Do You Have Sales Tools that Aren’t Selling?
Do You Have Sales Tools that Aren’t Selling?
One of the most common issues I come across is the disconnect between the sales and marketing teams. It creates a disjointed experience for customers and costs organisations money, both in lost opportunities and wasted staff time.
And there you have one of my hot buttons!!
Getting the sales and marketing teams working together to work on shared objectives is one of the areas I focus on when working with businesses.
The sales and marketing might be done by one single person, or there might be a whole sales team in the field supported by the marketers in the office. The challenges are often very similar.
Are You Wasting Money?
According to sales enablement platform Allego, 70% of the content created by marketers for their sales team ends up unused.
Allego believes the most prevalent reason is a lack of confidencefrom the salespeople in using the content. My experience is also that some of the material is simply not fit for purpose - including being outdated, doesn’t resonate for the buyer, includes too much information, or the messaging is unclear.
It’s not just that your marketing team has wasted the time it took to pull the presentation itself together and look good; it’s all the insights that have led up to them carefully choosing what to include and how to position it.
If done well, your sales collateral should reflect the understanding you have of your customers and what makes them buy. It should include an understanding of where they are in the buyer journey and what makes them move to the next step.
Meanwhile, your sales reps are each sitting at their laptops individually creating their own sales tools, instead of getting in front of the customer and having conversations.
Does this sound familiar in your organisation?
If you are growing your business, improvements to your business systems and processes make a difference.
Sales and marketing alignment is a huge topic, so I’m going to leave out everything else and just focus on developing good quality sales tools that your team uses, and which drives sales.
I’m an action-oriented soul, so I’m going to jump straight into some suggestions for WHAT you can DO!
7 Steps to Build Effective Sales Tools That Get Used
1.Get the team together
Whether you create the team to work on this project alone, or set it up for longer-term collaboration
(my recommendation), get everyone together (virtually or physically)
If necessary, spend some time on building the team culturally as ‘one’ before jumping into task-focus. A little bit of time at this stage can make it easier in the long run
2. Get on the same page
Identify the purpose of what you are doing and agree on a set of shared objectives. What does ‘good’ look like? Be specific. How will you know if you’ve got there?
Don’t assume everyone understands what everyone else does.
Get someone from each team to present about their job, how they work, how they are measured, the frameworks and assumptions they use and why Remind the team about your ideal customers and core messages
3. Prioritise
Prioritise what needs addressing first. Is it your slide deck for presentations to new prospects; an upcoming event; or account management visits? They might all need reviewing, but you might find it easier to focus on one initially
4. Deep Dive
Understand what is needed from the sales team & how they use it. A powerpoint might not work if meetings are held stood up in a factory, for example
Look at what is working now & what is not
Challenge and ask questions - if a certain message must be written in a certain what, explain why
Agree what ought to be standard and if sales can personalise it. If you don’t want them to - make that super clear
Get the sales person to talk through how they actually communicate - what do they actually say when talking with a client; get the team to compare notes. Do you ever listen to someone else talking about a subject and they use a turn of phrase or a fact that you mentally note and stick in your own toolbox?
5. Create the Tools
Creating the visual tools is often the easy part!
More importantly, create the messaging & talking points to support them
Create a master template, put it somewhere really easy to access for everyone and be clear this is the ONE true version!
Ensure there’s a nominated owner for maintaining it and communicating changes
6. Internal Engagement Campaign
Create an internal campaign to ensure the sales team is trained and engaged. You’re asking people to change behaviours and learn new skills
Train & practise with the team. Ask someone to demo how they use it can be helpful. Videoing each other, buddying up, listening to phone recordings, presenting at team meetings, talking over a beer…whatever works for your team
Treat it as a trial - it needs to be tested and used so we can see what is working or not. We want to learn and review. To do this we need specific feedback which can be captured and discussed during the review
7. Use & Review
Get out and use it in the field - allow plenty of time to embed and practice
Regroup and review if it was a success against the criteria, you chose when you initiated this. It could include the time salespeople spend on creating sales collateral, speed to move clients along the funnel, number of new sales etc
My guess is that 70% of collateral being unused is only the tip of the iceberg for your sales and marketing team working together, but it is a great place to start.