How to sell without a hefty marketing spend to most could seem impossible. However, in today's world it’s not just sales that has got harder – marketing has too. B2B buyers and decision-makers are highly educated on the products and services they require. They’re hungry for information. Their appetite demands 24×7 consumption, whenever and wherever they can.
Forbes recently reported that 80% of B2B purchasing cycles are completed before the buyer considers contacting the vendor. You’re feeling this and know this to be the case.
So in order to get your prospects’ attention and differentiate yourself from your competitors, you need to satisfy them like never before. And that means that if you’re in sales or marketing you’ve got to pull together. You need to form a united front both in terms of knowledge and understanding when engaging, nurturing, and interacting with your prospects. In essence you need to become a team of superheroes who join forces for the greater good of your prospects and your company.
This blog has been written to help address these challenges. It has been broken down into the following 9-steps:
1. Calling a truce
2. Researching and creating an ideal client avatar or persona
3. Defining a sales-qualified lead and processes
4. Developing the most appropriate messaging strategies
5. Creating engaging content to attract and nurture prospects
6. Meeting prospects where they’re hanging out
7. Using the internal sales team for qualification
8. Obtaining more information from marketing
9. Measuring, assessing and reporting
Now, before we get started, I just want to stress that this blog is targeted at sales and marketing professionals, sales and marketing managers, and business owners. The aim of it is to help you get ahead in business, to get you thinking about sales and marketing integration and to help you get buy in if needed.
Now, let’s get started and go through how to sell!
#1: Call a Truce to Enable Social Media & Sales
For the love of business, sales and marketing you need to kiss and make up. Forget the history. It’s time for you two to start working together.
Since the advent of business, sales and marketing have been at loggerheads. No matter which company I walk into, it’s the same story – sales believes that marketing aren’t providing enough high-quality leads and marketing believes that sales aren’t converting enough of the leads they do provide.
And this has to stop NOW. It’s not profitable for the business.
So how can this be accomplished? Well firstly, there needs to be education. Both teams need to understand why it’s better for everyone if they start working together. They need to appreciate how they’ll be more secure in their jobs, less pressurized, achieve more job satisfaction, obtain better bonuses and commissions if they pull together.
Typically, when revenues are down, business owners and senior managers look at the activities that have gone on within the sales and marketing teams. Many jump to the conclusion that hiring more salespeople will solve the problem and others cut marketing budgets or staff. Some do both. Argh! Regrettably, both result in a quick fix and don’t solve the main underlying problem for a long-term solution.
Only by getting the sales and marketing teams to work together and focus their attention firmly on the prospect, will a business increase its leads, sales and revenue. Business owners and senior managers need to realize that this relationship is a vital component of their business success and go about reinforcing the alliance.
#2: Research & Create an Ideal Client Avatar
A client avatar or persona is a 2-page profile that represents your target prospect and is one of the most important exercises you can do if you’re responsible for developing business. It sets the foundation for both sales and marketing activities and enables you to see your product or service through the buying eyes of your target. It’s important to do avatars for all your buyers, decision-makers and influencers as it results in a clearer understanding of your prospects, which will help you visualize and attract them.
In order to attract the right target prospects you need to know as much as you can about them. By demonstrating this through the information you share you’ll differentiate yourself from your competition, which will build trust and then sales.
The key features you’ll need to discover are:
- What are the business demographics
- What are their challenges and pains points
- What are their emotional drivers
- How do they prefer to consume information
- Where do they hang out – online and offline
- Where do they look for information
- What do they like doing in their spare time
Whilst this information can be captured through online surveys it’s far better to speak to your prospects one-to-one.
And, this is where both the sales and marketing teams can pull together. The sales team can play a vital role in this research stage by reviewing the behavioral patterns of their current clients when they were at the prospect stage. By reviewing the path current clients took while travelling through the sales process, you can identify the behavioural patterns, which indicated a readiness to buy. Marketing can then provide information on what content was converted and consumed which aids the process further.
#3: Define a Sales-Qualified Lead and Processes
Before targeting your prospects with marketing material to generate leads, both sales and marketing teams have to agree and define what constitutes a qualified lead i.e. when a suspect becomes a prospect and the process for handing over the lead. By doing this, both become clear on when it should be passed to the sales team, and this affords sales with the highest quality selling opportunity. Sales usually stipulate requirements such as budget, key drivers and authority to make a buying decision.
As the lead generation process continues, sales should constantly review their criteria for a qualified lead and feedback to marketing if changes occur. Further to this, sales should also inform marketing when the lead converts to a win or loss. Sharing victories leads to a united and empowered team.
#4: Develop Appropriate Messaging Strategies
Having gained knowledge from your current clients regarding their pain points and challenges, marketing will craft the messaging and strategy. Typically they’ll position the brand where your knowledge and experience perfectly match the needs and wants of your prospects’. They’ll then develop the strategy for reaching the prospects. This may include:
- Outbound marketing (emails, direct mail, telemarketing)
- Inbound/content marketing (blogging, e-books, white papers, webinars)
- Social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Slideshare etc.)
- Public relations
- Events/exhibitions
Once the messaging and content have been created, marketing must give sales access and keep them up-to-date on what’s being scheduled. This enables them to not only inform their clients and prospects on what’s due, but also to make them feel special – enhancing the relationship and building trust.
Furthermore, if sales are speaking to a prospect that’s specifically referencing a particular pain point, they can provide your company’s thought leadership content on that topic – again, showing a true understanding of the prospect’s issues and presenting a possible solution.
Likewise, sales must feedback to marketing if they discover, through their prospects that the content isn’t working. For sales and marketing to achieve both their individual objectives, and those of the business, there needs to be an active two-way dialogue throughout the lead generation and sales process.
