This article takes an introductory look into sales execution in 2015. There are changes happening in every industry, and much of it comes from new strategies for customer-facing communications as a direct result of technology-based trends and evolution. See why digital content marketing is like a chicken and egg conundrum, and 5 execution priorities to focus on when looking to enhance any sales process.
Background: Embodying the Values of Effective Sales
Achieving success and growth in sales is easier said than done. Compounding the confusion: the changing environmental factors which are often blamed for stagnating sales, are being embraced and praised by those who are excelling and adapting to them.
World-class leaders in business acknowledge that Sales and Marketing alignment is an essential strategy in order to position for success in the ever-changing buyer market. Sales ensures that Marketing understands the real target market (the buyer), while Marketing keeps Sales aware of market trends, digital content engagement, etc.
Customer experience is often perceived as straightforward, but leaders in this area know that it’s all about consistency and continuity. From front line touch points to signing the proposal, customers want to be serviced on their time, and to expectations.
Leaders never forget that Sellers are not born, they are developed. Sales executives invest in their sales force, praise both sales and non-sales achievements, and focus on motivating their teams, not ordering them.
New leads are often seen as the life force of the business, but leading executives know that selling cycles are shorter with established clients, and ensure that they are always servicing their key accounts, not just pushing for new sales.
And lastly, top business leaders know that everyone is being pushed to do more with less time, and they adapt their teams to ensure that the sale is not only convenient, but prompt.
The cement that ties all this together? Technology! It’s all about using the right tools, at the right time, to create the greatest impact.
Introduction: The Sales Forecast
Selling isn’t what it used to be, and there is less value placed on a seller having abundant product/service knowledge, but why? The issue is that today’s customer is more informed and connected than ever before. Many customers are half way into the sales process before they ever contact the actual sales rep.
The ever increasing demands of the customer also means that the purchase experience has evolved significantly. Customers are looking for a more dynamic, accessible, and continuous sales process. The sales specialists of tomorrow are ones who can sell how the customer wants to be sold to, where they want to be sold to, and when they want to be sold to.
The Issue: Digital Content Marketing without Sales Insights
Marketers are adapting to the behaviour of the customer and investing in content marketing. Everything from blogs and whitepapers to social media and videos, Marketers are, in essence, feeding the problem that Sales is concerned about; customers self-educating and not calling on Sales for information.
The issue is like a double-edged sword, as one would think that all the extra valuable content would equate to more informed and empowered sales reps. with content they can use for selling.
The reality is quite the opposite, sales reps. tend to use only a small minority of the content created; for several reasons. Sales tends to struggle with finding the right content for each stage of buying cycle, time and effort is being wasted on non-selling activities, and valuable opportunities are being lost to a selling cycle growing in complexity.
Check out this article about the top 10 reasons content marketing damages the sales process, because even if your content marketing team creates perfect content, there are common ways you can inadvertently damage the sales process with ineffective distribution and analysis tactics.
It’s really come down to a chicken-egg scenario; which one came first?
(Image Source: TrendMicro, 2014)
You see, buyers are self educating, and demanding more content, which in turn makes marketers create more content, which further empowers buyers, who then demand more content, and etc.
OR,
Marketers are using content to generate leads who are marketing qualified (know about the product), these buyers now know more and seek out more knowledge, which thus leads marketers to create more content, further empowering the buyer, and etc.
But smarter buyers create more complex buying scenarios, they ask more complex questions, they reveal their interests much later on, they make special requests far outside what the rep is accustomed too, and etc.
This misalign between what the customer knows and what Sales is communicating leads down a path of inconsistent customer experience, time consuming processes, and a cumbersome brand representation.
And this is why sales enablement exists. Sales reps need a solution to counter a smarter buyer, sort through a growing content library, engage on multiple channels, and always add value.
If you’re new to sales enablement, you'll probably enjoy this article that explains what is sales enablement, and provides a sales enablement definition for 2015. The article includes each of the major trends imacting sales, several definitions from different organizations, and a final conclusive look into what sales enablement is for 2015 and beyond.
