The Selling Synapse

1.           Selling profiles:

a.          A prospect contact profile

b.          A prospect company profile.

c.          A prospect industry/market profile

d.          A product/prospect fit

2.           A set of slide decks, focused on the information contained in those profiles

3.           A list of identified staff and consultants, that have relevant experience and expertise to contribute.

4.           A portfolio of targeted and relevant case studies.

These are the tools that your sales forces uses to differentiate itself. To focus the Buyer on your value. To reach the point of relevance with that Buyer.

And all of these tools are things that sales reps, at one point in the process, to one degree of completeness and detail to another, create to support a sales cycle. They don’t do it at the start of the cycle: they wait until the lead warms up, is qualified, is analyzed. They don’t do it all at once: they create it slowly, methodically, bit by bit. They don’t do it from whole cloth: they build on templates, on boilerplates, on previous similar work. They don’t connect the expert network out of the gate: they bring people in ad hoc, as needed, as available.

Now that works fine in a traditional selling dynamic: one where the Buyer learns about you bit-by-bit while you create your selling toolset for that Buyer, also bit-by-bit. But today’s well informed Buyer doesn’t behave that way. Today’s well informed Buyer has finished its learning before they make first contact with you. If your sales force doesn’t have those tools in place at the moment of first contact, they miss out on a key—maybe even the key—opportunity to differentiate you from the competition.

So the challenge—which I’ll talk about next time—will be how to get those tools ready for a Buyer you’ve never met before.

Thanks for reading.

At the core of any integration between Sales and Marketing is a reassessment of what Marketing really does, what its real value in the enterprise is, and how it should achieve that. So let’s start there.

What does Marketing really do?

It gathers knowledge. It does this as part of its daily routine. That’s how it determines messages. And segments. And positions. And ad approaches.

What is its real value, then, in the enterprise?

Distributing that knowledge.

And how should it do that?

By converting that knowledge into tools that sales people can use. And here, I don’t mean dumping links to articles and reports and white papers (etc.) into a CRM bin. Sales people prove time and again, through their [in]actions, that they are disinterested in slogging through a linkpile to try and find some useful nugget.

Instead, methods—some that are simple and some that are not—must be put in place that enables your selling teams to be more relevant to highly knowledgeable Buyers, and to achieve that relevance more quickly than the competition. And there are tools you can use, combined with your own processes, that can create and deliver tools your selling teams can use. They’re available today—from simple Office functions to integrated multivendor information harvesting, structuring, purposing and delivery systems.

But the first thing I suggest you do is answer this very difficult two-part question:

How much of what my Marketing organization learns and knows would help my Sales organization sell . . . and in what form should that knowledge be delivered?

I’ll offer some examples next time.

We love the fact that we’re not the only people that have uncovered and who articulate the value of what is generally referred to as Sales 2.0. We’re happy that there were many who came before us: it both validates our thinking and makes us part of a credible community of innovation.  Buyers are well informed. Relevance does differentiate. We know it and so do many others.

What we’re doing with Synaptic Selling is building a technology infrastructure, using best-of-breed providers across all the relevant categories, that turns these concepts into tools your selling terams and your Buyers can use to connect, interact and do business ahead of the competition.  Where the evangelists extol the value of smart lead management, we implement WarpSales from our partner Acrelic. Where the evangelists extol the value of expertise management, we implement XpertShare from our partner XpertUniverse–for JIT team creation.

So we love all the people and organizations that have made Sales 2.0 if not a household certainly a boardroom phrase. And we’re excited about driving the next step forward by turning those ideas into action.

A Synapse is best described as the place where cells interact to allow individuals to think and perceive and move. 

That’s what effective Selling is as well: a place where interactions take place. Interactions between members of the selling team. Interactions between Buyer and Seller.  The strength, immediacy and relevance of these selling interactions allows a Seller to achieve first-to-relevance, allows a Seller to decrease time-to-value, and by so doing provides early and persistent core competitive advantage.

 TIME TO RELEVANCE
Much of the early phases of the selling and buying cycles is wasted as the Seller struggles to figure out what the Buyer’s issues, needs and so forth are. In today’s selling environment the S and P of SPIN stand for stall and pause. Your Buyer, who already knows so much about you, is impatient for you to get up to speed and get down to business. The Seller who is first to relevance is first to engage the Buyer in meaningful selling interactions.

This is where top-line value comes from Synaptic Selling.

TIME TO VALUE
This focuses on productivity of the selling team.  The statistics tell us that it costs a company hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring new sales reps to the point where they can achieve quota, and that they have to make that investment to support a standard turnover that approaches 50% a year. Synaptic Selling processes replace the “learning” process which delays productivity with a tool delivery mechanism that facilitates productivity.

 This is where middle-line value comes from.

 COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
These two elements, first-to relevance and time-to value, together create a distinctive and persistent competitive advantage for the Synaptic Seller. By creating a place where interactions can occur rapidly and powerfully, the Seller pulls themselves out of the herd and creates immediate Buyer top of mind at the earliest phases of the cycles.

Synaptic Selling

the process which allows selling companies to deal with buyers who are Well Informed, Demanding, Pre-qualified and ready to do business with a buyer who can respond effectively to their Buying Cycle. These Well-Informed Buyers search for information about sellers, their products, prices, competition, customer feedback, and value, and then they contact sellers directly to engage sellers in their own Buying Cycles. They find most sellers and their sales personnel “irrelevant” and they make quick decisions when they have the information they need. Synaptic Selling is the process of aligning Seller’s Marketing and Sales Organization and incorporating technologies to effectively engage the Well-Informed Buyer and satisfy his Buying Cycle needs in the quickest, most relevant, and competitively differentiating way possible to quickly engage and close the sale. The seeming promise of Sales 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 is using new technologies to drive and close business through the lowest cost and effort channels, but most companies are unprepared for the changes they will need to make in Organizations like Marketing and Sales and in personnel and process to be successful. Synaptic Selling is the practical strategy behind Sales 2.0 technologies.