The 'Buy-in' Cycle
How well are you preparing your sales people to succeed?
Sales enablement is taking center stage in most marketing organizations—and with good reason. Trends, such as economic growth and market consolidation, are forcing changes in company messages and solution portfolios—making it impossible for even your best salespeople and customers to keep up.
The fact is salespeople perform better—meaning they make more money for your company—when they are properly prepared to execute. Make sure your sales tools stand out in a form that is first, recognized as valuable, second, easy to access, and third, actionable. Ideas for enablement
Your salesperson is your first customer. As such, consider the customer buying cycle—awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and repurchase—and modify it to be appropriate for internally-facing tools for your salespeople.
At Launch, we call it a “buy-in cycle,” meaning once your salesperson buys in to a new concept or selling portfolio, they are more likely to be successful selling it to others. There are four parts to the buy-in cycle; each requires a distinct set of activities and tools. Map your own internal efforts against the categories below and see if you’ve developed marketing tools across the entire buy-in cycle:
- Awareness and Education. You introduce messaging about new products, services, and solutions.
- Enablement. You deliver sales kits mapped to your preferred selling methodology, along with scripted presentations, success stories, competitive analyses, and opportunity briefs.
- Close. You provide proposal templates and tools that make it faster and easier to seal a deal.
- Reinforcement and Expansion. You offer cross-selling and add-on tools to help sales people identify follow-on opportunities. You also share internal news, including solution updates and sales successes.
If you spend most of your effort on the customer-centric buying cycle—and precious little time on the sales-focused buy-in cycle—you aren’t alone. Make it a goal in 2006 to balance your spending across internal and external initiatives. And if you’re unsure about the best way to build tools that are valuable and actionable, visit our website at www.launchintl.com/salesenablement to view samples of cool tools we’ve created for our clients.
To learn more about how we can help you build tools that produce sales results, contact us at info@launchintl.com or call 215-230-4340.
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