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Would you bet your paycheck on the accuracy of the local weather forecast for tomorrow? Surely you would not. But, when you put all of your company’s eggs in the basket of a bad sales forecast, you’re doing just that.

The pharma rep of today will approach these three types of healthcare practitioners:

Blog #3 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

What Do You Mean, “Margin Matters”?

A long time ago, in companies far, far away, B2B marketers marketed and their sellers sold.

The former were responsible for guarding the integrity of the corporate logo and generating tons of leads; the sales team was left to their own devices, and expense accounts, if they sold enough stuff. Obviously, times have changed. Contemporary marketers have, for a decade or more, been held accountable less for how many bodies, clicks, and downloads they generate, and more around ROMI - return on marketing investment. Considering the well-publicized analyst predictions that by 2017 the CMO's budget will out-pace that of the CIO, ROI had better be part of the equation for marketing leaders hoping to keep their jobs secure.

The five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower aptly noted that, “Morale is the single greatest factor in successful wars.” The same goes for the battlefield of selling. Much like a general leading troops to victory, high-performance sales managers earn the willing and earnest cooperation of the sales reps beneath them.

Time is a scarce resource that you dole out on a breath-by-breath basis. Leaving the existential debate aside, most can agree that it is wise to allocate time to worthy activity, and forget the rest. Highly effective sales reps know when to spend working hours completing a task, and when to say “no-” for today, this quarter, or forever.

If you’ve seen a video clip of the sun setting below a desert horizon where time passes on fast-forward, and each movement looks unusually pronounced, you’ve likely seen a creation of time-lapse photography. Perhaps you’ve seen a construction project captured by time-lapse photography, and watched a home appear in a 30-second clip that shows the building action, from the lay of the foundation to the finishing touches on paint. 

To create a time-lapse clip, photographers take hundreds of single photos of a sunset in action, for example. You’re viewing hundreds of single frames played together one after another, quickly. The method creates the illusion of a lengthy video played on fast-forward.

High-performing marketing departments churn out quality content with the precision of artful scientists. When an interested prospect hits the sales team only to find a half-baked PowerPoint, they halt mid-pipeline.

Blog #2 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

Traditionally, the B2B customer acquisition process is perceived as a two-dimensional, linear workflow: the mad scientists in product development cook up a brand-new iteration of the solution in their dark laboratory; product marketing launches a revolutionary messaging campaign in the newest, coolest medium; field marketing runs ads, events, and promotions to develop a pile of net-new leads; and then the sales team…closes the deals the same-old, same-old way they always have. Just like that - as if the proper order of things dictates that all content-based creativity and flexibility ceases to exist, once the white-hot leads are passed to sales, whose reps merely have to collect another signature in order to generate the revenue stream. If, however, enterprise sales reps are only expected to perform repetitious, uncreative, end-of-cycle tasks, why do we pay them so much?

The inherent problem with this model is obvious to all of us who have carried a bag, and a quota, but less so to the persona of the "celebrity CMO" who too often rides their white horse into town to fix things, but doesn't spend enough time interacting with real prospects or customers to truly understand whether their content is resonating where it counts. In reality, B2B sales leads are becoming an anachronism.

Whether making a sales pitch during a 60-second elevator ride, or engaging in a walk-up meeting, short sales call, or any unplanned selling encounter, the effective salesperson can use prepared content to turn a quick, surprise exchange into a high impact sales interaction using sales enablement tools. Here’s how.