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Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.

Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by IT buyers is that they can sum up a situation quickly and have the strength of reason and experience behind them. This can impede further inquiry and discussion … and result in an ineffective implementation and unhappy client. So, the sales professional needs to begin the process of engaging the IT buyer early, in order to help him move past any preconceived notions that could make a project unsuccessful.

Your prospects will be most interested in answers to the questions they have — even if there are greater issues underlying them. Use their immediate concerns as a starting point, and then guide the dialogue in a manner that gives you a platform for addressing any related or underlying concerns.

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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.

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