How can we, marketers, become more helpful to Sales? Steve Jobs said, “You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, not the other way around.” According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of the B2B buying process is done before the buyer engages with sales. This belies the notion that Sales is the “front line” in the selling experience. It’s marketing that is creating 70% of the customer experience. Can we rephrase Job’s quote and use what we know to support the selling “technologies”? Our virtual panel for this article come from the sales side and gives us some insights into how our selling partners see our complex marketing processes. We took a few steps to simplify decentralized marketing activities with the integrated demand generation process flow we’ve designed for you. Please download the presentation to learn about our LeadGen Journalism and  enjoy our panel that consists of:

Michelle Denogean, VP, Marketing & Business Operations at Edmunds.com, America’s online resource for automotive information.

Sharon Drew Morgen, visionary behind Buying Facilitation®. Author of over 600 articles and 6 books on Collaborative Decision Making including the classic “Dirty Little Secrets.” Sharon is speaker represented by the SocialAgenda Media Speakers Bureau.

Susan Enns, B2B Sales Coach and Author, B2B Sales Connections, a resource for anyone involved in B2B selling.

Dave Scholten, Commercial Segment Manager at Gordon Food Service, the largest privately held foodservice distributor in North America. and operated foodservice distributor in North America.

Brent Baker,  Key Account Manager (former Marcom Manager), Swagelok Northwest (US), home of the unique “One Swagelok” business model, which includes a network of more than 200 exclusive authorized sales and service centers in more than 70 countries.

SocialAgenda Media: “The key is not to call the decision maker. The key is to have the decision maker call you”, said Jeffrey Gitomer. What demand generation practices have you adopted to simplify the hunting game for your sales team and get a steady inflow of inbound calls from your prospects?  

SUSAN ENNS:

No matter what we do as sales professionals, the bottom line is the prospect buys on his or her own time frame, not ours. Therefore, the key to marketing and sales in today’s world is to create a very simple and repeatable process that anyone can implement to stay in touch with prospects so that you always stay “top of mind”.

At B2B Sales Connections, we use, as well as recommend to our clients, a system we call DRIP Marketing – Directed Relationship Intervention Prospecting Marketing.  DRIP Marketing ensures that you stay in frequent contact in order to build a relationship with the prospect over time so when he/she is ready to buy, they will think of you first.  It’s like every contact is a drip of water.  On its own, it doesn’t amount to much, but over time, each drip can add up to a very large pool.

MICHELLE DENOGEAN:

Our core customers (consumers) get our content and services for free. Our sales team is focused on acquiring partners who would like to sell products to our customers. In this regard, all of our customer-facing marketing efforts help warm the doorknobs for our partners. We do a lot of direct response advertising to acquire customers / traffic. This includes paid search affiliate marketing, content syndication, display and video advertising, etc. However, since we sell advertising ourselves, those B2B relationships do not require B2B campaigns. We deal will a finite number of clients and have had direct relationships with all of them (both client and their agencies) for years. We do advertise B2B for our dealer subscription business via print, events, email, etc. However, here we also acquire business primarily through existing relationships in the automotive industry.

BRENT BAKER:

I think that this is really where becoming a thought leader and a partner with your customers can be a real benefit. You need to gain a lot of trust in a supplier in order for them to “call you” when they have a need to find a solution to a problem. Thought partnership allows you to listen to understand their needs, and provide helpful information to build trust.

DAVE SCHOLTEN:

We aim to manage our brand and its voice because it represents who we are, and what we stand for. Generally speaking, that method allows interested parties to call us if they are interested.

SHARON DREW MORGEN:

I don’t look at sales as a hunting game. I don’t think this way at all. My model Buying Facilitation® teaches buyers how to gather their buying decision team — all of the folks who will touch the ultimate solution and need to buy in to change. The sales model is merely a solution placement model and ignores the internal, systemic, change management issues buyers must address (that are not solution related) before they can buy because otherwise they will disrupt the system. 80% of all prospects will buy a solution from a different vendor – within 2 years of a seller’s call. That’s the time it takes them (using their own change management strategy) to align the buying decision team. And the time it takes them to align the buying decision team is the length of the buying decision/solution purchase. Selling DOES NOT cause buying.

SocialAgenda Media: “Always be closing…That doesn’t mean you’re always closing the deal, but it does mean that you need to be always closing on the next step in the process,” said Shane Gibson. How is closing reflected in each step of your lead generation and nurturing process? 

MICHELLE DENOGEAN:

We believe strongly in relationship sales. As such, we treat each communication as a way to help our partners and potential partners further their own KPIs, thus reinforcing the value of our products.

SUSAN ENNS:

Every step in the marketing and sales process should be designed to obtain mutual agreement with the prospect on the next step to take place, and more importantly when that step will take place.  For example, for an email newsletter, there should be mutual agreement on what content it will contain and how often the newsletter will be sent.

In situations where direct sales contact is involved, the sales staff should be trained on the proper techniques on how to work with the prospect to determine the next step in sales process, when is the best time for it to happen, and whose responsibility it is to ensure it is completed.  You also need to track and manage this in a properly designed CRM system that is organized by the date of next sales contact, not an alphabetically organized glorified phone book like most sales organizations use.

