MarketSense

How the Sales Team Creates Persuasive Momentum

If your products are in any part sold by people (versus entirely on-line or via catalog sales), you see your sales team as the primary creator of persuasive momentum for your buyer. But because persuasive momentum is designed, a sales rep needs a solid foundation of supporting “tools”. There are three key requirements for these tools:

1. The tools must help the sales rep better understand the buyer


2. The tools must align the sales process with the prospect’s buying process


3. The tools must support and satisfy the prospect’s needs at each stage of their buying process

Buyer personas are the tools that help a sales rep better understand the buyer. Buyer personas profile a type of buyer. They are not simply a demographic description of the buyer. They go deeper to understand the personality, motivations, and behavior of a type of buyer. The breadth and complexity of a business’ products will influence the number of buyer personas the sales team needs.

For each buyer persona, a detailed buying process map is needed. The buying process map defines the stages the prospect goes through in their buying process. For each stage, it identifies the key sources, resources, questions, and concerns that need to be satisfied before the buyer will move onto the next stage.

With the buying process maps established, the buying process needs to be aligned with the sales process. This alignment is critical in ensuring all of the buyer’s process stages are supported in the corporate sales process. It enables the sales person to anticipate the needs of the buyer and be prepared to meet those needs. This sales preparation creates buyer incentive and acts as an emotional support throughout the buying process.

Finally, in order for the sales rep to create that forward momentum with the buyer, they must have the information the buyer needs instantly at hand. This means that appropriate mechanisms – demos, presentations, evaluation criteria, etc. must be prepared in advance to support the needs of the prospect. Each buying stage has its own requirements. Each buyer modality has its own interests.

Preparation is a critical underpinning of persuasive momentum. Time is an important factor in building momentum. If the sales rep takes too long in responding to a buyer’s need (framed as a request, question or concern), a momentum gap is created. This creates an opening for the buyer to seek more immediate satisfaction elsewhere. “Elsewhere” can mean other channels (on-line), other sources (outside experts), and other products (competitor’s offerings).

If it hasn’t become evident yet, a sales rep is often the conductor of persuasive momentum. But it really takes a cross-functional team to support it. Product marketing, marketing communications, customer service, sales engineers, and sales management all play equally critical roles in ensuring persuasive momentum.

My Sales 2.0 Vendor Marketing Scorecard

A little less than a month ago I attended the Sales 2.0 conference. All attendees registering for the conference provided their contact information including their email and phone numbers. Being a marketer, I expected that all of the sponsors of the conference would be given the attendee list to perform their own lead follow-up. This was Sales 2.0 after all.

I had high expectations from these vendors who should be using the latest and greatest marketing techniques. But the real life experiences were so dreadful that I thought I would share some of them with you. I have used a grade-style rating system for each vendor featured here. The vendor names are not provided to protect the guilty.

Vendor #1

The first email I got from this vendor made catchy use of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday to offer me a discount. Points for cuteness. But the email itself looked amateurish and sloppy. It highlighted some old and new features but did not provide any URLs to their web site to allow me to investigate further. The only call to action was to call a sales person. Not likely for an introvert like myself. I rate my first impression a “C”.

I received the second email from this vendor a week later. What a difference a week makes. This email was obviously researched and sent by a real person. In fact, the person not only said that they researched my company but included details that showed me that they researched my company. Big points here. But once again, the email itself contained key features, all nicely underlined. But none of those underlined features were links to content on the web site. This second response rated a “B” with me. I did reply and mention that I wasn’t interested. I even got a thank you for my reply. Now let’s see whether their automated system continues to bug me.

Vendor #2

Vendor #2 first contacted me about three weeks after the conference. The email they sent was a generic email to register for an IDC white paper. It was not signed by a person and included no links to their web site or to contact them. It was register or nothing. I was curious enough about the IDC value that I read the first sentence. But it was so long and convoluted, that I quickly deleted the email. First contact rating, a “D”.