#5: Create Content to Attract Prospects
Consider this statistic from Forbes – 80% of B2B purchasing cycles are completed before the buyer considers contacting the vendor. This means that your prospects are consuming huge amounts of content before making contact with the sales teams. Positioning yourself as a thought leader in your market and making your content highly relevant to your prospect’s needs is vital.
Key practices for content creation include:
- Finding someone in your organization to drive content marketing. This needs to be someone who’s passionate about teaching, training and improving the company’s understanding of the buyer.
- Giving your employees the chance to get involved. Make sure you understand all the writing talent and knowledge you have within your organization.
- Constantly increasing your knowledge of the market by keeping your ears to the ground. Spend time in forums and on social media to find out what your prospects are really talking about.
When marketing are engaged in a lead-generation email campaign, they should be signing the emails with an allocated sales rep’s name. The reason why is because the prospect will then start to imagine the sales rep and be more receptive to contact from them.
#6: Meet Prospects where they’re Hanging Out
According to research from Forrester, who surveyed business technology buyers, almost a half (46%) of decision-makers say they maintain a profile on a social-networking site and visit those sites at least once a month for business purposes.
Having created your ideal client avatar you should now know where your target prospects like to hang out online. And this is where you need to be too. By positioning yourself in these locations (communities) and interacting, you can gain insight into your prospects’ pain points, challenges and thoughts. Once you’ve established credibility in these communities, you can begin to offer your content.
In order to leverage fully, both the marketing and sales teams need to be highly involved in this activity. If the sales teams are wary of joining a social network community you can always nominate one salesperson to spearhead the initiative. Educate and train them on the relevant social sites, the tools available, the valuable information they can gather, and the tangible results they can achieve. Inform them that in today’s digital world, both brands and individuals use social media sites to discuss topics and developments, which are hugely beneficial to both the work they’re doing in sales and marketing.
So don’t miss out. Make sure you’re using social networks to their full potential by doing the following:
- Publish content on all the social media sites that your prospect hangs out.
- Add social media sharing buttons to all of your blogs and social media sites so that your prospects can easily share it with their network.
- Whenever you send an email, include social media links so that your prospects can easily connect with you on their favourite sites.
- When a suspect converts to a prospect within your system, connect with them on the social sites. By doing this both sales and marketing can see what their main issues are and what topics they discuss.
#7: Use the Internal Team for Qualification
Not all businesses have an internal sales team or sales support but if you do, use this valuable asset by qualifying out your leads. Use the qualified lead criteria that you set out earlier.
The qualification information should include:
- Business demographics – do they meet the requirements?
- Challenges – what are their main drivers, challenges and objectives?
- Problem solving techniques – what have they done so far to address the issues?
- Contract renewal period – are they approaching the end of a current contract period?
- Budget – do they have the budget in place? If so what is it? If not, when will it be available?
- Timescales – is the deal or project time sensitive and if so, why. This will indicate the stage of the buying process – are they carrying out research or are they ready to buy
- Decision-maker – who’s involved in the decision-making process? How much influence do they have? Who is approving the expenditure?
- Competition – who else are they speaking to about this?
Having made this call, the internal team (or you) will be able to place the lead into one of 2 categories:
- Qualified Prospect– a call/proposal/meeting should be arranged between the lead and a salesperson.
- Suspect – the lead does not meet the requirements at this point and is not ready to talk to sales. This lead needs to be developed by the marketing team who’ll continue to provide thought leadership content until they’re more ready to buy. A call every now and again would also be beneficial.
#8: Obtain more Information from Marketing
Once the lead has been qualified gather more information on them from the marketing team. The more information marketing can provide to sales at this stage, the better.
Useful information includes:
- The lead’s online behavior
- Number of downloads around a particular topic
- The sequence of downloads
- How recently they visited the website
- The time they are spending on the website
- The web pages they visited
Armed with this information, sales will now be in the strongest possible position to provide the lead with a solution to their pain points and secure a conversion to sale.
#9: Measure, Assess & Report
Once you’ve started converting leads into new business, it’s time to measure, assess and report back on the whole campaign. This needs to be a team effort for sales and marketing. By reviewing the process, from start to finish you can make improvements and provide a more targeted approach for future prospects.
Key measurements for review are:
- Engagement: the number of prospects that engaged with your marketing activity.
- Lead generation: the number of prospects that converted to a lead (prospect).
- Pipeline: the number of leads that ended up on the forecast.
- Conversion: the number of leads that converted to a sale (wins).
- Revenue: the total revenue generated.
- ROI: what was the return on investment for the lead generation activities.
So, to wrap this up…
Sales and marketing have very similar objectives. They both exist for the prospect; they’re there to satisfy them and to help them move through the buying process. With advancements in technology both sides can now more easily integrate and by doing so they can both realize increased benefits. Their newfound relationship is based on the principles of information share, teamwork and common goals. By working together from the very start of the lead generation process, both can maintain a unified understanding of the prospects they’re targeting whilst keeping their eyes on the prize.
Only by getting these two teams to work together in harmony, for the greater good of the prospect can you increase your lead generation, sales and revenue.
Now I want to hear from you…
Tell me in the comments below or in a private email:
- How are you dealing with social media or social selling?
- What aspect of social media or social selling do you find the most challenging?
Please share your stories and experience here, and if you've got a question, just pop it down here.
Thanks for being a sport and participating!
P.S.
Finally, if you know someone who'd LOVE the insight from this how to sell and social selling post, please send them a link. You’ll find solo entrepreneurs, consultants and yes, even sales and marketing managers who manage people who'll be interested to hear about this.
P.P. S.
If you want to learn more about Social Selling & Positioning yourself REGISTER for my master class: 12 Social Selling Tips
