Why The Need To Enable Sales With Conversation Kits?

The question most of us keep asking is “what can be done to make our sales team more effective?” Some of the answers lie in aligning the sales and marketing teams in your organization. This article focuses on the need for having sales content; that articulates why your product/service is the best to help your buyers achieve their business objectives and support sales in the customer’s buying cycle.

THE NEW BUYING PROCESS

At the beginning of the buying journey, your buyers are interested in acquiring knowledge about the problems they are facing, exploring options and assessing possible solutions. With the internet at disposal, our buyers have access to more information. By the time, they enter into a conversation with your sales representatives; they are pretty well versed with the different options available. They perhaps know as much or more about your products/ services as your sales reps.

YOUR (THE SELLERS) DILEMMA

Often the informed buyers, do not encourage unsolicited calls / emails from new sales representatives. With consistent efforts, once you succeed in getting past that hurdle, your sales team, has less time in hand to find out what’s going on in your buyers’ mind and world.

They need to identify and connect with various stakeholders, to:

Build rapport
Understand prospect’s aspirations and concerns
Make an impact
and….Win the deal

“The Problem Starts When We Lose A Deal Inspite Of All The Efforts You Put In And The Number of Such Instances Is on The Rise. Its Important To Then Do Identify The Root Cause And Do Necessary Course Correction…

ONE POSSIBLE REASON: SALES CONTENT IS NOT EQUAL TO MARKETING CONTENT

Based on my experience, in most organizations, you provide sales with lead generation marketing content used to educate buyers, and you expect sales to close the deal. So no wonder it does get used by sales and the marketing and sales department keep pointing fingers at each other.

The marketing content is all about educating buyers about issues, challenges, industry trends and business value. While, the sales content needs to highlight just how your products deliver all that marketing promises and help the buyer achieve their business objectives.

In the final stages, the decision makers, and key influencers are evaluating your company on the following parameters:

assessing viability,
working relationships,
value-add as a partner
Moreover, deciding how much they trust you.

NEED OF THE HOUR

Your salespeople need to be able to articulate the value you offer in a personalized manner, ensuring that it applies to each and every buyers persona, they are conversing within the prospect’s organization. As marketers, you have the resources to help them do this efficiently, so they stay focused on selling, not trolling for information.

To enable the sales team with relevant content, you need to plug the gap in the marketing toolkit. You need to ask yourselves:

Do our sales conversation kits have all the ingredients to win?
Do our messages break through the status quo to create more opportunities, and do they differentiate us from the competition to tilt the odds in our favor?
Does our content stimulate prospects to have a useful conversation and convert these opportunities into a realistic pipeline?
Are our marketing and sales people adequately trained to articulate our value to the different stakeholders in the buying process?

Sales require conversational toolkits loaded with the useful insights and information that helps them extend the dialog from within the stage to get the buyers attention.

“By better aligning our sales and marketing functions and creating a sales and marketing effectiveness task force, you can empower them in building a solution around these items.

To know what’s on the buyer’s mind, you need to have a productive conversation. Sales also need to ask adequate open-ended questions. Investing in creating effective sales conversation kits will help you connect and create the equations with your buyers, understand their needs, understand what’s important to them, and create the impact.

To better align the marketing content with the end-stages sales processes, the sales conversation kit may include:

Value proposition addressing your buyers goals
Conversational outlines for problem/solution scenarios
Conversational scripts for features/benefits
ROI calculators
FAQs

Once you start designing sales content for creating effective sales conversations, you will notice the difference.

SALES CONTENT CREATION IS NOT A ONE-TIME ACTIVITY

It is also important to review the effectiveness and usage of the sales collaterals at frequent intervals to get their feedback and to pay attention to what’s working for sales.

Image Courtesy: Pixabay

Innovatus Marketers Touchpoint LLP is a customer experience, marketing, service design, design thinking and business innovation consulting firm, based in India. We offer go-to-market and digital strategy consulting and help our clients rethink and redesign customer and employee value in the digital era. We offer design thinking workshops and consulting, tailored to enable, accelarete or transform your business. We are laser-focused on the problem at hand and your opportunity space, and optimize process to make design thinking and service design principles accessible to your employees who’ve never done it before or stuck-up, and provide “just adequate” theory to help you get moving and achieve outcomes.

You may reach out to Vidya Priya Rao @ +918080015500 or email @ vidyapriya.rao@marketerstouchpoint.com

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