Is Your Sales & Marketing Process Out Of Date?

Steve Woods is suggesting that may be the case for companies that use a consultative approach to sales and marketing, and that changes to your digital marketing hold the answer.

He suggests that with the advent of most new technologies there are two phases (my experience certainly supports something like this), the first is that the new technology is adopted in a similar way to the old technology causing lots of incremental improvements, and the second phase frames the problem in an entirely different way leading to sweeping innovation with the largely same tools in place.

The Impact For Sales & Marketing

In his eBook for Eloqua, a company that he co-founded, Woods"€™ takes a very B2B bias approach (though this is very relevant to B2C products and services too) and suggests that technologies that have become common place in marketing - search, email, web, blogs, and video - have created early innovation yet are being used in a way that is only the start.

A Fading Process

The traditional, consultative sales and marketing process has relied on getting a message heard, capturing leads, profiling and converting through a tight sales funnel. Certainly big ticket B2B purchase (software or corporate insurance) or considered B2C purchases (long haul travel or car purchase) are examples where qualified leads are courted over time by sales professionals underpinned by direct marketing.

Through conversations and a range of touch points the sales and marketing teams educate, guide, and lead a prospective customer through a variety of phases. Marketing collateral, research, case studies, white papers, references and events are used to ensure the buyer is aware of the pain point and that a viable solution exists. Once educated, the sales professional turns consultant and advisor to guide the prospective buyer to what is (hopefully) a favourable purchase decision. This purchase decision may take days, weeks or months, and it will likely include multiple decision makers if B2B.

So What"€™s Changed: 5 Challenges For Sales & Marketing Teams

1. Buyer behavior has changed. People now identify needs, inform and educate themselves, and seek multiple trustworthy sources to define a pain point and consider products or services. Even a simple typing of a pain or need in to Google or Yahoo! to get ideas, information and a prospective list of suppliers - they do not need to talk to you
2. Through globalisation, geography and time are not the barriers that they once were - new ecosystems emerge and shift, and technological advances can quickly rewrite the rules, capabilities, costs and timeframes, products can be accessed online, downloaded or shipped same day, there"€™s global choice
3. Web 2.0 technologies facilitate these new processes - information sharing and product comparison being two examples - unthinkable a few years ago, now easy across blogs and social networks - hand-picked testimonials give way to independent community web sites and portals
4. Buyers are leveraging these new information sources, rendering the salesperson to a secondary role (or even a non-presence)"€”particularly early in the buying process. This is very bad for B2B where the sale relies heavily on the connection with a sales professional to cultivate, gauge decisions makers, remove blocks and be pre-emptive
5. In this game-changing environment, it is far more challenging to align the prospect"€™s buying process with the company"€™s selling process"€™. Is a web visitor tyre kicking or ready to buy right now? Queue the term "€œleaky sales funnel"€

What Should A Sales & Marketing Process Consider?

According to Steve Woods marketers need to work differently, both with their sales team and the prospective customer, re-thinking whole processes in light of this change in buyer dynamics.

Marketers who understand, guide, and facilitate the buying process are able to have a very real and measurable impact on both revenue and sales effectiveness:

• Marketing can engage with people earlier in the buying process - turn the perceived disadvantages of web technologies into an advantage buy listening and engaging early where customers are searching and researching - add value and build trust
• It"€™s getting easier and easier than ever to be find-able online - and no excuse not to be, how hard are you prepared to work to listen and adapt to how and where your prospective customers are searching for answers
• Intelligent segmentation will allow innovative ways to keep tyre kicking buyers engaged with marketing whilst passing leads to sales that are in an active buying stage, the number of leads qualified and converted by sales will increase
• Mapping buyer interests to the buying process will generate genuine sales leads and allow positive conversation at different phases of the buying process
• Efficiency improvements since wasteful marketing is reduced and the number of raw leads passed to sales decreases

Don"€™t forget the download is here (sorry you have to give your details to Eloqua first, bit old school I know and maybe quite ironic considering), Steve"€™s book, Digital Body Language, is worth checking out too so long as you can filter it - it"€™s written very much from a B2B perspective but still valuable for B2C companies using a similar lead gen and lead conversion process.