Quick Tips - July 25, 2007

How can you equip your sales force with the information, documents and persuasive tools they need to be productive in the field? Two practitioners – Harry Ostaffe, Product Marketing Director, and Ed Korona, Director of Product Management, both with the Ericsson Corporation – have a combined total of nearly 40 years experience in the development, marketing and sales of technology products. In a recent Product Strategy Network talkcast, the two men shared their insights into arming, educating, and equipping your sales force with the tools they need for maximum results.

Build a competitive spreadsheet.

When responding to a competitor’s products, start with a datasheet that includes your own performance and technical specifications and those of the competition. Use that as a baseline for gathering competitive intelligence from analyst reports and sales team feedback from customers. Package it into a competitor-by-competitor summary. Identify points you can make to counter the position of each competitor. Use the spreadsheet to demonstrate the economic benefit of using your product versus either the current way that the customer does business or by using a competing product. Paying a third-party analyst to create one for you gives it some credibility, but it can be expensive: $10-30k.

Model the Cost of Ownership.

Develop detailed knowledge of how the customer uses the product and what that customer’s expenses are. Then develop a simplified Cost-of-Ownership model. You can modify your spreadsheet on the fly as you get feedback from the customer on what their specific costs and issues actually are. Make sure you’re able to articulate the assumptions behind the math in the spreadsheet. Build variables into your model that the customer can readily change to match their true costs.

Get inside help.

Work with your product champion on the customer side to help identify the variables they tend to struggle with. Be sure to allow enough time. Simple one-page spreadsheets can be built in a couple of hours; others can take several weeks, and it can often take more than a month to gather all the input you’ll need to include.

Prioritize sales tool requests.

When your sales force ask you for new tools, give priority to the ones which are likely to be used by multiple sales people. Case studies often provide the most help to sales teams. Product overview presentations also do well, as do higher level competitive reviews. Avoid in-depth competitive analyses, however, because they tend to lead you down a much more technical path. Although that will ultimately occur at some point in the sales process, keep the customer’s understanding at a higher level at the outset.

Help Sales qualify leads.

When it comes to lead generation and qualifying opportunities, be as specific as possible with your sales people. If you have a new product or a new application coming out, tell them how it’s going to be used, whether it’s meant to replace existing competitors’ equipment, if it’s for a new application, or if it’s being driven by a government initiative. Give them specific questions they can ask their customers to help them qualify the lead better. Provide them with information such as the estimated deal size, the likely timeline for the sales process, and any news articles or market reports that could help.

Stay in touch.

Open and continuous communication with Sales is a key activity for companies of any size. It helps the sales team feel comfortable in contacting Marketing and Product Management for support with the product, with the solution, and with helping create value propositions for the customer. A lot of real value can grow from starting with a little bit of data and then brainstorming on how best to package it for each specific customer.

Keep your sales team up to date. Make sure to push articles, analyst reports, industry newsletters and other useful information out to your sales people daily. Keep the material organized on your company’s intranet site so that your sales teams, wherever they are, can readily gain access to it. Doing so also helps make sure the material they’re using is up to date.

Fast lane/Slow lane.

Recognize that a company’s Sales function is almost always out of phase with its Development function. When development of any sort is involved, the life cycle that needs to be followed can never be fast enough for the sales teams. The danger is that when you try to build the business case and business plan and then opt not to pursue a certain initiative, your sales organization can get ahead of product management and start working with the customers on an abandoned product idea.  

This is part two in a three part series focusing on Enabling Sales.  (Click here to review part 1 featuring "Case Studies to Empower Your Sales Force").  

Part 3: Keeping Sales on the same page as Marketing

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