Many of my clients are neck deep in preparations for their annual sales meetings. They are creating presentations and content to get Sales jazzed about the year, and to educate them about new products, pricing, initiatives, etc.
Unfortunately after the dust settles and everyone has flown back to their patch, Marketing will moan about Sales not using all the tools they worked so hard to create. Sales will complain that they don’t have the right tools. How, after all this work, is that possible?
Part of the problem is that while marketers think about the content of sales and marketing tools, they often ignore usability. Just as with a complex product, great features (content) are only as useful as the user’s ability to access and exploit them.
To improve the usability of sales and marketing tools for your sales channel(s) and for customers, ask these questions BEFORE your create the assets.
Internal Usability Questions
- How is the offering (product/service/solution) marketed and sold, exactly?
- Who will use the sales/marketing assets and how?
- Which form or medium is appropriate for each type of marketing and sales activity?
- How much customization will be required with each use?
- How will the users obtain the asset when the need for it arises?
- What kinds of responses or questions are sales or marketing people likely to encounter when they use this asset?
- How will we know whether the asset is useful and effective?
Usability Questions for Customers
- At which points in their decision-making process does each audience need this information?
- Where and how do customers find this information?
- What medium is easiest for customers to access and use?
- Under what conditions will they most likely use this asset? (In a meeting? On the phone? At a computer? At a dusty job site? On a plane?)
- How much time will they have to interact with this asset?
- Will they want to share it? (If yes, how do we make that easy?)
- How will we know whether the asset is useful and valuable to customers?
Please share additional usability considerations when developing content and tools for us in sales and marketing.
I was thrilled to be a guest speaker on Linda Popky‘s Marketing Thought Leadership podcast series.
The podcast topics include:
- The definition of customer context
- How to use every aspect of context in messaging
- The customer use case as a tool for articulating credible and provable value
Listen to the entire podcast, “Customer Relevance: Why Use Case-Driven Value™ Matters to Marketing”
Customer centricity is well over a decade old. Companies have gotten better at tracking customer information, incorporating customer input into product design, and identifying customer needs in their sales and marketing messages. Despite these advances, the most frequent complaint by decision-makers involved in complex purchases is that vendors don’t listen, don’t understand their problems, and don’t convincingly articulate value.
Something is obviously missing from all that customer-centric activity.
Just about every discussion of being customer centric focuses on “understanding customer needs”. Unfortunately, most vendors focus on their customers’ needs, but not on the way their customers do business. That may sound like a subtle difference. It’s not. A focus on needs often misses the context for those needs. That’s important, because the context, not the need, determines value.
Let me repeat that. The CONTEXT, not the need, determines value.
Only by focusing on needs in context can you be truly, uniquely relevant. To become more relevant and valuable to customers (and grow revenue), find the needs that matter most now within the context of your customer’s internal and external business situation, and to which you can add the greatest value. Then sell and fulfill your offering in the way best suited to the customer’s way of doing business.
A great set of tips about on-the-fly sketching from XPlane are directly related to a recent post here about “2.0ing your sales meetings”
Happy to see that collaborative selling approaches are becoming popular, and now insightful companies like XPlane and WhiteBoard Selling are helping sales reps get more interactive and collaborative. That can only translate into greater customer relevance, and more productive and valuable sales meetings.
Idea Design’s blog about asking is right on – and applies to businesses as much as to charities. At the end are three points that may as well have been written for businesses – here they are, with business terms inserted:
“1. Be where your [customers and prospects] are. Hang out with them. Learn their language and be relevant to them.
2. If you want to [close deals] sooner or later you are going to have to ask for [the sale].
3. And when you do ask, ask in a way that is appropriate to your [customer]. ”
In a business, these apply to the sales reps, and to the rest of your organization. Get your messages into the places customers look to for information (note – first place they look is not your website). Your marketing, services, and product development / design staff should be attending the same events, reading the same publications, and participating in the same discussions on and off-line that your target audiences do.
Most sales people don’t have much trouble asking for a sale – but they often fail to do their homework and communicate why their offer should matter to the customer in the customer’s terms. That makes the ask inappropriate. To increase the frequency of yeses, increase the relevance of your offers. To make that relevance natural, as Idea Design suggests, hang out with the customers.
