Quick Tips - August 8, 2007

How can you equip your sales force with the information, documents and persuasive tools they need to be productive in the field? Two experts – 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 and telecommunication products.

In a recent Product Strategy Network podcast, the two men shared their insights into arming, educating, and keeping your sales force in synch with your Marketing organization.

Discourage the modification of Marketing presentations, selectively.

No one can stop Sales from adapting presentations to specific customer sales opportunities; everyone has a laptop and can easily customize PowerPoint presentations the way they want to. In fact, some marketing materials are designed with the expectation that they would actually be customized in the field. But you can use PDF documents for items that should not be changed – especially case studies; PDF makes documents more difficult to change. Focus instead on finding users of outdated presentations to make sure your sales people are using current material.

Manage the update of sales materials.

Use your company’s intranet site to post sales materials. You can organize it by product collateral, by solution guides, by case studies, or by some other criterion. Make it the default location for your sales team to gather information. As you update the material, post it on the intranet and remove the old content. But there’s a caveat: once that content resides on a laptop, it’s very difficult to police which version is being used. If you have an internal newsletter and update your collateral material or have new information to share, announce it in that newsletter.

Keep it succinct.

People have short attention spans. Try to follow the Ten-Slide Rule: If you can’t get your point across and material across with ten slides in 15-20 minutes, people will start to lose concentration. Keep everything as short and succinct as possible. Don’t duplicate the same material in different pieces of collateral. Make each one meaningful so that your sales people will actually read and study the documents you create.

Manage the use of tools in your toolbox.

When you work on RFI or RFP responses or prepare for customer presentations, have your corporate Marketing and Product people use the same materials created for Sales. That will reinforce the need for Sales to use them in their own presentations to customers. When questions come in from the field, point your sales people to the existing tools. That way, they can do their homework before falling back on corporate office resources. Marketing has the opportunity to take a broader view than individual sales people do. As a result, it’s in Sales’ self-interest to use those materials because they don’t have time to go out and research it themselves.

Engage Sales leaders.

Tighten the coupling between Sales, Marketing, and Product Management. You already rely on Sales for a lot of information. So collaborate with Sales leadership on initial content creation as well as in reviews before publishing any documents. Start with a datasheet-oriented competitive view; put the speeds and feeds and technical specifications that your company is supporting versus what you believe the competitors support; that’s the baseline for competitive intelligence. Then build on that by using analyst reports and customer feedback from the sales teams, and try packaging it into a competitor-by-competitor summary that allows you to build a response kit against major competitors. That way, you’ll know what their key selling points tend to be when they talk to customers, as well as key points you can make to counter the position of those competitors.  

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

Part II: "Building the Sales Force Toolkit"

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