When you make the decision to target market segments strategically, you can create significant profitable growth opportunities for your business. But what happens when the sales team fails to embrace those new segments?
It’s not that salespeople want to sabotage the efforts of marketers. But resisting change is part of human nature. When salespeople have spent months and years developing relationships with established customers, it can be difficult to make the switch to selling to a whole new set of customers.
It’s not enough to simply point the sales team in a new direction and let them sink or swim. They need the proper support to make the transition to selling to new target segments. Here are three things marketing needs to deliver to help salespeople sell to the right customers.
- Create a new value proposition. When they go out into the field, salespeople need to understand the needs of the people they’re selling to. To help them approach new prospects, make sure they’re armed with an updated value proposition that speaks directly to the needs of your new potential customer.
- Create new content and messaging. When you want to appeal to a new audience, you will naturally want to create new white papers, case studies, and blog posts. As you’re crafting these assets, remember that salespeople will be using these messages as a springboard to have discussions with prospects. Be sure to incorporate statistics, trends, and insights that will help salespeople have successful conversations with this new audience.
- Create a new business case and provide value-selling tools. We’ve always been strong advocates for building a business case and including it as part of the proposal process. Showing a clear cost justification for investing in your offering will help salespeople persuade decision makers (CFOs and CEOs) to buy. When the marketing team identifies new segments, they also need to make sure sales teams have the proper tools to quantify the business case for the new target segments.
Of course, there are a variety of other things that sales management can do around training and compensation to incentivize the sales team to pursue a new type of customer. But if you provide the value proposition, content assets, and business-case tools, marketing can be a great help in paving a smooth path for salespeople to succeed with new segments.
[Image via Flickr / John Carleton]
