Here’s a loaded question: who do you trust more, someone unintelligent or someone who has a well-researched answer to every question?
Sales are won by the reps that customers know, like and trust. In our personal lives, all of us can name plenty of acquaintances that we know and like, but we’d be slow to trust watching our kids for the week, or with any serious matter. David Horsager, a widely acclaimed expert on trust says that trust is built on a number of factors including consistency, clarity, compassion, but the most important “C” in business is competency. If no one believes that you can get the job done, then all is for naut.
So it’s clearly important that your sales reps sound smart, or no one will trust them enough to hand them a check for a large sum or money.
Making a sales rep sound smarter is the ultimate convergence of sales and marketing. It allows sales to focus on selling skills like prospecting, qualifying, closing, etc., while marketing can focus on understanding the target customer, their problems and how to frame your company’s solution so it resonates with their problems.
The benefits to this approach are myriad.
First, you can hire strictly based on sales ability, rather than industry knowledge. So instead of hiring a sub-par salesperson with 20 years of industry experience, you can hire a top-performing sales rep from almost any industry and plug them into your existing selling system.
Next, you’re going to get a much more consistent level of understanding of a target customer throughout the company and sales force.
And finally, the marketing messages your company is sending out to the world will be entirely compatible with the way that your sales team is selling, so there’s no need to worry about customers experiencing mixed messages.
Once you have aligned sales and marketing in order to make your sales reps smarter, you can roll out carefully orchestrated marketing campaigns to increase leads, or create an added-value tool like a tablet application so your sales reps can wow prospects in-meeting.
