By Loren Padelford, EVP of Sales, Skura Corporation
Companies are now required to hone their sales and marketing efforts to the individual needs and interests of each prospect in order to provide positive customer experiences amid the cacophony of today’s marketing-soaked landscape. After all, 81% of companies with strong customer experience competencies outperform their competition, according to Peppers & Rogers Group.
Getting the right content to the right people remains a challenge for B2B marketers, and yet, there are a number of best practices that can be applied to sales efforts and marketing content creation that, even if a prospect hasn’t told you what their exact needs are, can improve your chances of delivering a responsive, and timely sales pitch that aligns with your prospect’s needs.
By Loren Padelford, EVP of Sales, Skura Corporation
Companies are now required to hone their sales and marketing efforts to the individual needs and interests of each prospect in order to provide positive customer experiences amid the cacophony of today’s marketing-soaked landscape. After all, 81% of companies with strong customer experience competencies outperform their competition, according to Peppers & Rogers Group.
Getting the right content to the right people remains a challenge for B2B marketers, and yet, there are a number of best practices that can be applied to sales efforts and marketing content creation that, even if a prospect hasn’t told you what their exact needs are, can improve your chances of delivering a responsive, and timely sales pitch that aligns with your prospect’s needs.
Best Practice: Avoid the Sales and Marketing Black Hole
There is often a great disconnect between sales and marketing departments —largely due to lack of information and insight. Marketing will secure the lead, draft the message and collateral, and then hand everything over to the sales department, and nothing is revisited. Marketing never knows which of the content it provides the sales team is most effective, or even if it is used. In order to hone sales and marketing content to each prospect, this information gap must be closed.
Fixing the “sales black hole” does not require an unsolvable, secret proprietary algorithm. Sales and marketing teams can employ things like adaptive sales enablement technology to create a continuous feedback loop between them, using information collected about individual prospects before, during and after sales meetings to hone content and devise approaches that are custom-tailored to meet the needs of each customer.
Best Practice: Establish Customer Personas
60% of the buyer’s journey happens before the sales person interacts with a prospect, according to Sales Benchmark Index. However, the first contact a sales person has with a customer is blind. When you have not spoken with a prospect before or had the opportunity to discuss long-term goals, establishing a customer persona is crucial to your first introduction.
Personas lead to the understanding of who your customer is and who is buying from you, which is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of every sales presentation: relevance. Distinguishing specific personas is key to setting the foundation of developing an understanding of the thoughts, feelings, characteristics and behaviors of a customer — this can now be done even before an introduction is made.
Sales and marketing teams ideally should have enough detail to see different products and services from a customer’s perspective. What type of content do they consume at each stage of the sales process? Are there different pain points and motivating factors that turn into purchasing decisions? Do they have a decision-making role in the sales process?
Best Practice: Maintain Fresh Content
Presenting the “right” content to the “right” person is ineffective when the information is outdated and inaccurate. In today’s technologically advanced world, keeping content fresh is an active process.
Gone are the days where content remained static and applicable for months, or even weeks. Conversations that take place around a product or service may not change very often, but the conversation around its value certainly will, as it is in constant flux due to factors such as industry challenges, new technology and new laws. Based on feedback from the sales team, web sites should be updated quarterly while content should be updated continuously.
Best Practice: Be a Problem Solver
Today’s sales person is completely different from yesterday’s sales person. Now, more than ever, the sales person plays the role of a problem solver rather than a product pusher, as information is readily available to any prospect online.
A sales person today is the guide in leading prospects through all levels of the decision-making process, determining which product or service best works for them. The sales person is there to help prospects analyze their specific situation while providing multiple options.
By taking a concierge approach to sales, a customer’s needs are put ahead of an immediate goal of merely making the sale. A longer-term approach results in a better customer experience, increased customer loyalty and more sales over the lifetime of the relationship.
It comes down to the fact that a sales person is not selling a product, but is selling his or herself and must provide value to each prospect. Even if it does not lead to the quick sale, by playing the long game, value is created, which in the end is ultimately more beneficial to the customer.
Conclusion
The sales and marketing teams of today face unique challenges in terms of converting prospects. Fortunately, tools have evolved to help navigate this setting. By using technology to ensure the proper flow of information between sales and marketing teams, establishing unique personas, regularly maintaining fresh content, and adopting a problem-solving mindset; sales and marketing can align their efforts and hone content and approaches to each individual prospect. This in turn establishes a sustainable growth curve and increases the overall value they provide.
Loren Padelford serves as Skura’s EVP of Sales, leading Skura’s global sales organization, including inside sales, field sales, sales engineering and Skura’s global partner network. Prior to Skura, Padelford was the EVP of Sales and Marketing for Active Risk Group plc, where he was responsible for global go-to-market strategy and commercial operations.