Sorting the Clutter: Sales Execution Priorities for 2015
While it seems that Marketing’s activities are detrimental to the Sales team, some companies are welcoming the change as an opportunity to shift sales strategies and re-focus the lens to enhance customer delight in an era where the customer thinks they know the seller better than the seller may know themselves.
Here are the top five best practices for excelling in the face of this evolving sales environment:
1) Sales and Marketing Alignment
In the face of the content overload, it is more essential than ever to ensure that your Sales and Marketing teams are reporting to one senior executive, share crucial customer information, understand each other’s key terms, work towards common goals, and communicate often. The value of aligning these teams cannot be understated.
Many companies participate in content marketing today, and this participation usually leads to the use of content for selling (by sales reps). Therefore, marketing teams shouldn’t avoid the sales team when creating content that they’re expected to use for selling.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in a number of firms.
If you’re new to the idea of sales and marketing alignment, this recent introductory article we created can help you understand why to use sales and marketing alignment, and provides 5 best practices.
If you’re a little more in-tune with this idea, I suggest skipping that and reading this more advanced article about achieving sales and marketing alignment for a viable sales strategy.
2) Constant and Consistent Customer Experience
The trend of customers self-educating is a persistent factor of the new sales environment. Sales teams need to reorient themselves around the customer, not just established practices of their office. Sales need to know what their customers already know, and meet them at the same level. Each experience must take into consideration past touch point interactions and content that has been interacted with.
More importantly, sales must be ready and willing to interact when and where the customer is, whether social media, face-to-face, phone, and etc. The continuity factor of service experience is a growing concern, that is to say, your customer must experience your brand at the same level of quality and care, at every interaction, anytime.
The name of the game here is adaptive content management through an omni-channel experience.
Omni-channel just means ubiquitous multi-channel, or, the same consistent experience across all channels. If they commented on Facebook, called in the next day, and emailed for the rest of the week, the buyer wants effortless consistency.
This is because your brand isn’t a combination of channels any longer, channels are just engagement. If you’re still stuck in channel thinking, you’re behind contemporary marketing thought-leadership.
The customer/buyer doesn’t care about the channel, they see the brand as one entity and interaction as one process.
I know I know, this can be a little tough to envision. Think about it like this. Imagine if you were talking with a friend over SMS about weekend plans, then again continued the conversation over Facebook chat, then suggested venues over twitter, and closed-in on a solid weekend plan over a phone call.
You know that each time you connected with your friend, you continued the discussion. They didn’t re-start the conversation across each medium, and you were able to progress the same discussion across several mediums, why? Because they are one entity (your friend), and you expect that (short of having amnesia) they will clearly understand what you’re talking about, regardless of medium and time.
THIS IS OMNI-CHANNEL
Except instead of the friend, it’s the brand.
If you’re completely on board with this concept, I invite you to check out this post about being conversational, with tips to getting more out of your sales process. The buyer wants one experience across channels, and because technology spurred channel growth, its technology that will align the process yet again.
3) Invest in Sales Force Development
Sometimes we forget about the human element. Quotas and goals are important, but just because a number target wasn’t hit, doesn’t mean that a sales person isn’t making progress. With the growth of an empowered buyer, it is more essential than ever to create and develop consistent sales practices. Gone are the days of self-serving strategies, your team needs to be cohesive. The most important factor is to make sure this starts from the top. Sales executives need to motivate and coach regularly, investing in small wins on a daily basis, and big milestones like hitting quotas.
Continued investment in learning is a valuable tactic, because learning never really ends, and sales reps improve with each interaction. Sales training is more of a continuous process because of this, but with an ever diminishing return.
Early on, you want to focus on tactics, behaviour, product knowledge, and the typical on boarding criteria. On a longer term however, sales training becomes less valuable. Your established sales reps don’t want more descriptive product knowledge and theoretical selling tactics, because they already know the product, and how to sell it.
