Why Selling Keeps Getting Harder?

I saw a quote this week on LinkedIn from Peter Clarke, Digital Media Consultant:

"Buyers have become smarter at buying faster than sellers have become smarter at selling."

I nodded my head, liked the quote and then continued scrolling through my feed. Suddenly, the impact of that statement really hit me as I realized the enormity of the changes that occurred in the B2B selling process since the Internet and email.

Pre-email and Internet, mail was delivered 100% of the time and usually opened. There was no voicemail, so someone answered the phone, either the person being called or a receptionist who would take a message. I feel like most people made an effort to return all their phone calls. Buyers didn’t usually start their purchase journey until they talked to sales. The majority of product information was provided by the sales team. I think there was a higher level of trust, meaning less embedded marketing hype and superlatives, and more old-fashioned feature/function/benefit value in the product materials. When I started in marketing, that was the first thing we did, create the feature/function/benefit chart.

What has changed? Almost everything!

Communication channels are stuffed. Most executives never see any snail mail addressed to them. Spam and junk mail filters make email useless as a cold call technique. If it does get through those gates, business executives may not read it anyway due to their overflowing email inboxes. Linked In messaging used to offer a way to cold call, but most users today spot that and decline the connection request or message. People use voicemail to screen calls and receptionists taking messages are a thing of the past. Fifty to seventy percent of the buying journey is done prior to engaging with a salesperson. Sales is not the primary source of information. Often the product and vendor selection have already been done. As products mature differentiating them becomes more difficult. Supplier management negotiates the price like your solution was a commodity.

Customers know all about your solution before they contact you. 

What do you know about your customers before they contact you? Probably nothing, unless they happen to be a current customer. 

So how do companies and sellers become smarter at selling? How can sellers become more effective in this new buyer led sales process? There are software tools and vendors that claim to make selling smarter, but its like any automation tool, you will not achieve the benefits of automating a process that doesn’t work. I'm not saying investing in sales and marketing technology doesn’t make sense. What I am saying is if you have a poor process, automation and tools wont improve the poor process. It will just let you be poor faster and more consistently. 

What are the things you should do? There are many things to do, but I believe the following are the most critical activities to focus on:

1. Customer Knowledge
2. Prospect Messaging
3. Engage Prospects
4. Customer References
5. Prospect Tracking
6. Sales Education

Following is a quick summary of using each of these items to become smarter sellers. In future posts I will explain how to successfully accomplish each of these critical activities. 

1.     Customer Knowledge

If your prospects don’t contact you until they are more than halfway through their purchase journey, how can you find out more about them before they engage with your sales team? By using your existing customers as surrogates. This is reason why having advisory councils, steering committees and user groups are so important - they can serve as surrogates to learn more about your prospects. Creating customer boards and groups is not difficult but creating effective and useful customer groups does take some experience, as well as patience to nurture them so they develop into very effective and useful resources for a company. I have created numerous customer groups at different companies as well as served on several different advisory boards and user groups to learn what works and what doesn’t work. Effective customer groups can provide valuable insights into new technologies, market dynamics and challenges, new products, improving customer satisfaction, broken processes fix and honest input on any aspect of the company you want to obtain. And that includes the sales process they used, their buying journey, the information they would have liked to have seen, what was important to them, and their decision process they used to contact you before they bought the product form you. Gold mine!

2.     Prospect Messaging

Your messaging is the most important thing to get right. But remember, its not what you like, it needs to be what the customer is looking for. Focus on the job they want to accomplish. Address how they completely accomplish the job they need done, not just the part your product focuses on. How can you move the needle for them? What is unique about your solution or implementation you want to make sure they grasp? And remember, they don’t care how your organized or how you deliver the solution, they see your company as one company, not two product groups or four divisions. Speak as one company. In your customers language. If you sell to multiple segments, or channels, or need to sell enables first, make sure you create separate messaging that works for each of them. Focus on the value your solution brings, not just a list of features. (Remember the old-fashioned Feature/Function/Benefit matrix?) If you want to be successful, don’t start developing content until you have a good message map. Finally consider reviewing and testing your message map with your advisory councils and user groups. Make sure your messaging is relevant and resonates with actual customers of your solution.

