Part 6 of the series: A B2B CEO’s Guide to Navigating the COVID-19 Revenue Reality

Your sales executive likely has a keen sense of what types of sales support materials traditionally have been helpful, and therefore has an opinion about sales support needs from marketing. But times have changed, and the playbook has been torn up.

Given the times, the sales team simply can’t say with conviction that they truly understand exactly what sales support tools will help convince buyers to move forward. In our last blog, we talked about partnering between sales and marketing for lead generation and lead management optimization. Let’s explore how sales and marketing can partner to close more sales from those leads.

Many traditional salespeople will ask for brochures, sales sheets, hosted lunches and dinners, and other typical low-level marketing deliverables because that is the extent of what they have received in the past. But to do so in a vacuum – not considering the changes to the marketplace, or the need to act digitally, then globally – means they probably are not considering what they really need. For example, what you will most likely never hear from a salesperson (and many sales leaders) is this:

• “I don’t really know how to talk about the value of our business based on real business benefits – I only know how to focus on product features and the benefits at a feature level.”
• “I don’t understand some of the newer technologies. I know we are developing new sales tools, but I plan to keep selling the way I always have – it has worked until now.”
• “I don’t know if I can tell this story effectively.”

Yet these three thoughts are incredibly common when a sales team is underperforming — if your salespeople are being transparent and honest.

There are a tremendous number of steps your sales and marketing teams can undertake together to tackle these challenges and improve sales performance. Just a small subset of high-impact actions includes:

• Build a true understanding of why clients buy, and why they don’t. This requires systematic gathering of client insights into how they use your solutions, the benefits they get and why they buy or don’t buy.
• Marketing should foster a greater understanding of how your sales team currently tells your story. Examine the pitches used by both the top-performing salespeople versus the pitches of those that seem to have trouble hitting goal. Ideally, marketing should hear the story told in person in front of clients.
• With those two sets of insights, marketing and top-performing sales personnel can partner to create the model storyline that will win in the marketplace.
• Armed with the right insights and storyline, it should be a straightforward matter for sales and marketing to partner to create a new high-impact professional sales presentation. Sales brings the knowledge of what will work, and marketing brings the ability to see the situation with fresh eyes, and to deliver the value proposition in a highly effective format.
• In some cases, sales and marketing have even partnered to create a certification program around the new sales support materials and value proposition. This program can be used to upgrade existing sales talent and onboard new salespeople.

In our next blog, we will examine how to appropriately align financial rewards for both sales and marketing professionals based upon the achievement of sales goals.