But Marketing has to scramble to remain relevant

Insightful diagnostic questions and structured, early-stage conversations that can help senior-level prospects visualize how your offering relates to their goals, are at the heart of a sales template devised by Mike Bosworth, a popular author/sales trainer and one-time superstar salesman for Xerox Computer Services. But most Marketing departments are focused on the wrong audiences and at the wrong stages of the sales cycle, he says.

Michael Bosworth is a guru of B2B sales. Sales is his life. Whenever he's not preparing for one of his many industry speaking engagements, he is hard at work on his hobby – sitting in his office overlooking the Pacific and thinking up new ways to improve the selling process.

People from all sorts of businesses – particularly advanced technology ones – pay top dollar for the privilege of sitting at his feet to gain insight into how a successful sales process really works – and how it can go awry. Yet marketing departments, at least in Bosworth's eyes, often end up playing a much smaller role in consummating sales than they should. And in many cases, those shortcomings reasons relate to the challenges that stem from the non-traditional approach to selling that's at the heart of Bosworth's teachings – an approach which now enjoys a growing mainstream following.

Since 1983, through countless workshops, lectures and private consultations, as well as a couple of best-selling books, Bosworth has espoused his unconventional approach to sales and equipped his listeners with a correspondingly novel kit of selling tools. That was the year he left Xerox Computer Services – where he had risen to become the company's top new business salesperson during the previous eight years – and formed his own consulting partnership, Solution Selling. He co-founded CustomerCentric Systems, LLC in 2001.

Sales stinks

His career transition is not that unusual. But what is surprising about Bosworth's emergence as an oracle of sales is that throughout his childhood and early years of his career, he despised sales, salesmen, and everything they stood for. Part of it was professional: as an application support technician for Xerox – his first job with the company – he was constantly on the phone hearing from users about the details of their experience with the product, helping them solve real problems, and trying to reset the expectations of customers who had been deliberately misled by the people who sold it to them in the first place.

The other part was personal: as a boy, Bosworth's father – a salesman who seemed unable to hold down a job for more than three months at a time – had become violent and abusive. It was a pattern of behavior the young boy came to associate with the cynical, deceitful, and manipulative qualities that many people associate with traditional selling.

Even today, early on in his workshop, he asks his audience: “How many of you had a mother that had a vision for you, her child, that you would have a career as a salesperson?” No hands ever go up. Why? Because, he tells them, in every mother's experience, sales people have been aggressive, insincere, pushy, obnoxious, overly familiar, prone to exaggerate, and untrustworthy, among their other unpleasant qualities. They are also poor listeners.

So at age 27, when Xerox approached him about going into sales after three years in customer support, he turned them down. “I'm not that kind of person,” he told them. “I can't go into sales.” However in time, and following repeated assurances, Bosworth ultimately relented. Yet his lack of sales training, which others might have considered a major handicap, eventually became one of his strongest assets. Why? Because it forced him to draw on his experience helping customers solve problems as a help desk technician, not as a glad-handing, know-it-all salesman.

Asking and listening

What evolved from that perspective was a very different approach to customers as well as a new set of requirements for the marketing people whose job is to support the sales team. It results from his observation that the best sales calls are conversations, not presentations – listening, not speaking. “If you go to a doctor you've never met before, how does that doctor establish credibility with you? Does he take you over to his Glory Wall and show you his degree from Columbia Medical School? Or does he start asking you intelligent diagnostic questions you're capable of answering? We want sales people to do the exact same thing,” Bosworth noted. “We want sales people to build their credibility by asking diagnostic questions about how the customer operates without their product before they attempt to create visions of its use. In order for a sales person to have a conversation with a buyer, they must be able to ask intelligent questions the customer is capable of answering.

“We have a formula for creating questions that sales people can ask buyers that will help those buyers visualize how they will use the product,” he said. Step One in that process is what Bosworth calls ‘conversational messaging' – a series of structured dialogues intended, at different stages of the sales process, to introduce the seller company's mission, elicit the customer's work-related concerns, determine functional roles as well as formal titles at the prospect's company, establish the seller's bona fides, and more.

“What predictable conversations will your front-line sales people need to have in order to get your product sold, funded and implemented?” he asks. The answers vary from company to company and from one industry to the next. So a series of questioning templates that combine to provide a sort of discussion roadmap for the salesperson must be developed – one which will lead each key player on the customer's side to visualize using the product or service to achieve a specific goal. It is a task to which Marketing can now make a major contribution.

Marketing's modest contribution

But in most companies today, Marketing's contribution to the early-stage sales process is a minor one, although the reasons for that are not entirely its own fault. “How much does your Marketing department help that 28-year old sales person have an intelligent conversation with a C-level buyer?” Bosworth asks. “The vast majority of vice presidents of Sales will say that in that situation, Marketing is irrelevant; they're not helping at all. And the reason they're not helping is that the sales person has been given a bunch of product training but hasn't really been given a repeatable solution dialogue model that he or she can execute. However until Sales agrees to do something more than once in a row the same way, it's going to be hard for Marketing to line up and support them.”

Bosworth draws a key distinction between marketing communications that talk about a company's products as nouns – ‘ it will do this and that' – instead of talking about them as verbs – integral aspects of whatever a user does to solve a problem. Too much sales training is noun-oriented, he notes, and so is too much Marketing collateral. “That disables the buying and the selling process because deep down inside the buyer knows the product isn't going to do anything by itself,” he said. “So when sales people are talking about the product like an ‘it' they lose personal credibility and they're not empowering the buyer.”

Misplaced marketing resources

Many marketing departments focus too much effort on the later phases of the sales process and not enough on the sales person's need for productive upfront conversational messages with the client, Bosworth claims. In addition to forcing sales people to improvise their way toward the later phases of the process where the company's marketing collateral starts becoming relevant, Marketing's input places too much emphasis on the ultimate user of the product – someone who may be impressed with its features, but not the person authorized to decide whether to buy it or how to pay for it – the person who needs to understand the business case for the purchase.

That creates problems with the leads Marketing generates for Sales. “In most companies, the Sales department will tell you that the leads they get from Marketing are worthless. And the reason is that Marketing doesn't understand how products will be used to save money and make money,” he said. “They pump out a lot of collateral. But their product collateral is only getting low-level product users interested, which means the leads are lousy.”

Getting it together

“If Sales and Marketing both agree who belongs on a targeted conversation list, Marketing can start creating campaigns that interest the people on that list rather than simply getting product users interested – making the business case instead of just the product usage case,” he said. “To do that, we need three groups in the room: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support – because Customer Support people typically know the most about how customers actually use the product – knowledge that doesn't reside in most Marketing departments. Sales will have the business case knowledge. But when that happens, Marketing can become the owner of this messaging: Marketing keeps it up to date, Marketing tracks the usage, Marketing puts it out on the portal and makes it available to everybody. And anytime there's a new product release, Marketing is responsible for putting out these things with the new product. So now Marketing is integrated with a Sales process that the sales people are actually using.”

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