowledge and expertise to strengthen their business resilience and results.
Executive briefings are important because they often prompt discussion of compelling reasons for change and establish you as a peer and trusted advisor.
3. How do I Prepare For an Executive Briefing?
Crafting the insights, perspectives, trends, and best practices for an impactful conversation about the executive’s company, industry, competitors, and customers is the first step to preparing an Executive Briefing. This may require a group effort, including help from marketing and the sales enablement team.
You can pressure test your thinking with your peers and leadership team to ensure you create a comprehensive list of topics to cover during the briefing. Planning and preparation are essential, but it’s your experience and ability to shape the messages that will provide value to the executive team.
Distill your insights into no more than ten presentation content slides.
4. How Do I Outreach to Setup the Executive Briefing?
Personalize the Executive Briefing request and deliver it via a phone call to the executive(s) or their executive assistants. You’re trying to demonstrate you are peer. Don’t rely on an email to break through the clutter. Leverage email communication once you have established contact.
Your outreach messaging should communicate how the value you will deliver during the briefing will outweigh the investment in time.
5. Example of Executive Briefing Outreach Messaging
Susan – We work with other organizations similar to yours that need to improve their sales team performance and ROI impact of their marketing initiatives.
I’m requesting a 30-minute executive briefing so we can share three initiatives that other companies in your industry are adopting to drive revenue growth and market share during and after the pandemic.
I’ll also provide a list of the top five questions clients grapple with as they plan for the next 18-24 months.
Lack of confidence is the major obstacle that salespeople encounter when it comes to executive briefings. Most have never initiated a request for an executive briefing nor developed the content needed to pull it off.
More than ever, an Executive Briefing can help your organization access senior-levels within your customer and prospect accounts. Remember, most companies are in a change mindset so take advantage while you can.