One day later, I got an email signed by a person. It started with the sentence, “I wanted to follow up and thank you for attending Sales 2.0 and speaking with vendor name here”. Very bad news for this vendor. I did not speak with them at the conference. I didn’t even hand any representative of the company a business card at the conference. That said, the email did have a direct link to a demo on their web site. Bad news, the link showed the ugliness of the URL rather than a good hyperlink. O.k. Some training of their account reps is needed. But then there were these weird links to two other demos (these were actually formed better) that kind of trailed the signature. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get over the opening line of the email and sent the poor account rep a note pointing out the approach flaws. I did not get a reply from him. Second contact rating, an “F”. This interaction so turned me off that I quickly decided never to buy from them.

Six days later, this vendor's auto-generation machine is working fine. I got another generic email to register for a different white paper. Time to unsubscribe. (By the way, how did I get subscribed in the first place? I never "opted in" to anything. Isn't this spam?)

Vendor #3

Sometime before Vendor #2 sent me the personalized email, Vendor #3 sensitized me to the wrong opening approach. At the end of my work day (5:00 pm PDT), I got a phone call from an account rep at Vendor #3. They started by mentioning my visit to their booth at the Sales 2.0 conference. You can see where this is going. I politely indicated that I hadn’t done so. The rep recovered nicely (you can do that on the phone) and used the opportunity to give me a one line description of what her company did. This was helpful. Then, as I indicated I wasn’t interested, she asked me if I wanted to be removed from their call list. A verbal unsubscribe! Bless her heart. I said “yes”. This won Vendor #3 big points (and probably is helping keep their database clean too). I rate Vendor #3 an “A”.

Tune in to my next blog entry to get my list of dos and don’ts for email marketing.

How to get Marketing Involved in Sales 2.0

I am here at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Between the sessions, our host interposed a question that was asked in the conference coverage on Twitter (got to love it). The question was,

"How do we get marketing involved in Sales 2.0.”

There was silence in the room. That silence speaks volumes.

I believe that there are 2 ways that companies can use Sales 2.0 to foster a collaborative environment between sales and marketing.

1. Cooperate in the development of buyer personas.


In his introduction to panel participation, Brett Wallace from Forrester Research talked about how they created buyer personas for their different audiences. They had even gone so far as to create life-size blow-ups of "people" who represented their different buyer personas and positioned them throughout the office. This keeps those personas at the top of everyone's mind.

A buyer persona is a profile of a type of prospect. It describes the attributes that help you understand:




• who they are


• what their role is


• what their need is


• what their motivation is


• what their behavior looks like



Both marketing and sales have unique insight into these archetypes. That is why this is a perfect mechanism to use to bring the teams together under the Sales 2.0 umbrella. Both organizations will benefit from the unified perspectives the buyer persona offers.
2. Collaborate in understanding and aligning with the prospect’s buying process.

There has been a lot of talk about the buying process here at the conference. There is universal agreement that supporting and sustaining the prospect’s buying process is a fundamental component of Sales 2.0.

Once again, both marketing and sales co-own support of the prospect’s buying process. Marketing activities including promotion and education (think corporate web site) are critical to ushering the prospect into the buying process and building persuasive momentum. At some point, sales takes over and hopefully builds the momentum to a close.

In order to ensure persuasive momentum through the prospect’s buying process, marketing and sales must both understand, collaborate, and coordinate their activities. At any point where the persuasive momentum breaks down, everyone loses regardless of who is holding the prospect at that point.

At the conference, a lot of the talk about getting marketing and sales to align has been around metrics, speaking the same language, etc. However, I think the faster, more effective way to align them is to create a collaborative environment by developing buyer personas and the buying process together.

Success in a Sales 2.0 World - the Buying Process

In my blog entry Success in a Sales 2.0 World - a Marketing Viewpoint, I talked about how critical it is for marketing and sales to cooperate together to support the prospect’s buying process. Together, they must craft a seamless buying experience that builds the prospect’s persuasive momentum. I’ll talk more about persuasive momentum in future posts. Today I want to focus on a new tool that helps gets marketing and sales talking about the buying process.

