From redundant machine cogs to valuable assets, how marketing can elevate sales teams.

Today's buyers are better informed than earlier generations. They can quickly learn about the features and benefits of vendor technologies and services, read use cases and approach vendor's clients through LinkedIn for validation.

What does this mean for salespeople? Certainly, it’s no longer enough to head into a sales meeting armed with product fact sheets or details of new methodologies. Today’s buyers are probably already familiar with those.

Buyers want to establish business relationships with trusted partners who understand the changing business and technology environments which affect their business. They expect new relationships to start with value-led insights and empathy.

To achieve this, sales and marketing teams need to understand their buyers' organisational circumstances as well as the political, economic, socio-cultural and technological (PEST) factors influencing their sectors.

Historically, acquiring this level of insight into accounts has meant purchasing industry reports and hosting dinners and other events. More recently podcasts, blogs and eBooks have contributed to learning and intelligence.

Today, one way to accelerate learning is by engaging with your market through sponsoring thought leadership programmes. By interviewing senior business and technology leaders in your market, your organisation will be privy to rich market insight and intelligence and will establish valuable new relationships from the process.

Through the insights gained from a 30-minute interview, salespeople can go into meetings with a far better understanding of what that person does, and their organisation's challenges and operating environment.

The interview experience is stimulating for the interviewee and helps to crystalise their thinking. The wider insights from their peer group serve to benchmark their ideas and naturally business professionals enjoy the personal brand awareness generated from the publicity.

This positive experience is why >30% of post-interview conversations lead to follow-on meetings, introductions or referrals for the sponsors of TechPros.io managed thought leadership programmes. After all, isn't it natural for human beings to give back if they have enjoyed a positive experience - a 'value exchange' if you like?

In many cases interviewees become champions for our sponsors' brands, opening doors to more decision-makers and influencers, facilitating further discussion.

By deploying marketing strategies more closely aligned with the aspirations of human beings, and by understanding the macro and micro operating environments affecting buyers, salespeople will experience many more conversations with their target accounts. They will be viewed as valuable assets in the buying process, not redundant cogs in the vendor sales machinery.