Marketers and technologists may be slow to admit this, but great conversations are important to B2B selling. Not in the euphemistic, marketing-speak context of a blog post’s comment thread, or an invitation to “join the conversation” by filling out a web-enabled registration form. We’re talking about honest-to-God conversations, where humans in the same room watch each other’s lips move.
For B2B sales, conversations are the single most potent interaction between buyer and seller. Yet face-to-face sales calls, and the salespeople who make them, are by all accounts declining in number as sales organizations shift expense from face-to-face sellers to tele and web channels, and as buyers become more difficult to engage. What happens in sales calls, when they do occur, is therefore important. Those few moments of face-to-face interaction become ever more precious to sales organizations.
But too little attention is paid to conversation quality by those automating, enabling, supporting, managing, or otherwise optimizing what commercial sales forces are doing. Corporate Visions' Tim Riesterer has done some of the best thinking on this topic, including what makes a great sales conversation, and shared it with our audience in a recent Sales Management Association webcast Helping Your Sales Force Break Through the Status Quo Barrier. Tim was joined on the webcast by Mike Sitter, Director of Sales Effectiveness, CenturyLink Business Solutions.
His presentation was packed with insights about making salespeople better in sales calls, by engineering compelling, productive conversations. I thought his insights on the limitations of “buyer personas” was astute (Riesterer says situational context is a much better predictor of value). As was the nifty blueprint he provided for narrowing focus, orienting content to a buyer’s point of view, and communicating value within an effective sales conversation. We’ve excerpted some of his remarks on these topics below. Sales Management Association members can login to view the complete session and download slides here.