3.     Engage Prospects

Different market segments such as retail stores, convenience stores, restaurants and hotels each have different needs and use different language. Marketing materials need to be created for different segments to match what prospects are looking for. Different size prospects such as small retailers, mid-size chains and national chains also may have different priorities and decision criteria so materials should be tailored to each of them. Finally, within a given account there are likely to be multiple buyers and influencers including user buyers, economic buyers and technical buyers. Some will look at pricing, others support, training, impact on current operations, security, etc. Customer Focused Marketing means making sure you address all these different prospects and buyers with information to not only answer their questions, but to believe your solution and company is the best choice for accomplishing the job they want done. In addition to the variety of content, you need to use a variety of to distribute your message. Company web sites are a great repository for your information, but just a start. Use social media, consider a blog, maybe an education website. Email, partners, industry analysts, trade shows, advertising, articles, the list goes on. Each product and each market requires a different strategy. The objective is to reach your prospects with a message that speaks to them, so they start to engage with your company.

4.     Customer References

No one believes claims sales people make about your products any more. Who do they believe? Existing customers. Or unfortunately, ex-customers if you have them. Almost everything you do should include customer reference information.  Case studies, testimonials, quotes, videos and customer logos. Use the advisory council and user groups you put together first. By joining these groups these people have already told you they have a vested interest in your success. Obtain a variety of reference as your prospects will look for someone like them and to answer a variety of problems. Have your customers talk about how smooth the sales process was, how easy implementation is, how great support is, your user groups, the value of your solutions, etc. Assuming you have other products, you can even use customer references before you have sold the product, they can focus on all the non-product areas. Not all customers will agree to supporting your product publicly, but that doesn't preclude you from using their quotes or case study publicly without attribution, and then arranging a direct conversation later when a prospect asks. Take advantage to get customer references whenever you are at event with your customers like advisory council meetings and trade shows. From formal studio recordings to man in the street type videos these can be effective sales tools.

5.     Prospect Tracking

While you may not know who your prospects are until they contact your company, that doesn’t mean you can't learn something about them before they contact you. There are tools, like Pardot, that allow you to track and score an individual’s engagement with your materials across the web and social media. This is why you should have any information that a prospective buyer may want during their buying journey. This is also why it is important to structure your web site so you can see where a prospect is in their buying journey. At a minimum sellers can see what pages on your web site prospects visited, as well as how often and for how long. What materials did they download? If you have their email address, you can engage with them via an email campaign. As you get new customers, make sure part of the on-boarding process is to understand how they heard about your company and product, what buying journey they used, what was important to them and how they made their decision. This information allows you to continuously improve your process and become smarter sellers.

6.     Sales Education

The final area to address to make sellers smarter, and one that continues to challenge most companies, is sales training. Most companies do product training and some offer sales skills training, but it usually stops there. In addition to those topics, sales teams need to be trained on the industry and their customers, their needs, their concerns and their problems. They need to be trained on the modern buying paths your customers use. Training should include how to start a conversation with a prospective customer and how to ask the right questions to uncover opportunities your products could address. To be effective, training cannot just consist of having the smartest person on the topic presenting countless PowerPoint slides. That doesn’t mean you need to hire professional trainers, but it does mean you need to define clear objectives, define what each training topic will teach, and make sure the people doing the training adhere to the training objectives. Good training should include exercises to reinforce the lessons learned, testing to measure comprehension and metrics to measure on-going training success.

Yes, buyers have become smarter than sellers, but with the right tools and strategies sellers can become smarter and while they may never be able to completely retake control of the buying process, they can influence the direction and steer them to starting an engagement with your company. With the right solutions and tools, sellers can achieve success.

To me, these 6 items are the core of Customer Focused Marketing - fully and truly understanding your customers and prospects to leveraging that deep knowledge to effectively market and sell your solutions.

 To see how I can help your business, see my web site at Customer Focused Marketing.