Managing Customer Messages

It may come as a surprise, but the biggest source of conflict between sales and marketing may not be a perceived lack of qualified leads. Rather, Tim Riestererer and Diane Emo, principals with the CMM Group,  found in a recent survey of sales people that their biggest concern is linked to “the usefulness of marketing messages, training and tools.”

Too often, the content, materials and collateral that marketing is creating is getting pitched in the trash. And sales is spending much too much time trying to create its own sales content and tools. Leads, meantime, often appear too late -- when prospects already are in a decision cycle.

Sales people need to be speaking with prospects and customers well before that decision is made. In fact, they need to be equipped to be a part of the up-front strategic decision-making dialogue where opportunities are created based on business needs. This dialogue is going on at every one of our potential prospects, the question is: Are your sales people part of these conversations or are they waiting for leads? When marketing and sales are getting the message creation and delivery piece right, they are in a position to lead sales cycles versus wait for so-called sales leads.

In their recent book Customer Message Management, Riestererer and Emo make the case for strong  sales messaging and sales  tools. They consider sales support a strategic issue. "We spend lots of money on creating tools, but we don’t spend the time necessary to see if they are right … and whether they really work," they contend.

Marketers, they note, treat sales support as a "hit or miss" activity -- a mere "tactical" part of their jobs. "Yet, no matter how you look at it customers – especially B2B companies – rely on sales people to help them sift through all of the hype, claims and indistinguishable marketing driven branding and value propositions," they add. "Sales people, and what comes out of their mouths, need to be viewed as the most strategic asset marketers have at their disposal when it comes to building a brand and selling more product or services."

Provisioning sales for challenges in the B2B environment means giving them the messaging, tools and training to engage in compelling and consultative conversations, state Riestererer and Emo. "We expect them to conduct customer-centric discovery sessions to discover what the customer wants to accomplish, but we train them on everything they need to know about our product and what it does. Now, that’s a disconnect. Companies looking for a competitive advantage and a differentiated market presence need to re-orient their product messaging and align it with the consultative sales training approach – which starts with the customer and their business needs, not your product and its features."