BY MICK HOLLISON @MICKHOLLISON


Salespeople must presume unprecedented levels of sophistication and knowledge of products, pricing and the competitive landscape among their potential customers.


Shared: From your friends TechAutoCareers.com® the online resource for the Automotive Sales Consultant


The rise of the Internet, coupled with increasingly sophisticated buyers and new technologies like predictive analytics, have changed the world of sales and marketing forever. Simply stated, new technology that enables buyers to move through the evaluation and purchasing process without ever engaging with a live salesperson has fundamentally altered the roles of marketers and salespeople.


Marketing professionals must become dramatically closer to their prospects and customers. Salespeople must presume unprecedented levels of sophistication and knowledge of products, pricing and the competitive landscape among their potential customers.


This is not a brand-new phenomenon. Back in 2011, Jim Lecinski of Google coined the term ZMOT, which stands for Zero Moment of Truth. The term has been widely used to describe the moment an online purchasing decision has occurred. Until fairly recently, it was assumed that this phenomenon was mostly applicable to consumer purchasing decisions. However, in 2012, a Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 customers found that customers completed 60 percent of their typical purchasing decisions before ever having a conversation with a vendor. That's right, they are already 60 percent of the way through the proverbial funnel before the sales team is even engaged.


Making matters even more intriguing, new predictive technologies as mentioned in my previous post, Love or Hate It, Why Predictive Analytics is the Next Big Thing, can precisely target prospects with messaging that identifies unrecognized needs. In other words, marketing can offer potential buyers provocative insights about how to solve those latent needs. More importantly, marketing can actually "coach" prospects through the buying process long before competitors and sales teams even get invited to the ever-popular "pricing bake-off" with procurement.


So what does this mean for salespeople? Have they been forever relegated to negotiating prices with increasingly savvy buyers? The short answer is a resounding no, but ensuring it doesn't happen will require a significant change for salespeople.


There are three big things that smart salespeople must do in order to thrive in the new world order of hyper-educated buyers.


1. Sales must communicate with marketing. Now, before everyone writes me off as a hopeless ideologue, hear me out. I am not talking about idle chitchat about the weather and Monday Night Football. I am talking about real, honest-to-goodness, two-way dialogue about targeting agents of change--not simply those with budget or authority. In other words, if today's salespeople want to set the agenda rather than simply respond to customers that have already made up their minds, they must partner with marketing and think differently about identifying the best prospects.

The fact is that most seasoned salespeople have been classically trained in Solution Selling--a methodology that presumes salespeople should initiate conversations with open-ended questions designed to uncover well-understood, existing pain points. The problem is that most of today's buyers are already acting on those existing challenges. In other words, using this approach makes salespeople tardy to the purchasing party.


2. Leverage Prescriptive Sales Technology. In order to get out in front of the competition, the second thing enlightened salespeople must do is to adopt a new approach that goes beyond Solution Selling and even beyond the Challenger Sale espoused by Matt Dixon in his terrific, bestselling, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. I call this new model "Prescriptive Selling". Prescriptive selling requires the adoption of a predictive analytics engine that can help identify the best possible prospects based on criteria that go far beyond industry, job title and the like. Salespeople armed with this technology can not only identify the best prospects, but when, where and how to contact them. In some instances, this technology can even arm the modern salesperson with provocative messaging that will stimulate immediate action. This revolutionary breakthrough in sales technology is akin to night vision goggles for modern day warriors--without it, salespeople are literally flying blind.

Now here's the kicker: Today's predictive lead scoring tools are typically the providence of the marketing team. My bet is that in the near future, the best salespeople will want in on this action and will demand tools that dynamically prescribe sales activities versus simply providing a static lead score. As a CMO, I believe top-of-funnel lead scoring tools definitely have value, but the real action is a bit further down the funnel where action-oriented, non-conventional opportunities reside.


