Failure to prepare the Sales team to sell should be a crime. A lot of effort goes into the design and build of the product. Marketing does its best to create demand. Public Relations is working hard to get ink. But is your sales team ready to sell? Do they have the essential tools they will need to start closing business right away, or will they be left to their own devices to figure it out? Your organization could easily lose a quarter or more in lost revenue opportunity while this thrashing about is taking place.
It should be no surprise that the relationship between Sales and Marketing can be tenuous at best. In some organizations it doesn’t matter how hard the Marketing team works to support the Sales team. There always seems to be some complaint about how Marketing isn’t doing enough. That dynamic has existed for years and will continue to exist into the future. So my best advice is to get over it. The objective is to sell more stuff, and everyone has to do whatever it takes to sell more stuff. Period.
Because of this shaky relationship, Marketing teams sometimes do the absolute minimum when it comes to sales tools. And why not? It’s no fun to work hard to develop what you believe to be a great set of selling tools only to find out that you’re not appreciated in your efforts. "Here’s your Powerpoint presentation. Good luck with that." That’s only one of the sales tools and you know as well as I do that it will be changed and butchered by every sales guy in your organization. Always has. Always will be. But what about the things that really matter?
The roots of this problem can be found by knowing that roughly 10% of all sales pros consistently beat quota. They can sell the snot out of anything they get their hands on. They’re the guys that make it look easy. Problem is, most can’t explain how they do it and get frustrated with others that don’t get it. If you are lucky enough have an entire Sales team of these super sale guys, your job will be easy. These guys are not the focus of your sales tool efforts. It’s the other 90%. It’s those 90% that take the lead from the 10% and bash Marketing because it’s the thing to do.
If you’ve done your homework you know your target market, the buying cycle and who is involved in a sale. What your sales guys need is less education on every nuance of the product and more information on problems, markets and buyers. That is the information that will help them sell. So what can you do today?
First, re-examine your "sales training". What percentage of the training is about the product and what percentage is about the market? Prospects may get excited about a whiz-bang new feature, but they buy because they have (or perceive they have) a problem that they are willing to invest time and money in to resolve. Adjust your sales training to focus 80% of the training on markets, problems and buyers.
Next, focus on building a small set of market-oriented sales tools. These are reference materials. Make them short and pithy. I suggest the following as a starting set:
- Target Market Overview - provides an overview of the target market, describes the opportunity and summarizes the individuals likely to be involved in the research, evaluation and purchase of your product.
- Prospect Qualification Overview - provides suggestions on who to call on first, what constitutes a qualified lead and qualifying questions.
- Competition Overview - provides an overview of the competitive landscape. This should be a summary of competitors and how they operate. It should list things like top customers, pricing, strengths and weaknesses. A competitor’s strength is something they cannot change easily. For each strength, provide a statement that turns the strength into a weakness. You could also include a section on what to say when the sales guy is 1st in the account and last in the account. This information is valuable in helping to readjust the prospect’s bias toward your product.
- Common Sales Objections - provides a list of objections that are likely to be encountered in a sale
Start small and collaborate with members of the Sales team who are in the 90%. Develop simple, reference-style materials and be prepared for (and solicit) feedback on how the tools are being used and what could be improved.