I go into great detail on how to do all of this in my book “Action Plan for Sales Success”, but suffice it to say for our purposes here, the key is for the sales representative to control the sales process so that he or she helps the customer to buy on their own terms.  As my mentor taught me, the only sale you need to make today is the next step in the process.  Take care of that and your sales production will take care of itself.

BRENT BAKER:

In order to get to this point you need to be very knowledgeable about your customers, and understand their buying cycle. When you can map these things out, you can organize your marketing efforts to provide customers what they need at each point in their buying cycle. We use Foresters 4 stage buying cycle (Discover, Explore, Buy, Engage), and try to use our knowledge of the customer to map out experiences that move the customer along through this cycle. CRM is a great tool to track these experiences, measure your customer touch points, and develop metrics.

DAVE SCHOLTEN:

Our goal in all interactions is to remember that we are a sales company. We spend our time and efforts in pursuing a relationship of trust, and offer insights and support services to help our customers.

SHARON DREW MORGEN:

I do not have a lead generation or nurturing process. And I don’t teach closing. I teach buyers how to buy. I teach buyers how to manage the change that must happen off-line, outside of the purview of the sales folks; a buying decision is a change management problem, not a solution choice problem.

SocialAgenda Media: “You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise”, said Patricia Fripp. What have you learned from your initiatives toward building relationships and trust with your prospects in a way that contributes to your long-term success? 

MICHELLE DENOGEAN:

Relationships and trust are everything in our business. Our goal is to not only make car buying easy for our customers, but to also make it easy for our partners by bridging the trust gap between both constituents.

SUSAN ENNS:

I define trust as a prospect’s belief that you will do exactly what you say you will do, when you say you will do it.  Based on my experience and simply put, if a prospect doesn’t trust you, he will not buy from you.

The challenge is that often we need to open sales opportunities with prospects that have never heard of us before, let alone trust us enough to buy from us.  Therefore, the key question is how can we as sales professionals systematically build trust into the relationship throughout the sales process so that the prospect eventually feels comfortable enough to buy from us.  In my opinion, one of the best ways to do this is through the effective use of customer testimonials.

DAVE SCHOLTEN:

While one sale is important, a repeat sale, and a continued relationship leads to being the trusted source of subject matter expertise, and more sales.

BRENT BAKER:

This is absolutely true, and only the businesses that live this will survive in this day and age. We consider prospects anyone in the Discover stage, which is the phase where they understand they have a need before ever even contacting you. It is very important to create a digital presence that is frequently refreshed with useful content. It is probably one of the hardest things for companies to do, but the ones who do it well become trusted advisors for customers.

SHARON DREW MORGEN:

I don’t try to build relationships. I enter into rapport by helping them facilitate their buy in and change management. I earn their trust and relationship because we avoid any systemic disruption and get the appropriate buy in quickly. We close in 1/8 the time sales does. Sales merely closes the low hanging fruit.

SocialAgenda Media: When visibility to your buyers’ strategies is limited how do you help your sales team gather accurate insights to address prospect pain points and help them make more educated buying decisions?

SUSAN ENNS:

To me, the best way I can help my sales team, and those of our clients, is through their training and coaching.  Often our visibility with buyers is limited not because they are not interested, but because we are not interesting enough.  This holds true throughout the entire marketing and sales process.

When we can teach our teams to ask better questions, they achieve better results.  I go into great detail on how to create questions to uncover prospect pain points, both known and unknown, in my book, “Action Plan for Sales Success” because I think this is truly the key to sales success.  The right questions create value and differentiate you from the competition.  The close starts here.  As I have said many times, the better the fact find, the happier the customer, the better the pay check!

SHARON DREW MORGEN:

There is no pain. If prospects had real pain they would have fixed it already. They have work arounds.

DAVE SCHOLTEN:

The process of data gathering and interpretation is very important, and then taking that to relevant exclusive helpful insights. We have to earn trust prior to offering the insights.

MICHELLE DENOGEAN:
We are big believers in understanding our customers and partners. We do a lot of research, quantitative and qualitative, as well as hold “immersion” meetings to understand their business objectives. Surveys, ethnographic research (client ride alongs) and client immersion meetings where we ask them a few big questions and let them present their answers. No sales pitch, just listening. We believe fully in getting our boots on and having everyone get out and understand our customers and partners — not just the sales team, everyone.

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Also read:

• Make Content Your Most Valuable Sales Rep: Marketing-Sales Alignment Tips for Engagement With Your Audiences & Boosting Closing Rates
• B2B Content Marketing Lessons & Strategies for 2014: Interviews With Thought Leaders
• Marketing to the Internal Audience – From Low ROI To Cost-Effective Corporate Training
• Leadership The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation – interview with ex-SVP of Apple, Jay Elliot
• Top 5 Most Important But Not Obvious Principles Of Selling And Business In General – interview with speaker Richard Grehalva
• Marketing Through Sports: Secret Sauce of Getting Publicity With Celebrity Endorsement Deals