How Can Marketing Help Beleaguered Sales Professionals?

Wayne Marks Hansa|GRC

The recent economic downturn has made most sales professionals wonder what they can do di˜erently to even come close to making their numbers. Of course, there's no easy answer. The changes confronting sales professionals today are even more pronounced than they are for the rest of us. In our own business, we've seen a dramatic turn in what customers want and expect from their sales and relationship manager partners.

To be true and valued partners to sales teams, we need to understand a bit more about these changes so we can give sales professionals useful information, delivered in the right manner at the right time. The Sea Change I personally was schooled in the virtues of consultative selling. Bottom line: it seemed to work and it respected clients. One would present a great capability statement that stimulated interest, explore needs, and advance with options to engage the prospect. If the process was managed correctly, prospects seemed to almost close the deals for you. Those principles still have some merit, but today they leave sales professionals far short of success.

Now, customers are under siege. They have no time, too many priorities, multiple tasks to juggle, and too many vendors knocking at their door. No potential customer has time to spend sharing all her needs with salespeople armed only with questions. There is little time for customers and prospects to even think about their landscape of needs. Salespeople who think they can call a customer and only have a conversation to explore needs, had better re-think that strategy. This is a sea change in the context of business development compared to the way things used to be. We've found there are also di˜erences by generation -- younger generations, having grown up in the rapid pace of the internet, simply may not be of a mindset to indulge sales professionals and meet with them for that casual or informal get-together in ways other generations might have. Our perspective is that sales associations based principally on personal relationships are far more vulnerable than ever before.

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