Marketing-Assisted-Selling For B2B Companies

Apply Marketing Assisted Selling To Boost Your Sales Process To The Next Level

To me, a B2B sales professional is a high value company asset who leads and executes a tailored selling process while also being an adept marketer and customer experience expert.  Their primary accountability includes:

1. Closing profitable sales opportunities
2. Managing a healthy sales funnel enables continuous goal attainment
3. Creating golden spike sales opportunities
4. Converting customers to clients
5. Facilitating company-to-company and peer-to-peer relationships
6. Feedback to company leaders contributes to effective decision making

Marketing Assisted Selling Enables Optimal ROI From Your Sales Assets

1. Help customers determine if they have a problem worth solving.
2. Success stories about challenges, solutions and results are a wonderful resource for situations where risk reduction is more important than price reduction.
3. Pricing tools show the value of each trade-off during negotiations.
4. Complementary vendors who have relationships with people that can benefit from your company's solutions are a great lead source.  These relationships enable "whole product" solutions.
5. Self-service content and assessments for each stage of the buying process must be intuitive for general awareness and more in-depth for educated buyers.
6. The field marketing (FM) process is involved in each stage of the buying cycle:

• Awareness Stage: approach suspects to gain permission to send relevant, timely and expected information.  For each account that appears in the CRM database, FM reps search for additional contacts where cross-selling makes sense.  FM reps schedule sales interviews for sales reps and are a consistent backup when sales reps are unavailable.

• Pre-Purchase Stage: Nurture early stage leads. FM reps assign sales ready leads and work with sales reps to ensure that leads are reviewed and acted upon in a timely manner.  FM Associates stay in touch by distributing relevant articles, company information and videos and conducting theme webinars.
• Purchase Stage: FM reps assist in presentations, proposals, site visits, etc.
• Post-Purchase Stage: Sales reps and FM reps co-author programs to retain, cross-sell and up-sell second-tier customers (STCs) and develop STCs into key accounts. A welcome package for new customers teaches them how to do business with your company and creates a positive first impression.

Complementary Partners Are Essential To Your Business

It's important to understand if yours is a real partner program or just an affiliate program in search of leads and transactions.

An important first step is to develop a partner rating process that enables consistent terminology for your staff and also enables your business development team to prioritize how it spends its time and resources.

Most Growable Partners (MGPs) are the core of your business.  The strategy is to nurture them and convert them to MVPs.  Their characteristics include:

• They opt-in to receive your communications and meet with you periodically [online and in person]
• They allow you to speak with others in their firm
• They consistently refer and/or close a minimum number of sales opportunities for your products and services
• They make you visibile in their facilities [online and offline]

Most Valuable Partners (MVPs) are elite members of your partner community.  The goal should be for 20% of your partners to be MVPs. The strategy is high level partnering through recognition, customized solutions, programs and learning relationships. They possess all of the MGP characteristics plus:

• They tell you what you need to do to be successful – no guesswork
• They provide suggestions for improving your business
• They consistently refer or close a high number of sales opportunities for your products and services
• They refer you to new potential MGPs

Second Tier Partners (STPs) are partners whose commitment level and results would not be affected by your 1to1 time investment. They do not present the opportunity to become MGPs. You retain them and attract new ones through your BizD process.  Their characteristics include:

• They opt-in to receive your communications and will speak with you on the phone and online
• They sporadically refer or close new sales opportunities for your products and services

Below Zero Partners (BZs) will never justify the time required to partner with them.  The strategy is to eliminate their misperceptions or to subtly encourage them to become someone else’s partner. Their characteristics include:

1. They are not willing to speak or meet with you and do not opt-in to receive your communications
2. They are not willing to allow you to build rapport with others in their firm
3. They do not dedicate basic resources to refer or close new sales opportunities for your products and services

Targets are those with whom you'd like to establish a 1to1 relationship because they suggest future MGP potential.

Make sure that your partner team is not only oriented towards recruitment and managing STPs, but that you also have the calibre of staff to develop MGPs and MVPs?  Otherwise, top partners will lose interest and leave for a better opportunity.

Before contacting a partner, make sure that you know about their company and the person with whom you'll be speaking relative to their history with your firm.  Don't make the conversation only about what they're doing to help your company.  Why not send an email asking to set up a convenient time and agenda rather than expecting them to be ready to talk with you at that moment you call.

Complementary Partners Required For "Whole Product" Solutions

Except for early adopters and true innovators, most people are pragmatic when it comes to making their buying decisions.  They don't want to spend time or money finding or creating the ancillary components associated with the product or service that they buy from you.  Instead, they prefer buying from a company who not only provides an excellent product or service, but who also connects them with the right complementary partners who can fill in the gaps necessary for a "whole product solution". Most likely a partner has chosen you because your products and services fit into the total solution that they offer to their customers.