3. Adopt marketing techniques and messaging to elicit action, not just interest. The bottom line is that salespeople could learn some new tricks from marketing about how to target and engage prospects with controversial messaging that will stir emotions and incite radical change. Similarly, marketing must engage earlier and more directly with customers to set the table for sales. If both sales and marketing teams are committed to this new line of thinking and higher levels of collaboration, automation will radically accelerate sales, not eliminate salespeople.


What do you think? Is this something you can benefit from or do you have a few tricks up your sleeve that are just as powerful? Make your voice heard by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to hit the share button if you know others who will find this post useful.


I.C. Collins ~ Author, Educator, Trainer and President: Has One Simple Goal: Improve a Million Automotive Sales Consultants Lives with our ebook "How to Succeed in the Automotive Sales Industry"


I wanted to take a minute and THANK all the people that comment, like, and share my posts daily. I appreciate you all! From your friends TechAutoCareers.com® the online resource for the Automotive Sales Consultant™


Please accept our invitation and feel free to be yourself and get to know our members on TechAutoCareers.com®, Facebook, Google+, and Linkedin.

Views: 65

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

YES !  This needs a comment. Bravo !  Please allow me to put this brilliant theoretical discourse into actual auto sales case study practice.

I call this response :

"Fire bad  ... ummmmgh" 

Your perspective is that greater tech skills are needed by salesmen today and that this demands specialized training. Reasonable to expect as your business is tech training. However, before training salesmen to have special skills there needs to be executive and management level  "buy-in"  to insure that such skills are welcomed.  

We all have certain beliefs in life and in business. In the auto sales business many of the beliefs are called "best practices" and have been handed-down for 100 years and from selling horses and carriages before that. These are carved-in-stone like the commandments -- and changing them  -- is nearly impossible.

So. Let me try to attack one of these.

Advertising and marketing involves presenting a little info to many. A 30 second commercial targeting millions is very shallow but the hope is that it will resonate with 1% of 1%. Marketing goes deeper and hopes to get 100 times better results at the web page. Sales used to try to get one sale from five a few years ago  --- but now   --- 1 from 1.5  !

What do you see from these numbers ?

For one thing your job in the showroom now is three times easier. That's good. Easier beats harder.

For another, you were behind the real "moment of truth". You only worked those that made their decision to buy online.  "Lay-downs". So stop giving yourself medals for your great conversion. You lost most of the showroom traffic higher in the sales funnel. In the marketing zone. This makes the showroom traffic you see a "fool's paradise".

So let's look into the website data ... and every 3rd party site ... what is the "bounce rate". And how long did those that visited the page stay ? And if they left quickly why ?  These questions are the same questions you would ask if they were brick showroom shoppers. Why do you only ask about the brick showroom and not the click showroom. Click is where the shoppers are making the "moment of truth" decision" ... the "tipping point".

Can I offer a theory ?

Auto sales people are "sight hounds" not "scent hounds". REAL customers are those that you see.  "A bird in-hand is worth two in the bush" is wrong. Why are you OK with losing two on the web  --- you could have all three !"

OK   ----  that's theory. Let's make it real.

Advertising to millions - and marketing to thousands- have practical limitations for presenting to the "needs of the one". Marketing to the individual  is an oxymoron because marketing means to the market.

HOW CAN THERE BE MARKETING TO ONE ?! 

Social media. A shopper today starting at google can by-pass the dealer site, autotrader, cars.com or ebay -  find the car  - and the salesman and make direct contact !  "Prospecting" by one man can surpass both mass media hierarchy and dealership sales bureaucracy to connect directly with the customer !!

Uh-Oh !  OMG !  WTF !   The genie is out of the bottle. I am the destroyer of worlds.

The salesman can reach the shopper - and the shopper can reach the customer  --  directly.

Is this a good thing or bad ?  The answer is like what Frankenstein said about fire. "Fire bad  ... ummmmgh"

as you wrote:

 "Adopt marketing techniques and messaging to elicit action, not just interest. The bottom line is that salespeople could learn some new tricks from marketing about how to target and engage prospects"

RSS

© 2024   Created by DealerELITE.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service