Great marketing is more valuable than most C-suite execs or founders often realise. And they’ll see the impact—or lack thereof—on their sales teams’ performance at the point of negotiation.
Ask them: when speaking to new prospects, how strong do they feel their position is when starting the negotiation process?
Are they starting from a point of absolute strength with a very keen prospect, or are they desperately trying to quickly educate, wow and convert indifferent ones?
Are current prospects choosing your business/product based on its perceived value or are they only including you because they’re researching the market or need a certain number of RFPs?
Do they ask prospects how they heard about you in the first place? If so, how often does Google come up? That’s very late in the buying journey—if it’s the first place they’ve heard about you, you’ve probably already lost. If you aren’t collecting this information, how do you know where prospects first hear about you?
How common is it that your sales team have to make serious concessions in the negotiation process just to close deals?
Have you ever hired an experienced salesperson or even an entire team and quickly realised that they just can’t deliver, no matter how hard you push, train them or throw in deals/promos?
Talk to your accounts/retention team and see how difficult it is to retain clients when the price was the only way you got them in the first place.
By doing the above, which—unfortunately—I rarely see from C-Suite/founders, they will very quickly see that no matter how much emphasis is put on revenue growth, the magical return never seems to materialise.
Why?
The way I like to see it is that great marketing is phenomenal preparation for your sales team…before they even enter the first contact with a prospect.
Great marketing ensures your prospects:
1. Have heard of you before, and in a way that was memorable to them. They may have even been silent fans for some time before reaching out.
2. Know exactly where you fit in the world and how you differ from competitors.
3. Completely understand what value you offer them and have seen consistent messaging across their buying journey that has entrenched their belief in you.
4. They will absolutely pay a premium for the ability to make use of your offerings as the value to them far exceeds the cost.
5. Close faster as their decision was mostly made before even speaking to sales. Generally, all that remains is the final negotiation to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.
Great marketing is about giving your sales team the best opportunity to excel. Without it, sales and revenue growth are left to chance and often, price wars, which only hurt margins.
This is a topic we adore and love for the simple reason that sales is merely a negotiation. And great marketing allows you to begin your sales negotiation process from the best, and highest, possible starting point.