Traditional marketing texts (Philip Kotler, et al.) discuss the typical five stage buying process as: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behavior. This standard buying process describes deliberated purchases made by consumers. It applies less to impulse purchases. It is only a piece of the puzzle of more complex corporate purchases.

In his book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Bryan Eisenberg takes a closer look at the buying process. In particular, he describes a couple of additional stages with the purpose of calling out important details that often get lost in the five stage process.

I have leveraged both of these sources to describe the deliberated buying process as follows:

1. Awareness of a need


2. Frame the need


3. Research the framed need


4. Define the decision criteria


5. Narrow down alternatives


6. Choose an alternative to buy


7. Make the purchase


8. Reevaluate the purchase decision

I have created a new eBook, Understanding the Buying Process, as a tool to help marketing and sales explore their roles in their prospect’s buying process. To help marketing and sales understand the process, each stage is defined and illustrated by examples. That is just the foundation. Each stage includes a section called “Define your role” that helps marketing and sales

1. Realize that the buyer is in control


2. Think like the buyer thinks


3. Uncover holes in the buying process that are not addressed by the marketing and sales processes


4. Prepare to plug those holes in the marketing and sales processes


5. Create a seamless experience that supports the buyer through every step of their buying process

It is my hope that this eBook will help open up a dialog about the buyer that encourages the participation of both the marketing and sales organizations. As you try it, please let me know about your experiences using it.

Success in a Sales 2.0 World – a Marketing Viewpoint

To date, I don’t think that Sales 2.0 has gotten much traction in corporate marketing organizations. I don’t hear my marketing friends talking about it. I don’t see articles on the challenges to and benefits realized by marketing organizations that have embraced Sales 2.0. Yet, I believe that the goals of Sales 2.0 cannot be achieved without the equal, coordinated, and cooperative support of corporate marketing.

For those of you who are new to Sales 2.0, let’s start with a primer on Sales 2.0. In the Sales 2.0 “commercial “ video for this year’s conference, Sales 2.0 was defined as:

“A marriage between best practice methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies to achieve two things. One to improve productivity and number two to accelerate the sales cycle.”

Indeed, the focus of Sales 2.0 over the past couple of years has been to encourage the adoption of a variety of technologies, products, and services in sales and marketing organizations. Some of these technologies help improve corporate intelligence about the prospective customer. Other technologies assist the sales person in communicating with the prospective customer. Yet other technologies help sales manage the internal sales process.

From the marketing perspective, it is not the technologies that interest me. Many marketing organizations, especially those in high technology, already use these technologies. Instead, I see two aspects of Sales 2.0 that I believe are essential for marketing’s success in today’s web-based business climate.

1. Focus on the customer’s buying process.


The truth is that when it comes to the buying process, the customer is in control. As the authors of the 2003 Harvard Business Review article “The Customer Has Escaped” put it, “customers act like their own ‘general contractor’.” Customers select the information, components, and purchase channel that meet their needs. Marketers and sales need to understand the customer, the customer’s needs, and customer’s buying process. Then they need to design a buying experience that facilitates that buying process.

2. Alignment of sales and marketing organizations.


The customer’s buying process crosses the boundaries that exist between marketing and sales organizations. Sure, there are problems of transferring information about the customer from one organization to another. But more important is the creation of a seamless buying experience that builds persuasive momentum from the first customer touch. That seamless buying experience can only be achieved when marketing and sales tackle the design and implementation of the buying experience together.

It is critical that marketing and sales understand the difference between the corporate sales process and the customer’s buying process. The vast majority of businesses today force the customer to fit into “the way they do sales”. What a frustrating experience that is from both sides. If marketing and sales don’t embrace the customer’s buying process, they will find it very difficult to consistently accelerate their sales process.