Accelerating Sales by Making Buying Easier
by Ron Snyder, Kathy Gogan and David Steinore
Does this sound familiar? Sales says “Marketing doesn’t understand my customer and they don’t create sales tools I need to close deals.” Marketing says “Sales people don’t follow up on the leads we give them and they don’t go after the target market.” Meanwhile, prospects are wondering “why is this company calling me when I don’t need what they are selling?” And management is asking “why isn’t our new product selling faster and why are our selling costs so high?”
All companies experience this situation at some time. Most address this by, first, changing personnel – often the VP of Sales or Marketing is first to be replaced. Next, the company may try revising their sales and marketing processes. Third, product development priorities and processes are changed.
While these changes may offer some relief, the problem usually does not reside in a single functional area. More likely, marketing, sales, and product development are disconnected. Even worse, they may be disconnected from the marketplace. Functional objectives are not in complete alignment with each other and it manifests itself as problems in the sales cycle. As a result of this disconnect, the products do not best address buyer needs and the sales and buying processes are inefficient for both prospects and the company.
In a typical product life cycle, the product is first designed by development, then marketing creates the messaging, and finally sales sells it. Somewhere along the way, however, what and how the customer wants to buy can get lost, making it much harder to motivate a customer to say “yes” to a purchase.
The Three P’s
To have a successfully selling product, it is no longer necessary to go through IT. In many product areas, especially software, users have become the buyers and are taking a more active role in the selection of solutions that address their corporate needs. Thus the solution provider must have a greater understanding of the user’s environment and intended business outcomes.
Product
People Process
So what can you do? Start by analyzing the Three P’s in your organization -- Product, Process, and People-- to validate your current buyer requirements, identify critical gaps in strategy and/or execution, and create a plan to address those gaps
Consider the questions below to see how well your organization is responding to the challenge:
Product
- When was the last time that you verified your buyer’s requirements? With the explosion of Internet-based solutions, traditional technology adoption barriers no longer exist. The first step to accelerating sales by making your product easier to buy is to make sure you have a good handle on your buyer requirements – not just on product features but the overall product experience.
- One of the best ways to achieve this is to have an independent third party survey your buyers. It is human nature for buyers to be more open with an independent interviewer rather with a company employee – especially about areas where they would like changes. Some of the questions to explore include:
- How well do your features meet the needs of the user?
- How easy the product is to use?
- How fast is the learning curve?
- How effective is the available Help/ Support?
- What are the infrastructure requirements?
Process
In addition to having the right products, you need to have the processes in place that enable the best customer experience. This includes reviewing the ways your company gathers user requirements, how your company incorporates these requirements into your development process and delivering the appropriate level of customer service after the sale. Audit your internal and external processes in light of the total customer experience. Ask:
- How effective is your process to gather user requirements?
- How do you ensure you develop the right features?
- How innovative is your development process?
- How well do you support the prospect through the buying cycle?
- What level of self-service is appropriate for your product and target market?
- How well do you deliver the level of customer service required?
People
Your employees are the linchpins to successfully meeting your customer relationship and business goals. You will want to consider:
- How well are goals and roles aligned across the organization?
- Do you have clear rules of engagement and decision making to provide efficient decisions that are well supported?
- Is your planning well integrated across key functions?
- How well do you develop the skills needed to stay on top?
The more you communicate and coordinate across functions, as well as continually developing employee capabilities, the higher your probability of success.
Conclusion
Using the above approach, you can quickly identify what changes are needed to make each step of the buying process easier and more compelling – from the buyer’s point of view. This can include:
- Understanding exactly what buyers want do at each step of the buying process
- Aligning each step of the sales process with the buying process
- Providing marketing deliverables that support either the buyer directly or the sales effort
- Ensure there is a process that brings the voice of the marketplace into the product spec
- Identify what product or service modifications are required to support the buying and sales processes.
Taking these steps will accelerate your sales and marketing results.
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For the past 16 years, Ron Synder has consulted with technology-based companies to accelerate business results by improving sales & marketing effectiveness and other cross-functional productivity. Companies he has worked with include large, established companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Agilent Technologies, Synopsys, Siemens, and Philips, and rapidly-growing companies including NetSuite, Exodus Communications, Adobe and others.
Kathy Gogan and David Steinore are partners of Snyder's at Breakthrough, Inc.
To find out more about Marketing Operations Partners' sales process acceleration services , please call 408-243-7881 or e-mail sales@mopartners.com.
