Take control of your sales cycle: Manage your information
February 16th, 2010 - Posted by Tim Freestone
Before the ubiquity of information, prospects were able to get rid of the sales team with the simple demand: “Get me something in writing.” The sales professional, meanwhile, would guard information carefully, letting it slip out incrementally throughout the sales cycle, rewarding the prospect for moving each step closer to a sale. With websites, blogs and message boards available for virtually every topic imaginable, this doesn’t work any more. Most information is already out there.
Rather than give up and assume that the prospect has access to everything, however, there is still room for the controlled release of value-added information; it just has to be managed differently.
Don’t withhold information. That will lead a prospect to look elsewhere, and possibly end up in the arms of a competitor. Point your prospect to your blog, website, case studies and other information pieces — after all, this is why you’ve invested in them. But, make sure your sales professionals are equipped with additional insights — tailored to the prospect — that can be unveiled at each step in the sales cycle. This is where your marketing analytics become incredibly important.
A white paper cannot address a specific prospect’s specific pain points. That’s the domain of the sales force.
This fact is made even more important by the greatest weakness in self-service content: motivation. Your prospects can access almost anything they think they need … but are they looking for the right information? If they are motivated exclusively by a particular pain point, for example, but haven’t linked it to a broader, possibly systemic, problem in the IT environment, they may be using your information to choose the wrong answers.
Is that what you want? For a prospect to associate you with information they don’t need … even if this is something they brought on themselves?
The sales team should engage a prospect early to help him understand the real problems to be solved. When the prospect has a full appreciation for the action that needs to be taken, there’s greater value in the information provided. This is what the prospect associates your company with — greater, more accurate insights and solutions that track to the results the prospect really wants.
Of course, this comes down to something sales professionals — and buyers of all types — have always valued: the human touch.
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