B2B Sales Tools That Work
Sales and marketing don’t mix well at many organizations. But they should and they can. The right B2B sales tools help build collaborative relationships, improve life on the front line, and boost sales. I'm talking about B2B sales tools that work.
The Sales perspective
The sales team believes it has the toughest, highest-pressure job: closing deals, with each day’s performance measured in hard dollars and cents.
Working in sales means arriving late at night in an unfamiliar town, checking into a hotel with fingers crossed that high-speed Internet access is waiting in the room as promised. If it is, be ready for a night with the laptop, catching up with hundreds of emails and preparing for tough questions at an 8 a.m. sales meeting.
And don’t forget to write that quarterly report showing whether you’ve hit your quota. Company growth depends directly on the outcome of your meetings with prospects and clients.
You’re under intense pressure to perform. You’re relying on the materials and sales tools that marketing supplied to help educate and engage your prospects.
The Marketing perspective
The marketing team feels like it is underappreciated. It has to gain the attention of target prospects who are bombarded with hundreds of promotional messages each day; get and stay at the top of search engine results for key search phrases; qualify and nurture contacts until they are ready to be passed to Sales; become a trusted resource to reporters, analysts, and other thought leaders; and report the worth of such results when they're often indirectly linked with revenue and profits.
It can be tough to measure marketing success because there’s no single yardstick and results aren’t immediate. Success can come in the form of media coverage, industry awards, or invitations for the CEO to be the keynote speaker at major conferences. What is that worth? Yet, clearly, Marketing softens the ground for Sales by building trust with members of each key audience.
With experience in both sales and marketing, I worry every time I meet with a client... I worry that strategic marketing message we develop in close coordination with Sales -- and that we test with the target audience -- still might never be embraced by Sales.
And what a collosal waste of time, money, and opportunity that would be.
Achieving unified messaging
Looking to minimize the divide, a client asked us to look into its current sales process. The client’s overall goal was to empower its growing sales team to close more and larger deals while saving time on sales communications with individual prospects.
Our approach began by making the marketing message an integral part of the company’s B2B sales tools and practices.
Having an approved sales message:
- Enabled new sales staff to ramp up and generate revenue more quickly.
- Ensured that the marketing messaging and the direct sales communications were in harmony.
- Guaranteed that content a prospect would find on the company website dovetailed with what the individual salesperson said.
- Ensured that each sales representative hit the same key points.
Next we talked one-on-one with the senior sales staff, asking about their current approach and needs. We collaborated with sales to build additional tools, including:
- Guidelines for the sales process
- Checklists for discussions with prospects
- Tips on assembling collateral for follow-up
- Email attachments designed to fit in with specific types of communication
- A new sales elevator statement
- Templates the sales team could customize, including content for slides, text for emails, text for sales letters, and a cold-call script
Sales tools generate results in the field
A month later, the sales staff was using all of the marketing tools and sales templates in the field. And, they were:
- Selling the entire solution
- Getting less resistance on price, and
- Hearing fewer references to the competition
In the meantime, on the marketing front, we overhauled the company website, developed customer success stories, generated media coverage, and more in order to help drive qualified leads and provide proof points that the sales team can use during the sales cycle.
A brighter outlook
There have been other benefits. Because of the complexity of the company’s offerings, it used to take an average of four weeks for new sales reps to start making coherent cold calls, and two months before they could deliver a compelling sales presentation. And even veteran reps took about one workweek to send follow up communications after a sales call or meeting.
Now, with the B2B sales tools in hand, a new sales rep can:
- Be phone-ready in three days
- Make cold calls after only a week
- Lead a sales presentation after only two weeks.
- Generate professional, customized communications in 10 minutes or less -- whether it’s a first contact or a follow-up