MOST companies spend their marketing budgets generating awareness, but spend little time, and effort, equipping their sales force with the knowledge to sell. This despite the fact that in today’s competitive environment, selling is anything but easy.
This is why developing an effective sales guide is critical. A good sales guide educates the sales force to position and sell its offerings to the prospective customers. It also functions as a reference tool, organizing details for just-in-time access to help sales people take control of the sales process.
An effective sales guide also helps in building confidence in the product that the team is pushing, thus motivating the sales team. Sales people feel comfortable in presenting it to the customers and confronting the competition.
However, the truth is quite different. Companies publish ineffective sales guides that ultimately leads to revenue loss. Most of these sales follies can be avoided. Some of these problems, and ways of avoiding them. are listed below.
FAILING TO INVOLVE THE SALES FORCE: Many marketing departments develop sales guides with little or no input from their customers “sales force”. The result is a document that is disconnected from the real world challenges and only serves to widen the chasm between sales and marketing.
To develop effective sales guides and tools, the marketing department needs to understand how customers buy (i.e. how a sales takes place) and how sales people sell. Hence, talking to the internal customers before begining, and throughout the development process, will reap the benefits.
Locate a willing cross section of the sales force and pick their brains to learn what they consider most useful and the most frustrating. These frank conversations may yield insights that will surprise and help reshape the sales guide strategy, as well as take a huge step towards bridging the gap between sales and marketing.
PROVIDING INADEQUATE COMPETITIVE INFORMATION: Sales guides often paint a too-rosy view of the company’s competitive-position, or contain outdated competitive information. Look at it from the sales teams’ perspective — how would you like to go to war with inaccurate data, on your enemy’s strengths, weaknesses, and position relative to your own? Losing would be the only option available
So give the sales force what they need to win. One can do this by providing an unbiased summary of their competitors, how the company compares, and how it can win in tough competitive situations. Be honest about an offering’s weakness relative to the competition, and explain how to handle those vulnerabilities when talking to prospects.
Positioning the product against a competitor’s weakness is easy. It is the competitor’s strengths that pose a challenge.
FAILING TO MOTIVATE: Sales people feel tremendous pressure to produce. Their jobs are always on the line, so they naturally seek out the fastest, surest, route to achieving their quota.
However, the fastest route may be what is familiar. The existing product line, rather that what is new. The challenge is to motivate the sales force to sell their own offering.
An effective sales guide “sells”, sales people on the new offering by including the revenue potential of various kinds of deals (including a breakdown of solution components and percentages) and customer success stories that help build the offering’s credibility to the sales representative, as well as customers.
FAILING TO RESPECT THE SALES FORCE’S TIME: Sales people are constantly bombarded with information about products, changes, upgrades, special offers, etc. The last thing they need is a lengthy, disorganized document that fails to help them find important information when they need it.
So strive to develop a concise, easy to sue sales guide. Be choosy about information that is included. Organize content by thinking about the natural flow of questions a sales person would ask about a new offering.
Make it easy for sales people to quickly find what they need. Use charts and tables whenever possible to condense large amounts of information, and ensure that the sales guide is interesting to read.
USING GENERIC MARKETING MESSAGES: Generic massaging blurs the differences between the offerings and those of the competitors, resulting in a deep seated confusion that sales people may convey to the customers.
At the same time, generic messages cripple the sale force’s ability to position their offering for different industries and audiences.
Sales people need a concise product definition, a unique value proposition, and a succinct elevator pitch, developed with consensus from product management, sales, marketing, engineering, and communications.
CHOOSING THE WRONG WRITER: Sales people often complain that sales guides contain too little information to be useful, or too much technical detail to bother reading. Why do so many sales guides fall so short of the target?
The biases and background of the sales guide writers are usually the culprit. When written by the marketing staff, sales guides may shy away from technical detail. When written by technical staff, message information may be ignored. Neither group may understand the sales process. And, the specialized writing and organizational skills that sales guides require are not typically a job requirement for sales, marketing or technical personnel.
Good sales guide writers can translate technical information into simple, accessible prose, but they are familiar with the sales process and have a marketing bent. They are expert project managers capable of managing multiple drafts, hundreds of comments and countless details. They are skilled in quickly identifying the most important elements in massive amounts of information, and synthesizing them into tight clear writing.
If none of the employees have this combination of skills, the employer may wish to consider hiring an experienced sales guide developer.
