Revenue Journal®

This is part number three of a three-part article.
First we told the salesperson's sad tale, then looked at marketing and selling from the marketer's perspective. This week, we provide a step-by-step solution. If you actually do this, your dogs and cats will finally find common ground and start working together to increase your sales.

How to stop the squabbling and supercharge your sales
The secret to getting your salespeople and marketing people to work together is to stop the interdepartmental, political arguments about the selling process and start focusing everyone's attention on the customer's buying process. This is the only way to stop the political tug-of-war.

Here's how you do it.

1) Interview your customers. Hire someone to do this or do it yourself. Ask them open-ended questions and record everything they say. After you've had in-depth conversations with at least ten customers of the same type - and you've talked to all the types - organize and analyze what they have told you. Create a report that summarizes their comments and comes to conclusions. Insist that your marketers and your salespeople (and all top executives) read the report. Give them a week to do so.

2) Hold a meeting while the customer's perspective is still fresh in each person's mind. The goal of the meeting is to map out the customer's buying process - identifying the steps the customer goes through on the way to the purchase, the people involved, the questions they ask while buying, the answers that satisfy them, the marketing and selling tools and methods required to support every step of the customer's buying process, and who will be held responsible for creating and maintaining those tools.

3) Hold the meeting in a large room that has lots of wall space, because you're going to be posting flip-chart pages on the walls. The flip chart works better than a white board, because the pages can be used afterwards to create a final (computer-based) grid document. Don't try to have this meeting via virtual methods. It won't work. This exercise needs everyone's full attention and participation, which never happens in virtual meetings. Fortunately, you only have to do this once. You will naturally tweak the grid over time, as your marketplace changes. But, the basics will remain surprisingly stable from month to month, and even year to year.

4) Build a grid that diagrams your customer's buying process. Map out the steps of the customer's buying process onto the flip chart paper, and tape the pages on the wall. Simple products will have only three or four steps. Complex products will have more. For example, if you're selling a software product in the $300 to $1000 price range, and most of your sales occur on your website, your steps would probably be:

Step 1: We find each other
Step 2: The customer comes to our website
Step 3: Reads web copy
Step 4: Watches demo
Step 5: Downloads trial
Step 6: Tests the product
Step 7: Purchases the product
Step 8: Needs after-sale support

5) For each of these steps, you will want to map out the interactions between your buyer and your marketing/selling resources:

1. What happens (summarize the interactions between the buyer and the seller)

2. Who's involved (include the people buying and the people at your company making it easy for the buyers to buy)

3. Buyer's biggest concerns at this point

4. Questions buyers ask

5. Answers that satisfy buyers

6. Marketing and selling tools needed at this stage and who will be responsible for them (creating them, keeping them up to date, using them, and maintaining the content support infrastructure).

6) Assume the meeting will take hours. The salespeople in the room will be bored and fidgety for the first ten minutes, expecting that this is yet another exercise in futility, and angry that the meeting is keeping them from making important calls. They will also mumble, "There's no such thing as a typical buying process. I am the reason they buy, and every sale is different." But they will quickly change their tune. As you build the grid, they'll see that they have a great deal to say about the customer's behavior during the buying process, and nothing pleases a salespeople more than knowing what they are talking about. Bear in mind, however, that you can't hold this meeting without first conducting all the customer interviews. Because customers routinely withhold their real thoughts from salespeople during their buying process, you can't depend completely on feedback from your salespeople. As we've said before, only a fool tells a salesperson what he/she is really thinking. An effective interviewer will discover things that customers never say to a salesperson. However, salespeople can describe "what customers ask" and "what happens next" in the course of the customer's buying process.

7) As you fill in the Buying Process Map and the day wears on, expect a change to take place in the room. The marketers will have a new appreciation for the complexity of the selling process, and will understand what is needed at each step. The salespeople will get excited because they will begin to hope that they will have the right tools at the right time.

8) After the meeting, have someone turn the flip-chart pages into a Buying Process Map document. You can build the Map in a table in Word, or use Excel. Across the top, head the columns with the steps of the buying process, and along the side, label the rows with the interactions (Who's involved, what their questions are, etc.). If you're selling a complex product, the Buying Process Map document will be several pages long.

9) Set to work developing the tools. Not all of the tools will be new, but you may not have been using them at the right stage of the buying process, or you may have been putting too much emphasis on one type of tool at the expense of another. For example, it is quite common for companies to spend too much money trying to attract new business (supporting the "we find each other" stage), and hardly any money on the subsequent stages, where more specific customer questions are answered.

10) As the new tools become available, and the existing and updated tools are used more effectively, your dogs and cats will start to work in harmony. Salespeople and marketers will start working toward the same goal: supporting the customer's buying process. People will finally understand that their real job - both in marketing and sales - is to make it easy for the customer to buy.

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The Buying Process Map will drive your marketing projects for the next six months. You should set up tracking systems to track leads to sales, which will add more information to the grid. After the new campaigns and tools have been in use for several months, meet again with the same folks. Recognize their efforts and the progress that's been made. Then, fine-tune the grid and make the necessary adjustments in your activities and tools.

Once your dogs and cats have stopped fighting, you'll realize how much time and energy you were wasting on internal squabbles. Your dogs will be out there joyfully chasing sticks. Your cats will be purring along, happy to crank out materials that are actually working.

You'll need to make sure marketers continue to interview customers so their campaigns and tools continue to resonate with customers, and remain current, competitive, and effective. But that's a topic for another day.

This entire exercise, where you reverse-engineer the customer's buying process and start supporting it at every step, will allow you to manufacture sales in quantity. It's wonderful when this starts to happen. You will leave competitors in the dust. Your customers will refer others to you. And you will never again have to keep your dogs and cats from tearing each other apart.