I know you want to engage at CxO level, but who do you really engage with?

We regularly hear Sales and Marketing Directors proudly telling us that their sales strategy is "to engage at CxO level with business led messages". However, the reality rarely matches the strategy.

How can you spot who sales actually engage with?
It's very simple, ask the sales people who they met with in the last month. Look at the account plan and see who their contacts are. Review what is being sold in terms of value add beyond the standard product.

In an ideal world you should be able to ask sales managers for the contact strategy for their team's key accounts. It would be nice to know who are their sponsors, supporters, enemies, stoppers. It would be even more useful to see how senior the sponsors and supporters are - how close they are to the decision makers and decision making process.

What drives the engagement level?
The engagement level, and by extension the "comfort zone" of the sales team is driven by a number of external factors.

• Commission structure - Can a sales person achieve target by selling "product" and therefore not engaging at a business level?
• The offer - Is it applicable for a C-level engagement? There are many very successful companies who quite happily sell product that meets a specific "technical" need that is bought by people solely interested in the "technical" need
• The message - Is marketing producing a meesage that resonates at a technical level or the business level?
• Sales Management - do sales managers believe they are selling a commodity, a technical solution or a business solution?

To be successful a good campaign needs to be aligned to the real behaviours of the sales teams

A successful sales engagement campaign in support of a marketing campaign, requires pragmatism from both. A marketing campaign alone will not alter sales behaviours, no matter how appealing the offer to the client. It's aim is to entice customers to buy - to enable sales to sell more you have to do something else. You need to ensure that your sales engagement strategy is achievable by:

1. Understanding your contact database - ensure that the people you are targeting are aligned to your existing contact levels
2. Align your message to the targets - to be clear if your sales team are currently operating at a "technical level" give them technical messages
3. If you want a multi-level contact strategy tell sales exactly how to approach it - sales people always take the path of least resistance, you need to tell them exactly what you want to them to do and measure against it
4. Make it easy - provide sales with the messages, processes and target objectives for them to use and deliver against.

Are you telling me campaigns cannot be used to change the contact strategy of sales teams?

Based on our experience, this is the case. A marketing led campaign to drive the contact base into C-level individuals looks good on paper, but rarely works. Sales have to change their behaviours first.

We have successfully moved a sales team up towards C-level engagement, but it takes time and has to be achieved by getting the sales team to want to engage at that level and then habitually engage at that level.

Marketing campaigns follow the contact strategy of sales teams; they very rarely lead.

Don't despair though because you can achieve your desired C-level contact strategy.

Your campaign engagement process can provide the background to engaging at C-level, but it needs to be a step-by-step process, and used as part of a behavioural change programme for sales.

You told me you would provide a sales engagement process?

The sales engagement process we use does not change by contact level, it is a very straightforward approach. Here is a standard approach we use to help organisations acquire new customers:

1. Create a message that contains a trigger that will cause the recipient to have the emotional response of "ah, so there is a potential alternative to my existing supplier"
2. Follow up that message with a call to encourage the contact to have a meeting. The objective of the meeting is to "understand your challenges, priorities and focus, and see whether we can provide you a better solution than your current supplier"
3. Have a face-to-face meeting that is 80% prospect speaking and 20% sales rep speaking. The prospect will provide you with all the triggers you need if you ask the right questions. The outcome of the meeting is typically to identify 2 focus areas and come back with a potential solution
4. Measure and track all activity, plus capture the information gathered in the face-to-face meeting as this becomes your landscaping information for future campaigns.

Were you expecting something more complicated?

Remember our philosophy of selling being a simple process only made complicated by people who want to appear experts.

We have helped many organisation create targeted campaigns that sales can deliver against, and we have seen results, ask us and we can give you references. They have been used for both operational level engagement as well as C-level engagement. The process does not change; just the message and, of course, the ability and approach of the sales-person running the meeting.

C-level contacts are no different to any other level contacts. They want their problems solved, they want potential suppliers' sales people to listen to them and to provide potential solutions to their emotional and business needs.

Do you want to know more?

Either read our "Helping business drive sales" document or contact mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com and mark can take you through more detail.