B2B sales and marketing teams are adapting to a world where buyers —including the ones you haven’t met — already know all about your offerings. Mapping the buyer’s journey is key to winning business.
For higher-value engagements, companies must anticipate and meet their audiences’ needs. The key for sales organizations and the marketing leaders who collaborate with them is to do their own research, as well as collect and analyze data from their customer interactions and the digital footprints that customers leave behind when they participate in online communities, download white papers or attend a webcast.
Customers who meet with sales teams expect them to match their expertise and knowledge and then raise it in ways that help them address or even anticipate business imperatives. In fact, rising customer expectations were rated as the top issue impacting sales teams in a recent CSO Insights survey.
This infographic is from a Harvard Business Reviewreport “Winning Sales in a Buyer Empowered World,”
that was sponsored by software solutions provider SAP. For a full copy of the report, visit sap.com/cloudforsales.
Aligning sales and marketing. Leaders from sales and marketing need to collaborate on consistent ways to engage with customers across channels. That means, for example, providing valuable insights to customers that are relevant at different phases of their buying process and — for large B2B purchases — tailoring content for important stakeholders at specific accounts. It also includes inbound marketing activities, such as providing expert opinions on online communities and events to demonstrate the business expertise of sales and marketing leaders.
Developing expertise in customers’ business challenges. Sales teams need to communicate the details of an offering in context with the customer’s goals and issues. What counts is the impact of the product or service on the customer’s profits, revenue goals, cost reduction efforts, and other critical objectives.
