I’ve mentioned before how today’s long sales cycle has changed from a time when just demonstrating your qualifications and product benefits could often close a sale. Nowadays successful sales often come from learning more about your prospects than they know about you.
Listening needs to hold an important place in your marketing and sales organizations’ practices. I’ve seen organizations try to put a lead nurturing system in place and fail because they either don’t have the ability to listen and respond to the information that comes in or they have that ability but don’t use it nearly often enough. (Generally, however, it’s the first: a “lead nurturing” system that doesn’t listen.)
How do you know if your system supports listening? There are two major areas to look at. The first is always how well your technology is supporting your sales and marketing teams to listen. For the foreseeable future, a human being will always listen better than a computer. Is a sales opportunity triggered in your system when a lead clicks through an email and visits other pages on your site? (Do you know whether they did? Does a live person get that information?) Or if they took the time to watch a demo? Are they flagged if their title is at the executive level? There are patterns that can be watched for, and activity that can be captured that makes it easier to create meaningful conversations with that lead.
If you are interested in nurturing your leads, the tools must go beyond just sending an email and tracking opens and click-throughs. The second place to look is for the listening built into your technology. Do your lead records grow as you gain more information from a prospect? And, are you prepared to react accordingly – for example, automatically sending them information relevant to a web page they’ve visited 10 times? Is it easy for a sales rep to tailor a value proposition to a particular prospect’s interests?
These days, great sales & marketing is as much about how you listen as it is about what you say.