On a long term, established reps want one thing. They want to know what motivates the buyer, because this is truly the gap that enables someone to sell solutions, and counter pain points efficiently.
I put together an article about the two reasons sales training fails to improve the sales process, in which an analysis of market trends is applied to the outcomes of training for an in depth look at what sales reps really want from their training process. It’s worth a look if you’re deeply interested in sales training outcomes.
4) Develop Customer Loyalty
Customer churn, or customer attrition rate, is something of a concern at every company. When the buyer becomes more empowered, and competitive forces begin to weigh heavily, churn rates can push a demand for more leads and a need to make up for lost revenue. To add to the pain, loyal customers are getting harder to produce, yet established clients regularly have a shorter sales cycle (for upselling & cross-selling) and the potential for referrals.
The solution? Your clients need to see your sales teams as trusted partners in achieving success, not transactional sellers. Ensure that Marketing is communicating common concerns and issues to Sales, treat each customer how they want to be treated, and where, and when. Regularly communicate with past buyers, ensure that service is consistent across all channels, and tailor your communications.
It all comes down to adding value to the target buyer over time while maintaining high profitability. Digital content marketing is uniquely flexible in this regard, as exceptional content can add value to the relationship long after the sale is complete.
There is a bit of science in applying content to post-sale clients, and it’s not the same across industries. Check out this post about which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage, where 15 top content types are examined for their effectiveness in a variety of sales funnel stages.
5) Focus on Velocity and Convenience
As buyers continue to self-educate about purchases, you should approach a MQL from the perspective that they already have product knowledge and buying criteria in mind, your job is now to focus around adding value. Your product/service is NOT the primary value driver anymore, it simply consummates the sales process. The best Sales Specialists add insight with interaction; the buyer needs to feel that you have their best interests in mind, not that you’re a repository of product information.
The buyer is also changing faster than ever, and they are busier than ever. Every stage of the buying cycle needs to be prompt and effective. Leads can change into prospects fast, and they can be lost that much faster. Your teams must have a plan for prompt and accurate interactions, whether it’s a follow-up or a proposal.
This really comes down to 2 crucial tools.
1 – If the lead is passed from marketing, you need to be able to continue a persona-driven digital content-based discussion with them that avoids restating things they already know, and helps them achieve a strategic objective.
2 – You need the ability to guide a discussion across channels, because the buyer doesn’t care if you lost that last email, or forgot what was talked about in the last sales presentation. Furthermore, depending on the industry and situation, they may not have time to invest in continued calls, and their schedule may only allow for sporadic opportunities.
This is where adaptive digital content management and mobile sales applications come into play. Personas don’t just disappear once the marketing team passes a MQL to sales, in fact, they become more important, because the buyer is now seeking a solution that would apply to them and their buying scenario.
Omni-channel excellence is something I can't understate, especially if you’re using digital content right now for selling purposes. You need to be able to jump into a sales call at any moment, add value immediately, and position as a savvy, technology-enabled, solution provider.
We’ve got this article about how to produce more relevancy from the sales process, where these two concepts are discussed in detail, and some enticing statistics are used to back up the claims. If you’re interested, you might like to check it out.
Virtual Connection: Being There with Mobile Sales Enablement
The majority of businesses are implementing some kind of sales force of CRM program, but to what effect? If you’re integrating Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service, if you’ve developed a strategy for interacting with customers using tailored messages, and if you’ve automated functions across departments, you’re on the right track.
Unfortunately, that isn’t going to be enough. You need to ensure that your sales teams can actually utilize all that content, integration, strategy, and tailored messaging when it’s needed. That means an effective Mobile Sales Enablement Platform.
[RELATED CONTENT] For more on this, I invite you to check out the whitepaper below, which discusses how multi-channel engagement improves sales effectiveness.
Otherwise, if you want to personally see how this kind of real sales enablement solution works, request a demo, and let us show you what the future of digital content-based sales operations look like.
