Align your marketing and sales process with your customers’ buying process to close more deals
The B2B financial technology sales process has become much more complex in recent years.
- Buyers are 60-70% through their buying process before they’re willing to engage with Sales.
- Buyers form ideas of their needs before engaging with sales, and often the product capabilities fall short of the buyer’s vision.
- Buying committees have gotten substantially larger and decision processes are more complicated.
- Most inbound leads represent buyers who have limited influence over the buying committee.
- Up to 69% of deals considered fail to close due because buying committees fail to reach consensus.
Buyers Avoid Talking to Sales
By the time buyers engage with Sales, they have a pretty good idea what they want. When they set up the sales meeting, they tend to ask for a demo before sharing enough about their needs to make the demo relevant. So the sales person has two choices: launch into a demo and try to uncover needs as he or she demonstrates the features, or get the customer to back up in order to do needs discovery. Customer-centric solution sales people usually try to start the process with needs discovery. But customers may resist, viewing this process as a waste of their time.
That’s where the problems set in. Too often, their vision for a solution does not match your product’s functionality. If that’s the case, then Sales has an uphill battle. They have to re-engineer the buying committee’s vision of how they’ll solve their business problem.
Content Marketing Influences Buyers’ Vision
So in today’s financial technology selling environment, Marketing needs to step in to begin facilitating the customer’s buying process early in their awareness, discovery and research phases. But marketers are often ill-equipped to effectively facilitate buying because they lack sales experience. Customer-centric solution selling is in PropelGrowth’s DNA. Our founder, Candyce Edelen, has a long background in sales, sales management and solution sales training – much of it targeting the financial services industry.
This background helps PropelGrowth provide strategy and content to help your marketing accomplish these goals:
- Challenge the buyers’ status quo and build a sense of dissatisfaction with the current state.
- Inspire dissatisfaction from the points of view of multiple stakeholders across the enterprise.
- Reframe the buyers’ understanding to create demand for unique characteristics of your offering.
- Establish a vision for a solution that matches the capabilities your company provides.
- Help prospects clearly understand what differentiates your offering from competitors.
- Help internal advocates build consensus with all stakeholders in the organization.
- Facilitate each stage in the buying process to help buyers confidently reach a purchase decision.
Taking this approach helps establish your company as a trusted advisor. Then customers are more likely to perceive your sales people as “problem solvers” and give them access to key stakeholders and decision-makers throughout the sales process.
Our Methodology:
PropelGrowth will help align your marketing process with your customers’ buying processes. Our process includes the following steps:
- Understand your offering’s key functionality, messaging and differentiation.
- Identify your target financial services audience including vertical niches, buyer personas, and enterprise stakeholders.
- Prepare a strategy canvas that maps the competition, analyzes key differentiators, and identifies areas of uncontested demand.
- Interview new customers and recently lost deals to understand the full buying process from the customer perspective.
- Develop a content marketing strategy to increase awareness, build demand for your offering, and generate well-qualified sales leads.
- Leverage client and industry interviews to develop content that is highly relevant and useful to your target audience.
- Continuously evaluate results based in key performance indicators and improve as we go.
Partner with PropelGrowth to align your marketing with the way your customers buy, making the process smoother and more predictable and improving lead generation and close rates, ultimately driving substantial revenue growth.
Ready to learn more? Contact us.