Alignment of Your Sales Strategy, and the Buyer’s Journey
Does your sales strategy help your buyers make a confident, and expanded purchase of your offering?
My core purpose is to elevate the sales profession with our actions, and collaboration. Part of my belief is that my role is not to ask a business owner what keeps them up at night, but sharing insights to what should be keeping them up.. In other words, what you and your team should anticipate.
To that end, I invest time in reading about trends in sales, paying attention to trusted research completed, and distilling the data into actionable ideas that impact your business. A recent article from Michael Katz at Gartner caught my attention.
The article is dense with important facts about buyers and sellers. For example, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep free experience, and 68% recently did. While 20% of them regret purchases made through a digital experience only.
If your company is a complex B2B sale , it is essential that sales and marketing work with coordination. In fact, sales or marketing can accomplish what Katz calls a Learning Path alone. Your marketing and sales needs to deepen the buyer’s understanding that they can accomplish their goals through your solution.
This means your marketing messaging must speak to the problems your buyers encounter in a context they can relate to. The sales messaging and questions must uncover the same compelling problems. Think marketing and sales as hand and glove.
Most importantly, as the business owner, do not let any of this up to chance. Internal or external marketing must have a clear understanding of the beliefs, and behaviors of your buyers. Your sales people must be given the same context as to the problems they can solve for your buyers.
This is one of the first problems that must be addressed to create success with your sales team, or new sales hire. Teach them about your buyer, the company sales story, the problems you solve, and the questions they must ask to be effective. All of that training - before product training.
The Learning Path concept is not dumping all the product knowledge at the feet of the buyer. It is sitting on the same side of the table with the buyer, seeing the landscape from your perspective, and discovering together if your solution is a great fit, or not.
Please indulge me with a football metaphor. What Tom Brady sees at the line of scrimmage, and in the 2.3 seconds before he releases the ball, is much more robust than a pedestrian quarterback. Your salespeople need to strive for better discovery, not pitching products.
The Learning Path yields a 147% increase in buying more of your products because the guidance provided helps the buyer recognize your value.
Here is why I am writing about this: 62% of sellers in Gartner’s research describe defining their sales and marketing messaging as different. This is a serious and common mistake, and a significant disconnect. Companies must have alignment between marketing and sales. Getting the company story right is critical to increasing customer acquisition and revenue growth.
Back to fellow Wolverine Tom Brady, “slow down to speed up together.” You must understand who your buyer is, what they believe, what behaviors they have, and clarity about the problems they have.
If you want to learn more about getting your marketing on target, check out my podcast Sales and Cigars and my series with Matt Anderson on “how to think about marketing”. We are breaking down the common mistakes marketers and entrepreneurs make.
And one more thing…
I am really excited about my Free offer coming up on August 21st. If you are hiring salespeople the same way you hire everyone else, the FREE Challenge was created for you. You will get everything you need to hire your next sales superstar. Follow me on LinkedIn for the upcoming announcement or click here for more info.
I want to thank you for subscribing and reading the blog. The entire team at Helix Sales Development is working hard to deliver value to as many entrepreneurs as we can. We do not and cannot work with everyone who reaches out, but we are building offerings to give you access to great tools.