If you are a "market maker", you create an umbrella under which some of your partners will develop their total business.  In other situations, partners who have a mainstream business can differentiate themselves by offering their customers your products and services as a complement to theirs.  In either situation, a win/win bi-directional relationship is essential for success.  Discover and apply the keys to success unique to your partner program.

Another Reason Why Business Schools Should Teach History

Self Fulfilling Prophesies Work Both Ways

If you expect a positive outcome, you are on the right track. If you expect a negative outcome, you'll be subconsciously influencing that result as well.

Today's high school and college students have yet to experience a healthy economy.  They're used to hearing about fiscal cliffs, high unemployment, a tough job market, belt tightening, outsourcing, etc.  Has this become their self-fulfilling prophecy because that's what they've come to expect?  Let's hope it's not engrained in their muscle memory.

I believe that a holistic business curriculum can foster their positive self fulfilling prophecy? If we teach business students about the history of the cycles our economy has traversed, they'll be better equipped to believe that they can influence future good times.

If we can create positive self-fulfilling prophecies in these future leaders, they will be wanting to innovate, undertake risk, invest, etc.  They will have a positive, enthusiastic attitude and will enjoy their careers.  And they'll get our economy back on track for the long term.

Here's an intersting article on Self-fulfilling prophecy by Carolyn Kaufman, Psy.D. in Psychology for Writers

Business Students Should Study History

Business schools should cull relevant history into snippets that form the basis of a course on strategies and leadership.  This history can be applied in business situations where there's a need to leverage an opportunity or confront a threat.

A great example is the strategy that Teddy Roosevelt used to influence the building of a 50 mile canal that would cross the Colombian isthmus of Panama and unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  The 13,000 mile New York to San Francisco journey took months as ships navigated around the treacherous Cape Horn. A canal would save hundreds of miles and man-hours.  Even President Ulysses Grant had sent seven expeditions to study its feasibility.

Roosevelt tried to negotiate with Columbia, but Colombia eventually lost interest. Then, Roosevelt and Panamanian business leaders collaborated on a revolution. The Battle for Panama lasted less than a day as Colombian soldiers were bribed $50 each to lay down their arms and the U.S.S. Nashville cruised off the Panamanian coast in a show of support.  On November 3, 1903, the nation of Panama was born.  The rest is history. This is an example of an indirect approach to achieve a goal.

An indirect strategy might be the best approach in certain opportunity management, market penetration, market development and product development situations.  Holden International teaches about indirect strategy in managing sales opportunities in its book, Power Base Selling.

Business Blogs Create Positive Impact

 Blogging Is A Business Essential

A blog is an essential tool for every business professional. This drip marketing resource will help you to increase your audience and stay in touch with customers, prospects and partners by contributing tips, answering questions and teaching.

Readers Benefit From Timely, Relevant, Concise Posts

If you write well and frequently share your expertise, readers will value you as a source of important information. They will share your content with their communities on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

 

Bloggers Benefit From A Unique, Respected Online Presence

You will establish yourself as an expert in your field and differentiate your company Vs. competitors who do not blog well.  Increase domain knowledge though research before each post and improve your ability to explain concepts.  Frequent quick-hitting posts earn higher readership than random website visits. Search engine friendly blogs generate online referrals.  Readers respond to your posts with new ideas to enhance your business. Comments to your posts expand your community.

Enhance your newsletters, websites, social networks and emails with a link to your blog.

Successful Marketers Are Great Performers

Captivate Buyers With Your Personal Performance

Memorable Experiences Differentiate Sellers Of Commodity Products And Services

Here's what I mean by personal performance

You present an aura of passion for what you do and a confidence that the customer is better off buying from you.  Your communication style establishes trust, honesty and dependability.  Your high emotional intelligence balances impulse control and assertiveness.  You blend style and class with minimal visible effort, while not trying to appear that way.  This is called sprezzatura.

Customers perceive you as both different and valuable.

Prior research reveals their needs for minimizing risk, avoiding aggravation, eliminating pain, obtaining pleasure, acquiring power or earning a profit.  You can weave this perspective into provocative questions that capture their attention.  Then you narrate a success story that resonates with their situation so that they can visualize the benefits. Being natural enables you to share insight about your products, your business and your industry and to easily address objections.

Invest in yourself and become the differentiator.  Give them a reason to want to interact with you.

After reading this blog post, do you agree that this is the profile that smart sales managers should be hiring?

“If a man is a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will say, Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."                                                                               Martin Luther King Jr.