Ask, don’t tell.  Customer credibility is built by asking probing questions and listening carefully to the answers, not by boasting about yourself, your product, or your company.

Screen the prospect.  The earliest tactical support a sales force needs from its marketing department is in crafting questions that can help the sales rep determine whether the prospect actually has one of the problems that the seller is good at solving. 

Create micro-scripts.  Develop an elevator pitch, success stories, and follow-up, solution-oriented mini-scripts which your sales reps can use to elicit and then answer the customer response: ‘tell me more.’

Pose diagnostic questions.  Instead of bending the prospect’s ear about the virtues of your product and company, ask them intelligent diagnostic questions about their work flow, constraints, and alternatives. 

Dialogues, not monologues.  Position your sales calls as conversations, not presentations.  Focus on identifying and solving the customer’s problems, not on boasting about your own particular product.

Build visualization scenarios.  Create predictable, targeted, use-oriented questions and scenarios that your sales rep can use during an initial sales call; it helps the prospect to visualize using the product to satisfy an authentic need:  i.e. ‘would it help you to track the volume of copier use by different staff departments?’  Create similar visualization scenarios for each key product feature.   

Anticipate conversations.  Determine what predictable conversations your salespeople would need to have with specific key players on the customer side in order to sell, fund, and implement your offerings.  Then develop questions and scripts your salespeople can use in conducting those conversations.

Talk with the chiefs.  Particularly when selling expensive, enterprise-wide products, Marketing should create custom-tailored prompts that the sales rep can use to advance discussions with each C-level executive of the client company.

Defer discussing price.  Delay specific discussion of your specific product until the customer can visualize its use.  That’s because as soon as you introduce a discussion of your product, the issue of price will come up, and unless the value of that product’s use is already established, the price will almost certainly seem too high.

Coordinate collateral.  Have Marketing re-engineer your sales collateral based on a predictable flow of sales conversations that move from diagnostic questions to usage scenarios rather than on one-sided product presentations.

Leap the chasm.  The chasm for a new product – the often deadly time interval between early adapters’ embrace of a product and the mainstream market’s acceptance of it – is typically 9 to 18 months.  However, if you work on creating targeted messages and probing conversations directed toward the mainstream market right from the outset, you may be able to avoid that chasm altogether.