In my role, I spend a lot of time developing messaging and associated narratives to create a unique point-of-view in the marketplace. Certainly, a key aspect of deploying this story is to create tools that your Sales teams can use to help further the narrative, move the prospect away from his status quo and toward your unique solution. Usual suspects here even include those tools that Marketing uses in lead nurturing campaigns to start the story before Sales resources get directly involved.
However, as Marketers, we may be missing the need for some key tools to help enable our Sales teams. These are internal learning tools that customers never see, but have as much rigor put into them for the benefit of your Sales teams as you would a brochure or other collateral for customers’ eyes. Why is this critical?
- The selling environment grows more and more complex and flooded with product feature-based information;
- Time passes from an initial launch or splash and when a Sales professional actually needs to gain the attention of a prospect;
- As we create better messaging with a unique point-of-view, we need to make that messaging come alive for Sales folks
When we launch new messaging, our sales toolkit is usually about half internal-only materials solely to help Sales learn, remember, and crispen their delivery of the messaging. We use creative resources to provide engaging visual layout, simple copy to allow the messaging to shine through, and deploy the tools into systems that put the right content in front of the seller depending on the selling situation she is in.
Yes, this is more work for the Marketing team, burns more agency hours, and requires more time to build a deployment plan. However, these are the very tools that make the conversations at the seller-buyer level work. The customer-facing tools support the conversation during or afterward. So take a look at your sales toolbox and make sure that, if you give them nails, also give them a hammer.
(Image Hammer to Fall used under Creative Commons License)
Filed under: Marketing & Sales Algnment, Sales Enablement, business, company story, lead generation, marketing, sales, sales tools
[...] or, worse yet, make their own? You need to invest the time and resources necessary to help Sales nail the message when they get that hard-earned first meeting. Make sure that customer-facing collateral supports the [...]