My previous summaries of the Sales Executive Council’s rep success work (The Five Profiles of Sales Reps and Unpacking the Winning Sales Rep) explained how the most successful sales rep profile (the Challenger) wins by doing three things well: Teaching, Tailoring and Asserting Control.
But who should be on the hook for encouraging successful behaviors when it comes to these activities? Should it be left up to the individual rep? …the sales manager? …a central training group? …how about Marketing?
Common sense not only tells us that it is a critical combination of all of the above, but dictates that Marketing needs to play a critical role in just about all of the competencies for them to be successful. Here’s our take:
Teaching (80% Marketing, 20% Sales)
Customers are looking to suppliers for insight—for knowledge and information that enables them to be more competitive by either saving money or making money in ways they hadn’t yet realized were possible. To provide this to our customers, it requires a very specific organizational capability…one of commercial teaching. And relying on the skill sets of individual reps to get this done isn’t enough here. Marketing needs to lead the charge on commercial teaching, as we’re well positioned to scan the customer horizon and build this relevant pitch (vetted by Sales, of course).
Now, the big question is: how do we not only make it relevant to the customer, but also still ensure that we are set up for a profitable relationship? Well, the key to all of this is to uncover our differentiators (the things that our organization is uniquely positioned to provide) and then teach customers to value these things. The marketing team at Volvo (commercial trucks division), working in conjunction with CVI (consultant), did this well. They arrived at a narrow set of underappreciated differentiators (underappreciated by the customer) and then created a sales-ready message/pitch to teach these newly discovered differentiators to the customer. This was accomplished through a 4-day “messaging workshop” consisting of cross-functional peers. Click Here for the Volvo Example (see also: GE and Dow Chemical)
Tailoring (50% Marketing, 50% Sales)
Marketing should drive the activity here but needs to include sales partners, who have a lot of knowledge around individual customer stakeholders and what they care about (Click Here for an example from ARAMARK)
Asserting Control (mostly Sales, HR/Sales Training)
Development here typically takes the form of specific sales training led by HR or a “sales effectiveness”-type function internally – where the key learnings/takeaways are then reinforced in an ongoing manner through the sales management team. That’s not to say that Marketing can’t play a role here – in fact, we’ve seen some marketers in the B2B space get heavily involved in figuring out what exactly we are willing (or not willing) to trade away during negotiations (what “negotiables” should/should not be on the table).
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