B2B Sales in the Modern Age

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1 B2B Sales in the Modern Age Using Insight Selling to Improve Sales and Marketing Results When it comes to lead generation and improving customer relationships, it seems that sales and marketing professionals seldom see eye to eye. Marketing professionals have always sold products and services from the vendor point of view. No matter who potential customers are or what their unique challenges might be, collateral has been generated with generalized, shotgun marketing methods. And, it s easy for sales reps to pitch only the products they are familiar and comfortable with, no matter that new alternatives might serve specific customers more effectively. Add high salesforce turnover, and you have a dangerous mix of unfocused marketing effort and sales generalists, who fail to bring real depth to their customer relationships. Dangerous, really? Yes, dangerous to: Sales teams and decision makers Marketing teams and decision makers Customers impatient with hard-sell sales relationships This white paper is designed to help you perform your own diagnosis to tell if your organization is vulnerable to this danger. Easy-to-Identify Symptoms of the Sales and Marketing Blues This is an old problem, and the symptoms are easy to find. The more visible ones include: Sales goals that are constantly unmet. Sales opportunities that weren t recognized or were lost to the competition. No persuasive evidence of a marketing group s value to the company. Feeble closing rates and other evidence of weak or shallow customer relationships. Listless revenue trends. How many of these occur in your organization? You need to find out, and quickly, because the damage is usually done when you aren t looking. The Business Impact of Sales-Marketing Dysfunction When sales and marketing professionals don t cooperate, business performance suffers. And sub-par performance shows up where it really counts in sales and revenue reports. You ll find that the greatest pain and concern of sales and marketing decision makers appear in two areas. Page 1

2 Market intelligence. Chances are, you are not maximizing opportunities because you don t have a complete, accurate and up-to-date view of your market. How many of these questions can your marketing team answer? Which products and services comparable to your company s offerings: Are available from competing vendors? Do your customers want or look for? What s hot? Where are the opportunities? And, how quickly can your marketing team identify an opportunity and hand it off to your sales staff? Sales-related intelligence. What does your sales team really know about your customers? Your sales team will never succeed until they find the links between who your customers are and what they actually buy and why. How many of these questions can your sales team answer? Can you describe each of your customers buying cycle, purchasing stakeholders and buying network? What are the indicators of their purchasing priorities and concerns? What do they buy that you sell? Have you started educating customers about solutions that might help them, even if the effort doesn t directly result in a sale? How quickly does your sales team convert marketing information into leads? Can your sales team proactively bring new insights to your customers, information that they might not have considered previously? Did you notice that lost opportunities show up on the sales and marketing sides of the discussion? Business opportunities lost to the lack of customer-specific marketing and sales information represent huge costs, which are totally unnecessary for companies to incur. Making the Move toward an Advisory Relationship So, what s needed? How can sales and marketing professionals help each other by quickly finding juicy opportunities and converting them into strong, ongoing customer relationships and sales? Move away from product-centered sales and marketing to a more effective approach, which starts with the specific pains, concerns and priorities of each customer. Find and implement technology solutions that enable sales and marketing teams to work together more closely. Use marketing assets that enable marketing professionals to get a fast, accurate read on market trends, core audience members, and the business problems that need solving. Page 2

3 Develop an advisory role between customers and your sales staff. When approached with advisory information and a collaborative attitude, customers notice and appreciate the difference. Develop sales methods that add to revenue with less effort and cost than previous methods. But how do you translate general principles into sales and marketing best practices that really work? Insight selling provides the answer. The Insight Selling Alternative Recently, the world of B2B sales has morphed into something very different than veteran sales pros would recognize. The enormous information stash we call the Internet has transformed customers into researchers. These days, buyers don t approach sales reps until they ve developed a clear idea about what an effective solution for them would be. Everything about this new sales environment creates new requirements for your sales staff. If the only ammunition they take to sales meetings is a well-worn product or service pitch, they will not fare well in this new environment. What s needed and proven successful is a sales strategy that begins and ends with your customer. This proven approach is insight selling, an important piece of the changing B2B sales environment. Five Keys to Insight Selling Although new, insight selling has already spawned many approaches. Descriptions of these many approaches tend to share five common elements: A product or service that provides a specific customer with tangible business value. This is not the no-brainer it seems to be. Notice the specifics. This is a one-on-oneon-one situation: a specific offering that s right for a particular customer, who has specific concerns and priorities. If you want the sale, you must pitch a solution that satisfies all of these specifics. Plentiful customer and industry information. By knowing their industry and their company s situation and requirements, customers know more about their solution than you do, at least to start. This is a prime opportunity for marketing professionals to support their sales colleagues by providing industry trend and competitive information. Lots of it, the more, the better. Unswerving focus on what helps each customer. First, gather general information. Then, listen; find out how each customer s specific situation might fit into the more general industry pattern. Next, promote your offering with capabilities, benefits and value Page 3

