In many B2B businesses, the marketing and sales departments live in
different worlds and this results into :
- the "ball not being caught” by any of these two
- new products failing to reach their potential (not to speak about their targets)
- reduction in the morale of both the sales and marketing teams
- grass-root salespersons consider promoting new products a waste of their time
NEW PRODUCTS : ENGINES OF GROWTH
CEOs love the new product program
because these launches
- are visible events - inside and outside - to rally people together
- make functional silos to work as towards a common goal cross-functionally
- improve the technology quotient in the overall product line
- give something to talk about to the customers and employees
- may serve as preemptive technological obsolescence of one’s own line
- are seen as “new ammunition” to fight the competition
HOW MARKETING LAUNCHES NEW PRODUCTS
In most companies, the marketing department conducts road shows in
various branches. During these road shows they dump a huge load of data and
materials during the internal launch seminar
- Explanation of how it works
- What are the multiple configurations
- What are the various connectivity options
- How to demonstrate various features
- Feature-Price comparison with the competition
- What campaign has been planned in print, magazines, websites
- Glossy and nice brochures, fact sheets, tech specs, FAQs, gifts.
NEW PRODUCTS : WASTE OF SALES FORCE TIME
But no one really asks what do the front line salespersons REALLY NEED from the company. Because, unless your products are so outstanding and so well promoted that the customers will queue up for them on their own, this way of launching will not work. And this statement is particularly true if you do “solution selling” (also called “consultative selling”) i.e. you sell your products as “solutions” to the customers’ “problem”.
So, although the marketing department has taken
a lot of effort to launch the products, the entire effort has been
product-centric. It is not clear who
will make the salesperson effective in selling
the new product in a consultative / solution mode. This requires a the
salesperson to have a deep understanding of the following in the context of new
products
- the customer’s pain points
- how the new product addresses these pains
- how the new products is a better solution than the competition to alleviate these pains
- who is a prospect and how to locate them
- how to find where is the prospect on his “buying journey”
- how to provide comfort to him in context of “business”, “stakeholders”, his “persona”
- what specific messages are relevant at what stage of the buying journey
- Generally how to increase the sales velocity.
After all, the sales department wants marketing to give it the ammunition to jump-start the acceptance and sale of new
products, to shorten time to revenue, to improve the
lifetime profitability of their offering compared to customer needs and competition and to keep major competitors out of key
accounts.
THE RESULT IN THE MARKET
The way things are in most companies right now, this important stage is really no one’s
responsibility and, since it is so, ultimately the burden falls on the shoulders
of the poor front line salesperson to learn it all by himself - through trial
and error - with some help from their own direct first-line supervisor.
But the front line salespersons are so busy in their day to day job of
selling the whole product line - and achieving their monthly targets - that
most sales people cannot give a focused attention to how the new products are
to be put across to the prospects. As a result, many salespersons take a long
time to internalize it many do not get it at all.
The outcome of all this is that the productivity remains low for a new
product for a far longer time than it is planned. The salespersons and the sales channel member
get disillusioned and demoralized and their expectations from the new product become
low. All sales and marketing people connected with the new product begin to
feel small due to constant needling from the top management. The product
becomes a victim of self fulfilling prophesy and never meets the potential had
been launched properly and given proper attention by both the marketing and sales
departments.
WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY IS IT?
Is marketing responsible? Many would take a pragmatic view and say that
the marketing department cannot be held responsible because they are situated
at HO and do not deal with – and hence have no visibility of - individual
customers. And therefore they cannot possibly craft an individual messaging
strategy for an individual customer.
With this kind of mindset it is easy to understand that most marketing
departments in B2B business are product-centric. When you generally do not get
to meet individual customers, you really do not know what drives them to behave
in the way they do. And therefore the marketing people cannot be anything but
product centric! What an irony!
THE ANSWER
The REAL answer is that Marketing need not customize messages but
should develop training material (based on research and testing) to help the
sales force to prepare themselves for customization.
The Marketing should develop "Buyer Personas" and "Buying Journeys" for each such persona so that this can be used in the field to train the sales force. If the sales force are just given product knowledge, demo and print material; they flounder when they personally meet the customers. But when they are trained in dealing with the customers and how to create consultative conversations with them, their trial and error time reduces drastically, they become more productive, more confident. This results into the sales curve of the new products go up faster resulting into all round feel good factor and this lays a solid ground work for the company to introduce new products.
THE HIDDEN BENEFIT
When
the sales force is well trained not only in what the products offer but
also in how to sell them to the customers, the time spent in "Sales
Support" after the new products is launched comes down sharply. I know
that in some companies, the sales force is so untrained that they call
the marketing managers to deal with many customers as if it is their job
to close the sales.