Integrate
Marketing and Sales with “Sales-Ready Messaging” to
Improve Results
By: Chris
Kiminas, co-founder, BizLogx LLC
Integrating marketing and sales has become a key goal for many businesses, with good reason. When companies align sales and marketing, they typically experience rapid improvement in sales productivity. The quantity and quality of leads improve, sales cycles grow shorter, and conversion rates increase. The companies grow faster and generate more profit.
Since companies have so much to benefit by integrating sales and marketing, why is it so hard to get the two working together? That’s one of the issues that the American Marketing Association joined with our colleague, Mike Bosworth of CustomerCentric Systems, LLC, in studying a few years ago.
Many vice presidents of sales interviewed in the study said that marketing was “irrelevant” to their selling efforts. Why? Because, according to those executives and their salespeople, up to 90 percent of sales collateral created by the marketing department was NEVER used by sales.
Salespeople viewed the abundance of Web content, white papers, brochures,
and other material generated by the marketing department as largely
immaterial to their selling efforts. They admitted that marketing
effectively documented product features, but felt it was ineffective
at communicating why those features were important to the customer.
Worse, it failed to demonstrate how customers and prospects would
actually use those capabilities in their business.
Clearly, one way to move sales and marketing closer together is to help marketing generate messages and material that the sales team can use to align their offerings with specific prospect goals and close more sales. But where does marketing messaging most often miss the mark?
In the time-honored model, marketing describes products and services in terms of features and benefits. Features are facts – price, color, size and options. Benefits involve statements of what the product can do for the customer. Conventional wisdom holds that people make buying decisions based on benefits.
To show benefits, product marketing organizations often describe their offering in terms of what ‘It’ can do. For example:
- ‘It’ will increase your productivity;
- ‘It’ will reduce your customer churn; or
- ‘It’ will improve employee morale.
In our experience, today’s prospects want to know more than what ‘It’ will do. Their real questions are, “How will ‘It’ do that for my organization?” and “How will ‘It’ help my company to:
- Achieve a goal;
- Solve a problem; or
- Satisfy a need.
With a little advance work and planning to address these questions, marketing can create “sales-ready messaging” to help the sales team shorten sales cycles and close more deals. Here are some fundamental steps in planning sales-ready messaging.
| 1. | Start by studying the potential buyer’s roles and goals. Identify the people in the target company who have the power to buy, fund and implement the seller’s offering. |
| 2. | Next, determine each of these persons’ business goals and objectives within the organization. What is their mission? What are the obstacles to achieving that mission? |
| 3. | Then take a look at how your company’s products or service can help each person achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need. |
| 4. | Develop a set of targeted questions that will lead the prospect through the process of identifying their problem or need. |
| 5. | Develop usage scenarios that will help your salespeople guide the prospect to an understanding of how they can use your product or service to satisfy that problem or need. |
| 6. | Carry the messaging throughout the marketing mix, from the company Web site through brochures, sales sheets, and media relations. |
When marketing creates more effective customer messaging through this process, the salespeople have the tools they need to influence and steer sales calls to their advantage.
Our experience shows that companies whose marketing organizations arm their sales people with “sales ready messaging” shorten sales cycles, accelerate revenues and improve the profitability of each deal closed.
Published
by Bizlogx,
LLC.
Copyright © 2006