4 information that applies specifically to your customer. Do not deviate. Talk only about what addresses your customer s pains, concerns and priorities. Easy access to competitive information. If your customer mentions a competitor, be armed with effective information. Don t knock the competition and their offerings it s bad form and rarely successful. Just tell customers how your offering will do a better job at addressing their requirements. Accentuate the positive. A sales and marketing solution that works for you. Insight selling is based on Big Data, and you know what that means. You ll need a proven way to wrangle all that information, find what you need for each account and deliver it in a useful form, the sooner the better. Some folks advocate for CRM solutions, others promote the data discovery and analytics approach. Either way, decide what will help your operations, get it and use it constantly. Alright, you understand the basics of insight selling and the resources you need to make it work. But how can you use these assets in your sales and marketing efforts? Use Sales Insight to Challenge the Buyer s Framework Many purchasers are doing the groundwork themselves and feel like they know what their needs are. Use insight selling to disrupt their assumptions and focus on the value of your offerings. The insight selling process makes it easy for your marketing and sales staff to: Accelerate the discovery process. Buyers don t want to engage in a lengthy discovery process. So, provide them with relevant, high-priority information without delay. The insight selling process is based on questions and types of information that can be discovered via technology. Provide customized business intelligence. Focus your discovery process on what your customer hasn t considered. That can include risks that were not visible or not-soobvious opportunities for higher revenue, better performance, process improvements or cost savings. Then, present information designed to reflect customer concerns and priorities. Expect your sales reps to uncover key insights. Develop a unique set of insights that you feel should be uncovered in each successful engagement and outcome. Then, make sure that your sales team gathers key organizational insights and adds the data to your database. By asking for answers to the same basic but essential questions, your sales reps can start to self-manage and improve their performance. This process makes it easy to see the gaps in their discovery and plan the best responses to answers that are gathered. This is where your information management solution will earn its keep. If you ve chosen well, it will provide a quick and easy way to find, choose and present intelligence that s actionable and relevant to each customer. Page 4

5 Provide customized business intelligence. Focus your discovery process on what your customer hasn t considered. That can include risks that were not visible or not-soobvious opportunities for higher revenue, better performance, process improvements or cost savings. Then, present information designed to reflect customer concerns and priorities. Expect your sales reps to uncover key insights. Develop a unique set of insights that you feel should be uncovered in each successful engagement and outcome. Then, make sure that your sales team gathers key organizational insights and adds the data to your database. By asking for answers to the same basic but essential questions, your sales reps can start to self-manage and improve their performance. This process makes it easy to see the gaps in their discovery and plan the best responses to answers that are gathered. This is where your information management solution will earn its keep. If you ve chosen well, it will provide a quick and easy way to find, choose and present intelligence that s actionable and relevant to each customer. Change role from sales guy to advisor. Successful insight selling requires an investment of time, attention and a change of attitude. When your sales staff makes that investment, customers notice. The change in approach definitely disrupts customer assumptions. And, it can clear the way to an ongoing relationship based on advice and collaboration. So, how does insight selling improve sales and marketing performance? Tangible Performance Improvements for Sales and Marketing Insight selling and increased collaboration between your sales and marketing staff will generate performance and productivity improvements for everyone involved. Marketing professionals. Marketing professionals can focus their efforts on the top of the sales funnel, where they belong. By producing materials and arming sales reps with key insights and trends related to their customers, they help sales teams gain credibility and generate net-new conversations with customers. Sales professionals. When sales pros embrace the insight selling philosophy and have the marketing horsepower to back them up, they assume a more collaborative and welcome role with customers. This creates a mind shift in customers. They ll change their view of your organization from a simple vendor to a trusted business partner. The result: deeper relationships, increased credibility, and more loyal customers. Sales leaders. Like their marketing executive colleagues, sales leaders are on the hook to deliver measureable sales results. A proven insight selling approach combined with an effective marketing co-pilot will help build a healthy pipeline of new conversations and opportunities to meet this end. Insights and trends are the common language of executive leaders, who need to focus on the short- and long-term stewardship of their Page 5

6 organization. When sales leaders present to key executives in the language of insights and trends instead of products, they help paint the art of the possible for their executive counterparts. And, they gain valuable buy-in at the highest levels of the customer s organization. Insight selling provides an effective way to transform product-centered sales discussions to where they belong with customer concerns and priorities. Fits & Sparks provides solutions help transform your sales capabilities where it counts, with improved efficiency and revenue. Fits & Sparks Paves the Way to Insight Selling, Greater Collaboration Our B2B sales and marketing solutions position your sales team to sell on market insights and intelligence rather than product features. We recognize the changing B2B sales and marketing landscape. So, we ve designed our services to help sales and marketing teams work together more closely and sell smarter. Surprise your customers. Start new conversations that your customers need to hear, but haven t heard from you before. 80, meet 20. Generate recommendations for your sales team based on trending topics discovered in your CRM solution. Replicate the methods of your top sales producers and identify hidden opportunities. Sharpen your message. Tailor the messaging and sales strategy for each customer and prospect, based on key segmentation criteria, including industry, company size, and region. Gain valuable market intelligence. Build your marketing programs, collateral, and assets based on key insights from your customers. And, build a product road map that is directly related to solving your customers toughest business challenges. Discover how Fits & Sparks solutions can put the power of big data and 21 st century data management to work for your sales and marketing operations. For a free demonstration and a quote, contact us at info@fitsandsparks.com. Page 6