Don’t just think in terms of your sale peoples’ actions - it’s equally important to understand your prospect’s typical buying process, and to anticipate their concerns and motivations at each point in the journey. What information does the prospect need, and how well are you able to provide it? And does your current sales process clearly align with your prospect’s decision-making process?
Are You Doing All You Could to Enable Your Sales People? According to studies conducted by the American Marketing Association and other reliable sources, the vast majority - more than 80%, by most counts - of the sales tools and collateral created by marketing goes unused by sales people, who then spend a frightening amount of their potential personal selling time reinventing their own materials and tools.
It’s incredibly wasteful and often frustrating for everyone concerned. If you suspect that you might have a problem in this area, you need to take action. First, get your sales people to explain to your marketers what sales tools they actually use and how they use them, share what they have developed for themselves, and identify the missing tools they need to support their sales efforts.
Don’t allow either side to take defensive positions. Your goal must to be to establish a pact between sales and marketing that sales input will be considered before any new sales tool or piece of collateral is created, and an agreement that no new piece will be developed unless and until it is a clearly defined role to play in facilitating the prospect’s buying process.
When Was the Last Time You Cleaned Out Your Pipeline? Sales pipelines, if not actively managed, have a habit of getting clogged up with deals that have stopped moving - which may then block the progress of other more dynamic opportunities by diverting resources away from them. Before you get started, make sure that you’ve clearly defined your sales process.
Make sure that your process has clear definitions of what you expect to happen at each stage, and - most important - has clear, evidence-based milestones that determine how opportunities progress from stage to stage.
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