Crystal Bristow
Jenkins Electric
Charlotte, NC
It’s no secret that sales and marketing teams often experience healthy tension (some might call it “growing pains”) in their working relationships. But, if instead of focusing on their own pains, what if your sales and marketing teams focused on the pain of customers?
First, let’s identify what we mean by pain. Pain is the reason your customer is calling or scouring the Internet for answers. This pain often doesn’t surface initially; it’s a few layers deep, but it’s the key that unlocks customer trust.
As sales and marketing professionals, we’re often guilty of focusing too much on the features and benefits of our products and services. We focus on our own agenda: price, voltage, quantity, delivery time and so on. We’re comfortable with features and benefits because we wrote them. They’re simple, straightforward and often very clear and easy to remember. But the truth is, your customer can read your features and benefits from your sales sheets and your website. What makes them trust your company and, more importantly, what makes them purchase from you, is the ability to identify and alleviate their pain.
For example, a customer’s motor may be down resulting in the stoppage of an entire assembly line. This affects production numbers, which gets rolled up to monthly production goals, which are the metrics management uses to evaluate job performance and hand out promotions. In this scenario, what’s the customer's pain? Is it one motor being down? Or is it the fear that your customer’s supervisor will view the situation as a sign of incompetence? Or worse, is it the potential for missing a well-deserved promotion that your customer has been working toward for the last five years? Identifying the pain is the crucial first step. Once the pain is identified, your customer is more likely to trust you enough to solve their problem and alleviate their pain.
If your sales and marketing team isn’t focused on pain, they may miss the real reason a customer is overly anxious or even angry about what might seem like a small issue to you. But, because you haven’t dug deep enough, you don’t understand what’s really going on. And this is the point where teamwork between your sales and marketing team really matters.
Sales is responsible for those direct conversations with the customer. It’s their job to dig in and find out what’s really on the line with the issue they’re calling about, not just what it appears to be on the surface. And when sales does figure it out, they need to share it with marketing. Think of it like “Easter eggs.” Sales collects valuable insights concerning customer pain and then marketing weaves elements of those insights throughout their messaging across all your platforms: social, web, print, collateral, data sheets etc.
What’s the first thing you do when you need a product or service you’ve never bought before? You either ask a friend or you ask Google. Let’s translate that to sales speak: you either ask for a referral or you look to the web to give you the most relevant suggestion. When you discover information that speaks to your pain (even unacknowledged, unshared pain), the source of that information has earned your undivided attention. Features and benefits are important, but your pain drives you to find what you actually want.
When sales and marketing teams first identify and then communicate their customers’ most sensitive pain points, together they drive more sales. But this teamwork requires good internal communication and consistency in tactics. That means sales and marketing teams need to talk often and openly. Marketing should be in sales meetings and hear about the opportunities, customer pain points and successful alleviations of pain.
The two departments should support a free exchange of ideas and experiences. When sales teams are on-site or making large installations that are visually interesting, they should capture images and content and share them with marketing. Be sure to include descriptions of the pain your company is solving. By sharing customer feedback,
accolades, or even complaints, your sales and marketing teams are acting as one team operating from the same playbook. They have different roles and responsibilities, but they share a clear and united strategic direction: to alleviate customer pain.
Once your teams start working together, what does success look like?
- Frequent Communication. No matter the platform (phone, text, social), sales and marketing frequently share customer compliments, success stories, onsite photos, etc. When complex issues or pains are solved, sales relays the details to marketing, who then tell the story.
- Marketing materials are infused with customer insights from the sales team. This includes everything from correct terminology to the types of information the sales team needs to do their job.
- They celebrate wins together. When a lead comes in, it is then passed to a salesperson and is eventually converted into a successful sale. Each team acknowledges the roles of the other and they celebrate the win together.
- You earn your customers' trust together. What customers see in your marketing materials, on your website, and in your data sheets is consistent with what they hear from your sales team; and, perhaps most important of all, what they experience when your technical teams are on-site or when their equipment is returned. Alleviating pain is one consistent experience.
While aligning your sales and marketing teams is essential, you’ll be even stronger if you can extend the communication and collaboration to your engineering and operations team. If everyone in your organization is focused on solving customer pain, you’ll be the first call customers make when the next pain arises.
And isn’t that what we all want? To be the first call.
Want to continue the conversation? Connect with Crystal on LinkedIn.
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