Dec 29
Part of our responsibility in marketing is to develop sales ready messaging and content that inside and/or direct sales teams can use to qualify prospects. Selling is not about product features and benefits, but solutions. The key is to identify the problems, needs, goals and objectives of the person you are targeting. One way to identify each of these is through solution development prompters which serve as a guide for a sales executive who is communicating with a prospect.
Let’s say you’re selling software that helps Finance Directors forecast earnings in a more accurate way. Although the Director of Finance may use your solution the most, different people within the organization may need to be sold to as well, such as the CFO, who has to approve the purchase of the solution. It is important to write a prompter for each title you must target, and incorporate their goals.
How to develop them:
1. Create a prompter for each of your targets (ie: Financial Advisor, Director of Finance, VP of Wealth Management, CFO).
2. State their goal
3. Create a column on the left-hand side of the page and write out common problems that a Director of Finance (or other title) may have, in the form of a question. (ie: When you’re closing out a quarter, do you often miss your forecast by a few percentage points? Does your boss often put pressure on you to have more accurate forecasts?)
4. Create a column on the right-hand side of the page and list scenarios that would help out with these problems. (ie: When a new quarter is about to begin would it help if you could use a single application to forecast revenue? Throughout a quarter would it be helpful your CFO could view revenue trending data via a single web-based console?)
Once you have created a prompter for each title and goal, share these with your sales force. It will help them become more effective at selling based on solutions and not products.
