How to translate smart marketing into savvy selling

Behavioural tracking, customer segmentation and focus groups may all be common currency among marketers, but before attempting to execute your meticulously planned strategy it pays to ensure you have the sales team's buy-in.

Modern techniques probably give today's marketers greater insight into customers' personalities and habits than ever before. But if these insights aren't passed on to the field sales, telesales and customer service teams tasked with converting prospects into customers, then they're little more than an intellectual workout. Sales teams need information they can understand and act upon.

Getting the message across

• Does your company know and understand its own offering? That may be an odd question, but it's perhaps best explained using an alleged quote from Bill Gates: "We (Microsoft) see ourselves as being in the 'information providing' business, not the software business. If the American railway pioneers had recognised that they were in the transportation business then today we might all be flying Amtrak Airlines."
  Don't attempt to communicate the company's offering to the sales force until you absolutely understand it yourself.
• Once there is clarity, create a central news portal on the company intranet and keep it regularly updated with all product collateral. Have your marketing team contribute regularly to a product news blog as an informal means of maintaining communication with sales.
• Never disregard small or incremental changes to your offering as being too minor to warrant a team update.
• Make sure that the sales team is able to translate simple product features into a broad range of benefits to suit your varied audience. Try experimenting with role-play exercises involving a diverse mix of scenarios to identify and address different groups. Share all findings via the blog and/or intranet.
• Go on joint appointments with your sales force (always letting them take the lead). Listen and learn. Watch their presentations. Sit-in on their sales calls. Any gaps in their knowledge and understanding will soon become evident.
• Organise for the sales team to present to the marketing team (this may have to involve a degree of diplomacy). Sales people often demonstrate a level of conversational fluency that suggests a depth of understanding of their product or industry that they simply don't posses. Careful questioning can quickly identify and plug any shortfalls.
• Wherever possible, make sure that every member of both the sales and marketing teams has an opportunity to use the company's products. Staff members at Volvo's UK call centres have access to a different demo car each month. They can drive it, and even take it home. As a result, they're able to draw on personal experience when responding to callers' questions.

Knowing the target

• Where a salesperson enters a discussion with a thorough understanding of their client's unique role in a project, and the problems that client needs to solve, they have a far better chance of successfully concluding a deal.
• It's crucial that all sales people understand the differences between the various audiences with which they interact, and the motivating factors for each.

Never missing an opportunity

• Practically every sale includes the potential to cross- or up-sell. The key is to provide the sales force with the permission, information and guidelines necessary to convert such opportunities.
• Make sure that all add-ons are relevant to the other side's needs and solve a problem. Otherwise you risk undermining the original sale by being perceived as simply piling on costs.
• If in doubt, remind sales people to go back to the basics. Why do customers need your product? How does it solve their problem? Cross-selling and up-selling should only add value to the core proposition.

Being persuasive

• A common denominator among top sales people is that they're money driven, although this in itself is often misunderstood. Sales people view sales and reward as a scorecard. Don't therefore underestimate the value of praise.
• Sales people also feed off each other. Success breeds success and failure, if unchecked, can lead to a downward spiral in performance. Identify naturally enthusiastic members of the team and use them as catalysts and role models for the rest.
• When it comes to tangible rewards, ensure targets aren't too complicated and are deemed fair.
• Avoid tinkering. Too many changes to marketing objectives and the reward scheme may lead the sales team to feel that the rules are, "being made up as they go along", but...
• ... Reward combinations can work well. In addition to 'turnover' – margin, discounting, cross-selling and up-selling targets and rewards can all help drive the business forward.

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