Keeping track of multiple divisions and multiple sales efforts — while making sure that your pricing isn’t all over the board and providing a convincing joint proposal for the client that will help him or her understand your advantages—takes a great deal of coordination. Solving the political problems inside may be the biggest challenge. Without a piece of technology to keep track of who is doing what, however, this becomes an even more difficult task.
Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales
Another important area of automation — that of sales messaging — can greatly affect the interface between marketing and sales. This is an area where technology actually has exacerbated the problem.
Marketing serves many important functions. Among these is creating effective and timely sales messaging for salespeople. Often the sales department is unable to get the information it needs from marketing in a format its people can use.
With the advent of e-mail and the Web, marketing people now can barrage salespeople with tons and tons of information, which makes sorting through it all to find the right information even more difficult.
The key to this is to provide the information in a format that allows salespeople to find what they need quickly and easily. Another problem is that marketing typically doesn’t create different messages for prospects, customers, salespeople, and investors. And if a company has a large number of products, a large number of competitors, and is in a number of different industries, the result is a huge knowledge management problem — which drives a sales problem.
Hey, Marketing—Salespeople Are Your Customers, Too
Marketing collateral and brochures obviously should be written from the point of view of the customer. But which customer? For sales-effectiveness messages, the starting point should be from the salesperson’s point of view, which is by stakeholder. What do the salespeople need to be competitive, to keep customers satisfied, to add value, and to win more business?
Once you have this information, it has to be organized and indexed. First, it has to be chunked into pieces. Some companies approach this by chunking it by product, but salespeople need it by customer pain — from the customer’s point of view. If customers have this pain, how does our solution solve it? What are the outcomes? And — oh, by the way — it is contained in what product?
After the information has been segmented, it then has to be indexed so that salespeople can search for it by customer pain; by product, solution, or service; by industry, executive, and technical buyer; by phase of the sales cycle; and by competitor. Once indexed, it must be linked to other relevant data so that salespeople can trace it back to other related information that they might need.
You are a salesperson in a hotel room, late at night. Tomorrow morning, you have a sales call to a CFO in health care, against competitor XYZ, for a certain solution set. What do you say? What are the industry issues for each person on the buying committee? What will your competitor have said? What traps can you look for? What issues can you create?
Tomorrow afternoon, you have to talk to procurement in Bank X. What are their issues? What will they be concerned about? What solutions do you have? How can you differentiate yourself?
As you can see, this can be a knowledge management challenge. Most file document vendors organize and index documents, but salespeople need their information in a more granular fashion.
Sales Knowledge Management
Salespeople tell us that they often have to make as many as 20 calls internally to find the information they need for prospects and clients. A tool that makes this easier is an enormous value that frees salespeople up to sell.
An example of a vendor working to provide that additional level of value to salespeople is Pragmatech. The company’s offerings allow salespeople to quickly personalize communication in the context of “buyer-ready information.” In other words, the communication is personalized and tailored to the buying criteria of each prospect or customer. All Pragmatech applications are driven by a common knowledge base. Content in the knowledge base is parsed into customizable pieces and indexed with appropriate search engines so that salespeople can easily personalize presentations, proposals, statements of work, RFP responses, business letters, and other communications throughout the sales process.
Jennifer Webb of Pragmatech tells us that when the company surveys its clients, it finds that 90 percent of the sales messaging used by its salespeople comes from their own hard drives—not a central message center—and that much of the data is feature-driven rather than pain-driven. When Pragmatech talks to prospects, its people ask, “What if you could capture what your A players are saying and get that into the heads of your B and C players?”
Pragmatech’s success stories demonstrate the value of a centralized knowledge base made accessible to sales organizations. For one enterprise, a leading online global career network, the marketing team aligned closely with sales to capture and refine the best high-value buyerfocused messaging. With use of automated proposals and presentations and a searchable Website, the sales force throughout the enterprise had access to these wellarticulated and accurate messages and could apply them to communications that were personalized to the buyer’s objectives. The results included improvements in sales effectiveness, client interactions, competitive advantages, and productivity.
Salespeople still need the flexibility to tailor messages to individual buyers, but in this way they can at least start from a central repository. Then you can be sure that they are basing their messages on current information that is already arranged into pieces that they can organize and use.
The solution is not just a sales portal, a tool kit, a dashboard, or a marketing encyclopedia. There is no technology “silver bullet” when it comes to sales and CRM.
Messages Focused by Stakeholder
The best practice is to have relevant information, to keep it fresh, and to organize and index it based on what your sales force needs. This should be the point of departure, and it should be driven by the best practices sales cycle, working backwards through marketing to get the right information by industry, stakeholder, organizational chart, solution, product, competitor, customer, prospect, or investor.
The information needs to be segmented, indexed, and linked by a tool that can help salespeople find what they need, when they need it, to win more business. By the time a salesperson gleans all this from brochures or books of binders, well, you can get the idea.
Product Launch or Product Lurch?
And if you are involved in a new product launch, your window of competitive advantage is probably six months before your competitor can bring a new product online. If your salespeople spend half that time creating messages themselves, you’ve already lost half your opportunity.
A typical scenario for many companies is for marketing to give the salespeople information on a new product or solution in a format that is great for a marketing piece but not great for a competitive sales message to be used throughout the sales cycle.
Each salesperson then “translates” this marketing message into the message he or she needs to support the sales process.
Here is the problem: The “A” players may figure this out quickly and lose value for only one or two weeks. But it takes the “B” players a little longer, and they may lose one or two deals before they figure it out. And how long does it take the “C” players? Somewhere between a long time and never. There is a better way to do this.
