Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Closing the Deal

What sales really needs from marketing

By Lisa Dennis, president, Knowledgence Associates

If you ask the average sales person what they need, the answer is pretty predictable: “qualified leads.”

Yet any marketer will tell you that there are a pile of untouched leads sitting back at the office getting older by the minute. The reality is that marketing’s job is to provide targeted leads – but it is sales’ job to fully qualify them. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about this. But if we go a bit deeper, there are things that sales could really use from marketing that will make the qualification process more effective. If you believe, as I do, that the first customer of marketing is the sales team, then providing all the necessary tools to enable the sales process is a key part of marketing’s role. A worthy goal is to enable a salesperson to engage in a customer-focused conversation with sales targets. In order to engage in a higher level conversation, marketers need to provide more than just product/service features and benefits. Areas of concentration include: preparing for engagement, qualification tools, conversation assets and relevant, tailored content.

Preparing for engagement involves setting up the salesperson with the following materials:

• Customer-focused value proposition that clearly states the prospect’s challenge or goal, your company’s specific offer to address it, and what differentiates your offer from available alternatives;

• Customer-focused benefits (not features) tailored to individual personas/titles of target prospects;

• List of key value drivers that guide the prospect’s decision process, quantified with verifiable proof (customer testimonials, case studies, or third party validation). Qualification tools make all the difference in streamlining the sales process and driving closeable opportunities into the pipeline. While it is sales’ job to qualify, there is a role for marketing to play in driving the process.

• Create a “Prospect Fit Index,” which provides an easy and consistent method for sales to determine whether a prospect is worth pursuing. The index should outline what is a poor fit versus an optimal fit based on a set of 5–7 key criteria that describe the best and closable sales targets for your products or services. Any prospect can be quickly assessed or scored based on where they map across the index. 

• Develop a lead measurement tool that allows both marketing and sales to score a lead to be able to assess the quality of leads coming in, and to determine which leads should be pursued versus nurtured until they are ready to go to sales.

Conversation assets needed to drive the prospect through the sales process include:

• List of key business requirements and initiatives by target role or title so sales people can focus the conversation on topics relevant to the prospect;

• Set of high level questions, tailored by role or title that help the salesperson to engage the prospect in examining their KBRs;

• List of potential outcomes should the prospect not adequately address their challenges.
Create marketing content that is tailored by key person or title, rather than simply creating assets by the pound. More content is not better content. Salespeople need some direction in determining the best mix of content assets to aid them as they engage in an ongoing conversation with their prospects.

• Do a content assessment across all marketing assets to determine what the current mix is between content types, format, level of complexity, focus, shelf life, source, audience segment, buying stage and decision role. Identify where the gaps are in asset coverage that need to be addressed.

• Map content assets for the best fit with targeted personas and titles to make it easier for sales people to provide relevant assets that will help drive their conversation. The map should include the optimal mix of assets for each stage of the pipeline.

• Develop a short training webinar that outlines the map, and provides a set of guidelines on how to use the marketing assets and connect them to the conversational tools like key questions, key business requirements and outcomes.

Some of you in reading this will question whether what I’m proposing is really a marketing responsibility or a sales responsibility. The point is that the buying climate out there is forcing marketing and sellers to engage and partner more closely than ever before. It takes a village of marketing and salespeople to land and keep happy customers. Marketing has the power and expertise to lead the way on that journey.
 

Lisa Dennis is president of Knowledgence Associates in Cambridge (www.knowledgence.com). "Closing the Deal" is a new weekly feature in MHT where sales experts share their advice on technology sales.