To be successful, professional services marketing and sales groups must work closely together, and the business development representative must be carefully trained. In many industries, the sales cycle for new customers into the service organization is long. For example, if the selling organization is offering accounting or legal services to business owners, they may need to wait for existing contracts to expire or other business drivers which will prompt the potential customer to consider switching providers. Marketing should work with sales to determine trigger emails and other marketing automation assistance to keep customers warm in between phone calls. Marketing will also need to help create sales collateral – electronic, on-line and printed – which support verification and trust features which may be identified by potential customers as important to them. The business development reps will need to be carefully trained on how to define and activate marketing automation, and how to use sales collateral.
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