More Marketing!
When your current sales team asks for more marketing, beware.
They may ask for:
- More campaigns
- Better literature
- Lower prices
- New features
- More pre-sales tech support
These things are crutches. If your salespeople don’t know how to sell, you can never give them enough crutches. You will spend a lot of money and time doing things that don’t address the core weakness.
Sending Literature is Not Sales
I was supervising outbound calls with a sales rep who got a potential buyer on the phone. The buyer started to open up and began to describe a problem the rep’s software could solve.
The reps response? He immediately ended the call by offering to send literature.
Rather than having a true dialog about what’s happening in the customer’s world, the rep bailed out and expected the marketing collateral to make the sale for him. Unfortunately, this is not unusual.
Your salespeople will never tell you that what’s constraining their sales is their lack of skill. It’s a sales leader’s job to:
- Have a custom, state-of-the-art selling system.
- Ensure all their salespeople know how to use it.