Enabling an Insight Sales Approach at Concur

Expense management service provider, Concur Technologies, was looking for a way to translate insight selling into real sales-ready tools for their sales reps. DSG joined the mix to help unite the high-level strategy with the actual words used in daily sales conversation. 

“I think the keys to our success were having marketing and sales be equal stakeholders in the finished product, beginning the engagement and partnership with that idea that we were equal partners in the engagement, and having the buy-in from the very beginning. So, it wasn’t conceived as a sales initiative or a marketing initiative. It was conceived, from the get-go, as a joint initiative,” said Thomas Marks, Sr. Director, SMB Product Marketing, NA at Concur Technologies. 

Below are additional tips from Thomas Marks, outlining the steps his marketing team took to understand sales needs: 

• Ride-alongs with the sales team, where marketing joins a sales call as an observant party 

• Call observations so that marketing can understand the types of questions sales is being asked and the difficulties they face in the process. This tunes marketing in to sales’ needs, so they have the ability to shape the overall message, based on the challenges the field faces every day 

• Practice groups that enable marketing to foster collaboration between field-marketing, client marketing, and channel marketing.  

• Series of meetings designed strictly around collaboration and brainstorming, so that marketing feels connected to sales, like one big team that’s responsible for the entire life cycle of a prospect—from curiosity all the way through to becoming a customer—and making sure the customer experience is the best it can be. 

To read more about how DSG worked with Concur to successfully align sales and marketing, download:

The Sales Messaging Divide eBook