Quick Tips

Even a brilliantly engineered product with a strong marketing plan won’t meet its revenue objectives unless your sales force truly understands how that product meets their customer’s needs better than the competition’s.  In a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, three experienced PSN Members Michael McGuire, VP Product Management of Management Science Associates; Wendy Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager for McKesson Automation; and Harry Ostaffe, Director of Marketing and Business Development for Powercast, discussed the tools they use to arm their sales force to sell their products.

• Curb your enthusiasm. Marketing needs to align its own expectations.  The sales tools they create are important, but they’re only a small part of what Sales does. What Sales really needs is to be able to tell good stories and present a good value proposition.  Marketing needs to help them in whatever ways it takes to make selling easier; the written tools are just backup.  But they put Sales in a better position to go in and confidently tell the story about that product and create that relationship.
• Collect stories.  Most sales people are storytellers.  If you can arm them with a good story, perhaps from another sales rep, or another customer, it can help.  Stories about the other times a customer asked for these features and none of them turned out to be very important can be particularly valuable.
• Understand the value of value propositions.  The more time you spend with Sales in the field, the more you appreciate how important differentiating product benefits and a good value proposition really are.  Ease of use, productivity, improved workflow, and efficiency are the some of the things most customers really care about.  But no matter how good your sales team is, if you don’t know your market and you’re not giving them something they can sell, they’re not going to succeed.
• Get real.  You can’t have an empty value proposition.  The product has to solve real problems and have real value.  Solve a problem that’s among the top three things the customer is going to address this year and differentiate it enough so that it can compete against whomever you’re competing against.
• Ask for customer help.  Identify customers who may be willing to work with you on quantifying your value proposition.  That can be difficult when you’ve just released a product, but Sales always asks for it because they know it helps them.
• Prepare product overviews. Write an overview for your product that tells Sales ‘here’s what you need to know’ and defines what the product is and is not.
• Chart the territory.  Map out everyone in the purchase decision: the user buyer, the economic buyer, and the other stakeholders.  Sometimes there’s a hierarchy.  Define how to handle each person’s objections and what’s in it for them.
• Make a plan.  Prior to making any sales call, have your sales people write a call plan.  It should identify who the players are going to be and what their potential objections are, so the sales person can walk into the meeting prepared to answer those objections.
• Map out each call.  For the very first sales call about a product, have Sales outline who you want them to talk to, what you want to tickle them with, what you want to tell them, and why they should want to see it.  The goal is to get to Meeting #2, which is a demo.  Then they write call plans for each meeting thereafter.
• Anticipate questions.  A call plan is like a punch-list, it’s very formalized: what’s the objective?  What’s the minimum action commitment?  What do they think the customer is going to ask?  Flesh out their questions and then write responses so the sales people aren’t going in blind.
• Call in.  Immediately after every sales call, have the sales person leave a voicemail message for a pre-defined distribution list telling who the customer is, who was at the meeting, any red flags, what their minimum action commitment was, and whether they succeeded or failed.
• Create cost-of-ownership tools.  One of the most useful sales tools involves some sort of financial analysis for ‘total cost of ownership.’  These analyses will rarely result in a sale all by themselves, but they help move customers toward you and to get them thinking in the direction you want.
• Build ROI tools.  Depending on the customer’s business, Return on Investment models can show payoffs in a number of different areas.  However, a lot of product marketing managers don’t put the time into creating those financial tools and quantifying value propositions, even though they can actually have a big effect on customers.
• Arm your champions.  Giving the customer facts and data is helpful because it gives your champion on the customer side the tools he or she needs to justify and sell the solution internally to whomever they need to convince.  Anything that will help your champion sell to their boss internally is ultimately going to help you.
• Consult for the customer.  A Benefit Realization Study can result from Sales performing a free customer consultation for the use of their coach at the customer’s site.  It involves a before-and-after model of implementation.  However, if the client sees data that doesn’t align with what they think is true, they’ll throw it out.  So either work with them to establish accurate numbers, or leave them blank and have formulas where they can plug their down numbers in.  They’ll also need to be able to change it because otherwise, they’ll think you’re trying to pull something on them or hide something.
  

Look for More Quick Tips in this Series

Part I: Enabling Sales to Succeed: Educating the Sales Force
Part II: Enabling Sales to Succeed: Supply Effective Sales Tools

Comments on this Quick Tips article can be submitted to editor@productstrategynetwork.com

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