INFOGRAPHIC: The Sales Conversation Divide
What is your big idea for growth? The Sales, Marketing, and Product leaders we engage are continuously going to market with ideas to gain market share and drive revenue to the next level. Your big idea could be the launch of a strategic new product, a transition to selling integrated solutions, a focus on penetrating your top 3 industry segments, or aligning the sales conversation with new branding.
Most of your big ideas probably include a heavy dose of marketing activity and demand creation campaigns. It’s one thing to have a big idea and marketing and campaigns behind it; it’s another thing to actually see the big idea turn into what salespeople are saying and showing everyday in sales conversations with prospects and customers. The essence of the divide is big ideas for growth on one side and what your sales people are saying on the other.
The real challenge is figuring out how to bridge the divide and motivate salespeople to deliver new messaging - increasing their confidence and ability to sell a new product or sell an integrated solution or engage at the c-level, which may be required for your sales or growth strategy. Seeing strategies and messaging be fully adopted by sales over time is a sales alignment issue on one hand; on the other hand you have a selling organization that likes the new big ideas but needs practical tools that are useful for everyday conversations. Information provided to sales cannot be high-level product information, descriptions of the big idea or direction for the business; it needs to include How-To content and tools that help salespeople learn faster and better today.
Organizations easily fall into the trap of not including Sales in the development or validation of new sales messaging or new tools, which results in salespeople creating their own content. There is a better way.
