Why Sales Needs Conversational Briefs
According to the American Marketing Association, 50% to 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales. Given that Sirius Decisions research reports that 82% of executives say sales reps are unprepared for meetings, there's an obvious disconnect.
When marketers are nurturing farther across the buying process, they’re telling a longer story. Instead of creating a stall at the handoff, where buyers must adjust to how salespeople sell, marketers can empower the extension of the story and help sales step gracefully into the conversation.
Sales content is not marketing content. Where marketing content needs to deliver education about issues, challenges, industry trends and business value, sales content needs to illuminate just how your products deliver all that marketing promises. Your salespeople need to be able to competently articulate value in a very personalized manner that applies to the prospect they’re speaking with. Marketers have the resources to help them do this efficiently so they stay focused on selling, not trolling for information.
In the beginning of the journey, buyers are interested in gaining knowledge about the problems they're facing, exploring options and assessing possible solutions. More and more of this research and learning is being done without "sales" interactions. The Internet gives buyers access to more information than they've ever had before. By the time they get to a sales conversation, they probably know as much or more about your products as your sales reps.
However, the decision stage is critical. Salespeople need to be able to generate conversations that seamlessly connect from where the buyer transitioned off the marketing content. The transition itself signifies a shift in focus. In the final stages of the buying cycle, the decision maker and the most prominent influencers are evaluating the company—assessing viability, and working relationships, and partner value add, and deciding how much they trust you.
If marketing is providing sales with the content they're using to generate attention and educate leads, no wonder it doesn't get used by sales. It's not what they need. Sales needs conversational toolkits loaded with the useful insights and information that helps them extend the dialogue from within the stage where the buyer is focused.
Since marketing's job is to expose your company's expertise and the value you'll bring to the table beyond the buyer's in-house resources, sales needs materials that help them provide validation that what marketing has told them is true.
In addition to the buyer's activity, demographic and psychographic profile, sales needs the following resources that tie the earlier stages of the marketing process to the end stages of the sales process. The conversational toolkit may include:
- value propositions focused on the buyer’s goals
- campaign-based FAQs
- conversational outlines for problem/solution scenarios
- conversational scripts for features/benefits
And all of the above are customer focused—not product oriented. Marketing cannot just reload lead generation and transitional content into the sales portal/system and expect that to carry sales through closing the deal.
Sales content deserves to be created just for sales conversations. And it's not a one-time thing. Just like marketing content evolves, so does sales content. In order to tune sales content, it's imperative that marketing get feedback, monitor content use and effectiveness, and to pay attention to what's working for sales. Marketing needs to take responsibility for tuning or eliminating what's not effective.
In fact, marketing should treat sales content like a campaign, paying the same attention to the metrics of sales force attention as they do to lead generation and nurturing campaigns.
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B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.