Taking Your Sales Conversations to a Higher Level

Would you like to take the conversations your sales and channel teams are having with prospects and customers to a higher level, so they address the issues and concerns your buyers really care about?

Creating and delivering suitable content for sales conversations across the customer buying cycle is a problem in many B2B companies, however it is essential to improving the performance of the core group of salespeople.

I’ve been working on this problem for 10 years and have observed that the top 10% of salespeople have already figured out what conversations resonate with buyers and will use anything that gives them an edge to get even better.

The core group of salespeople who are struggling to achieve success, need conversations and stories to be created for them and they require practice to internalize and use them effectively and with confidence.

Despite best intentions from senior executives, sales and marketing messaging projects often fail to deliver what salespeople need and achieve the performance improvement expectations of executive sponsors.

Why isn’t messaging internalized and practiced? 

Messages are internally focused and product-centric and not relevant to the issues your target customer stakeholders care about,

Messages and content is not useful, or in a form that is immediately usable by salespeople (trapped in document containers, stuck in portals).

Content to support salespeople is not available in the moment:

• Viewable as required for pre-call or self-coaching
• Supporting content to send before and after a conversation is absent
• Content is not available for In-call conversation support, including:
  • Key points to cover and what to listen for
  • Positioning, point of view and industry insights ready to share
  • 45-90 second customer stories that resonate with target audience
  • Questions to ask and answers to frequently asked questions
  • Visuals and shareable links to visuals to support conversations

• Content to support conversations conducted in social-media is simply not available.

Salespeople don’t get the proper training and don’t have the right skills to use it, have not practiced using it and thus won’t use it until they are “comfortable” with it.

Who’s problem is it?

Marketing creates the content, salespeople are supposed to use it and sales managers are responsible for turning the content into sales results.

It would be easy to argue that the salespeople are not doing their job and using what has been created. 

Sales management could be accused of not holding salespeople accountable and helping them use the content.

Marketing could be accused of creating content that salespeople will not use.

Before I answer the question, let’s examine the three main causes of the above problems:

1. The output of messaging work is not made available in formats that support real-time selling.
2. Sales messaging is typically delivered in document form as a one-off, – a project deliverable, often involving outside consultants and once delivered into the sales portal, it gets lost and begins to go stale.
3. Helping salespeople to learn and master using the content is often poorly executed. 

Achieving a Higher Level needs a New Approach

I contend that all three groups are in some way responsible, but instead of pointing the finger, we need to look for new disruptive tools and methods to deliver sales messaging content that salespeople will use to achieve success, including;

• Platforms and tools that free the message content from its container to deliver relevant unstructured content in response to a keyword search, so that salespeople can access the right content for the right conversation in real-time and use it in conversation or share it over any medium.
• Message and content creation must evolve from a tactical product-centric “deliverable” to a collaborative and dynamic customer-focused activity requiring constant input and iteration from the field, markets and competitors to keep message elements alive and relevant.
• For salespeople to rapidly adopt and own new customer-centric messaging we must provide a new culture for learning that is collaborative, ongoing and fun and where personal ownership and individual performance are nurtured. 

We welcome an opportunity to discuss these concepts in more detail and ask that you please contact us or click the free trial button above to download the WittyParrot product for a free trial.