A message to sales management - if you do not believe then neither will your team

Last week I explained how important I believe it is for the messages to the market to be appropriate; the next step is to ensure the sales team understand them and can deliver them to their clients.

Don't just rely on training
The standard response to "how do I ensure my sales team will deliver the message?" is for marketing to arrange a training programme and then send everyone to it.

Let me clarify what I mean, I am not saying you shouldn't be training your sales team on your products and propositions - of course you should and we will look at how to maximise the effectiveness of this training next week. However, there is a fundamental issue to address before you start sending people on a training course; what "behaviours" are you expecting from the sales people and how will you ensure that they will regularly and habitually exhibit those behaviours?

How do you want the sales people to engage with the client?
One of the major issues we come across is that nobody has really thought through the client engagement strategy associated with the campaign. Let me illustrate what I mean with some examples:

• Expecting the sales teams to follow up a generic "brochure" in the last month of the year - to marketing's surprise sales would rather focus on closing deals.
• A campaign that uses an incentive to customers to turn up to a meeting, but does not tell sales what the outcome of the meeting should be - Sales give the incentive away to meet with their favourite customers, "think of it as a reward for your great business"
• A comprehensive campaign to promote key messages to "C-level" contacts - to everyone's surprise few meetings are arranged to deliver the message, instead everything remains business as usual

In all these cases there are two main issues:

1. There is no clarity as to the sales objective of the campaign and by extension no definition of the activities required from the sales teams
2. Sales management has not bought into the campaign, so they have not taken ownership of the effective execution of the sales part of the campaign

How do we define the activities sales should complete in support of the campaign?

The start point is a very simple one, stop thinking about a marketing campaign and start thinking about the desired outcomes of the campaign (why are we doing it?) and work backwards.

Let me give you an example of one we are currently working on.

Campaign objective: To acquire new corporate accounts.

Campaign approach: To promote a new product (which is unique in the market) to act as a door opener

Marketing deliverable: An expensive Direct Mail piece, supported by an incentive to get the customer to have a meeting.

So we worked backwards from the objective.

1. What outcome do we want from the meeting? To understand what the "prospect" sees as their issues, confirm we can address them and identify an opportunity to prove ourselves.
2. How do we know we have achieved this? Ensure you have a simple data capture document that enables the sales rep to capture all of the appropriate information
3. How will we help the sales rep capture the information? Provide them with a proposed structure and agenda for the meeting
4. How will we ensure the "prospect" gives us the information? Tell them the objective of the meeting and ensure they are happy with it
5. How will we ensure the "prospect" knows about the objective of the meeting? Provide a structure for the telephone conversation selling the meeting.
6. How will we ensure that calls are made? Create full visibility of who the Direct Mailer was sent to, and when they were called
7. How will we ensure the right people are invited? Manage the data that is used to build the mailing list.

So all you have to do is support sales through every step and the campaign will work

Unfortunately it is not that straightforward. Not only must you have a good plan you must be able to execute it. Key to execution is sales management, if they do not drive execution it will never happen.

There is an old adage "a fish rots from the head" and it is very true about sales. If management does not believe in something, not only will they not drive it, but they will undermine it. We have all experienced a sales manager, or sales director, who has made a virtue of knowing better than anyone else. Do you recognise these examples?

"Ignore them, we will do it my way", or "What do marketing know, selling is a numbers game, the more calls, the more meetings, the more sales"

How do we get sales management on-side?

There are two steps (and they are both about selling!)

1. Involve them from the outset, they have to own the campaign alongside marketing
2. Make the campaign measurable and make sales management own the metrics.
1. Measure the number of meetings
2. The outcomes of the meetings (opportunity pipeline)
3. Ensure the client landscaping data is accurate and up to date and helps sales qualify opportunities - do we know enough about the key potential prospects in the target market?

Our experience is that it is only when you tie marketing and sales management to a common goal that you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

Keep following this blog, it will help you

It is our aim to continue to provide pragmatic and practical advice and solutions to the issues facing sales teams. We will always ensure that whatever we say you can use with your teams confident in the knowledge that we have already used the solutions in real life. We will continue to provide free tools and if you want access to more tools then you can always visit our website www.sales-accredit.com.

We need your input

We base all of our examples on the issues we are identifying in our clients, but we would like you to help us. Send us the issues you are facing and we will endeavour to address them in our future blogs.

And Finally

In the last blog of 2009 we discussed the personal business plan. We now have a worked examples, so if anyone would like a copy please drop me a line mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

The next blog will look at how we design the sales engagement process.