As the economy speeds up, more products are entering the market. For business, this means more competition and growth challenges. In order for businesses to differentiate themselves and beat out the competition, they need to evolve their sales approach. No longer can sales afford to keep doing things their own way, selling the same solutions the way they always have. At the same time, marketing can’t keep churning out the same feature-oriented material that is no longer useful to sales. Sales and marketing need to be in lockstep with one another.
Thanks to marketing automation, social media, and information-packed websites, customers can educate themselves on practically anything these days. Seeing that they have access to limitless information on the Web, businesses need to evolve their sales approach to provide customers with more than what they can get online. Customers need insights…breakthroughs that they cannot get by simply doing a quick Google search.
Sales interactions and presentations need to be focused around growing a customer’s business or achieving strategic objectives—not just product features and functions. Once a customer’s pain is uncovered, sales must address how specific products solve the pain right then and there. On the spot. Not in a post-meeting email or follow-up meeting.
Throughout the buying journey, customer’s expect to learn something new at each point in the process because their problems evolve quickly and opportunities move fast. (It also doesn’t help that they are inundated with calls, emails and visits from potential competitors selling similar solutions.)
Evolving your sales approach means empowering your sales force. It doesn’t mean housing more content in a sales portal (that nobody uses) or checking the mobile box and building a one-off app that lacks an intuitive interface and is unable to evolve as your sales force evolves. Using antiquated ways to sell means that each interaction is a wasted opportunity to educate and inspire a customer to think differently about their problems or objectives and position your solution as the key.
It’s time to think of every meeting with a customer like a precious drop of gold. It’s only going to get more scarce. Tomorrow, these drops of gold will be like little diamonds. The currency to buy more is insight and education. Leveraging the right tools makes this happen, and the result is a marketplace filled with opportunity. But first, marketing and sales need to work together to capitalize on this opportunity. Using a mobile sales enablement tool like Mediafly’s SalesKit pushes targeted content to the entire field of sales reps. More importantly, you can leverage better-than-custom tools to expose new insights that educate potential customers, taking your sales dialog to an entirely new level. A much more lucrative level. Not just for you but for your customer as well.
Carson Conant is the CEO and Founder of Mediafly, Inc. Inspired by the efficiencies created by leading Software as a Services companies, Carson led Mediafly to pioneer the mobile generation’s version of SaaS solutions: Mobile Apps as a Service (MAaaS), which is now embraced by some of the world’s most respected companies. When Carson is not traveling to be with customers, prospects, sales teams, and shareholders, he lives in Chicago with his beautiful wife and two rambunctious children.
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