One of the top three pressures on sales organizations, according to a new Aberdeen “Sales 2.0″ study: “the need to compete with increasing customer and prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators.” Well, duh, of course. Prospects can do their homework very well today online.
What this means is that companies need to rethink the typical sales presentation and sales training. You can’t walk in and explain who you are, your clients, your product line and your competitors. I sat next to a marketing exec of a big high tech company on a cross-country flight recently and watched him, for six hours, tweak a sales presentation that did exactly this — presenting the basics, most of which prospects could find on their own, in 85 slides. Later in the flight I struck up a casual conversation and he explained that he was going to California to train the sales force on a new sales strategy. Oh woe that that deck was it.
Sales presentaitons today have to provide VALUE to the prospect. Tell me something helpful that I don’t know. What trends do you see? What assumptions are misleading? What’s likely to change in 18 months, but stay the same for the next 24? What’s slightly different about my industry than others?
Almost all products today are viewed as commodities. People buy based on relationships and trust. To earn that trust, provide more valuable insights from the get-go. All those other facts, case studies, awards — put them on your web site and make it easy for prospects to find them.
According to the 210 companies surveyed by Aberdeen in Sept., the top pressures are:
- 63%: increase top line revenue growth
- 60%: improve sales productivity
- 32%: compete with increasing customer/prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators
- 24%: reduce sales cycles
- 13%: connect a disperse and/or global sales force
Good points, Lois. The very thought of an 85-slide ppt makes me cringe. Two additional thoughts:
First, as I’m sure you’d agree, we should be thinking more about conversations than presentations anyway. So training and support for sales needs to shift much more toward conversational (and listening) skills, networking systems (i.e., helping sales people connect customers and prospects with the right experts for additional conversations), and just-in-time information support to equip sales people with useful conversation starters and market/industry/company information relevant for the interaction.
Second, proof points still really matter. Of course you can and should put your case studies, et al, on your website, but it’s still essential for sales people to talk intelligently about specific examples of how the company has helped similar customers and what results ensued. They just shouldn’t do it with slumber-inducing slides!
Rob,
Agreed! Another helpful thing for sales reps are customer stories — not the traditional case studies, per se. One value of online communities is that there are so many great anecdotal conversations and stories happening that are worth repeating.
Lois
I wonder how this varies from a b2b sale to a consumer product?
Or one that has b2b sale in front of the consumer sale?