The president of C-Level Connections described, for the server Salesandmarketing.com from his own experience, how managers can learn from their salespeople.
Sales teams daily communicate with customers and sales representatives. So they can provide managers with important information. If you can use this information for your sales and marketing strategies, your chance for being successful will improve. Bonnie Rodden explains this using the example of how a sales team helped a medical software company improve the success of their marketing strategy.
The company was having to deal with a high turnover of salespeople. These salespeople complained that if the proposed deal is not attractive there is no sale. So executives decided to outsource a sales team to improve the situation. The team was instructed to focus on introducing modules 1 and 2 of software into hospitals and not to deal with other two modules. This strategy has been used for years. But follow-up calls shows that there was no interest in modules 1 and 2.
These are a few points from the case.
1) Focus on the right product
As the manager of sales teams you should find ways to make them successful. In the case above, the manager asked the decision makers at hospitals questions. He discovered that most hospitals had already implemented a software with functions of modules 1 and 2 during the past years.
2) The right strategy
The manager also discovered that the decision makers for modules 3 and 4 were not in operations, but in finance. They were not only interested in gaining information about the software, they were actively looking for solutions which modules 3 and 4 provided. The sales team changed the product strategy to focusing on introducing modules 3 and 4 to finance executives in hospitals. Thanks to it, the number of deals between hospitals and sales increased.
3) The right information
Salespeople who were used to dealing with modules 1 and 2 still continued to so on "auto-pilot", often not hearing the needs of the finance executives for modules 3 and 4. Qualified sales professionals were able to provide feedback to retrain sales people there by focusing on the other two modules.
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