Reading: Using IMC in the Sales Process
Through the Looking Glass: Understanding the Sales Process
Up to this point, we’ve emphasised the importance of getting into the minds of customers in order to market to them effectively. The consumer decision-making process outlines the key stages people go through when making purchasing decisions. Now we’re going to step through the proverbial looking glass to examine that same process from the seller’s point of view.
Why is this helpful? For a sale to occur, the buyer must successfully navigate the decision-making process. To help the buyer do that, the seller needs to provide information and assistance along the way. For some products and services, such as those that employ personal selling, the seller’s role is very hands-on. For other products and services, particularly ones in low-involvement decisions, the seller’s role may be fairly hands-off. In either case, though, it’s helpful for marketers to understand the sales process that happens alongside the consumer decision-making process.
The role of marketing is to work in the middle ground between these processes, providing tools that facilitate the customer’s movement through the decision-making process and tools that help people responsible for sales close deals. When marketers take an IMC approach to this challenge, they can develop timely, well-coordinated marketing tools that effectively support both processes.
The Seller’s Viewpoint
The sales process begins by determining where to focus attention, and then proceeds to relationship building and information sharing, helping prospective customers reach a buying decision. The figure below outlines the five stages of the sales process, which correspond to the five stages of the consumer decision-making process.
Stage 1: Generate and Qualify Leads
The first step in the sales process is to find sales leads. A lead is an individual who expresses interest in learning more about a product or service. However, simply being interested isn’t enough to warrant the seller’s full attention. Leads must also be qualified. In other words, the seller needs to confirm that the lead actually has a recognised need for the offering and the ability to pay for it. Once a prospect meets these criteria, the goal from both the marketing and sales perspectives is to move the person successfully through the decision-making process.
Stage 2: Build Relationship and Discover Needs
At the same time, consumers are searching for information about how to address their needs, sellers are searching for information about the consumers and what they are looking for. At this stage a true buyer-seller relationship starts to form: the seller reaches out and probes in order to understand buyer needs. The seller also begins to position herself as a trusted resource to help address these needs. The buyer begins to understand that the seller may indeed be able to provide what he is looking for.
Stage 3: Present Solution and Resolve Concerns
Once a seller understands the needs of a qualified lead, she can effectively present the product or service as a solution to those needs. She has insight into the buyer and understands which features and benefits are most important. She can position the offering accordingly. It is important to present the solution at the same time the consumer is formulating and evaluating alternatives. Inevitably, this evaluation process will raise potential concerns and reservations about the solution. The seller surfaces these issues and provides additional information to resolve them.
Stage 4: Close the Sale
At this late stage of the sales process, the buyer is focused on securing the best deal possible, while also confirming that this decision is the right one. The seller is taking final steps to ensure that her solution is selected and that the purchase is completed. This may involve offering some final, crowning piece of information to instil confidence in the choice and move it over the finish line. It may also involve negotiating final deal terms, pricing, or providing incentives to finalise the decision.
Stage 5: Monitor and Follow Up
This final stage recognises that closing the sale is a gateway into a new and deeper relationship: the active customer relationship. If the seller wants to retain this customer and potentially sell to them again in the future, it is essential to invest in the relationship and ensure they are satisfied with their decision. The buyer hopes to quickly start enjoying the benefits of the new solution. The seller now takes responsibility for effectively delivering the solution. At this stage, if the seller is using personal selling techniques, there is often a personnel shift, and a colleague from customer service, solution delivery, or another team takes over for the seller. What remains constant is the seller’s vested interest in monitoring the customer’s progress, intending to maximise lifetime customer value.
Alignment between the Sales and Marketing Functions
The marketing and sales functions have common goals in helping to move prospective customers through the purchasing process successfully. Although the sales process is often labelled as “sales,” in fact, the sales and marketing teams collaborate to make the process effective. It is very common for the marketing team to be responsible for the first stage of the sales process, lead generation and qualification. Marketing can also play a crucial role in establishing relationships with qualified leads, identifying their needs and concerns, and providing valuable information as buyers begin to seek solutions to their problems.
Often, the marketing team collaborates with the sales organisation to develop appropriate tools for the later stages of the sales process as well. Solution presentations, product demonstrations, and other informational tools are all marketing communications artefacts. Marketers can ensure consistent positioning, messaging, and brand alignment by working with sales team members to develop tools that support these stages of the process.
When no personal selling is involved, organisations may rely heavily on Web-based tools and interactions to support these stages of the buying process. Tools such as videos, self-running product demonstrations, free product trials, case studies, and product comparisons may provide sufficient coverage to eliminate the need for dedicated salespeople. However, marketing plays a central role in developing and improving these tools, as well as in managing the process of connecting buyers to the information they need. Marketing automation tools can add significant power to organisational websites to assist with this process.
Fitting IMC into the Sales Process
So, where does IMC fit in the sales process? Marketing communication tools serve as the fabric that weaves together the consumer decision-making process and the sales process. A common set of IMC tools is responsible for helping both processes function smoothly. Taking an IMC approach to supporting the sales process helps marketers think holistically about what’s happening on both the buyer’s and seller’s parts; a coordinated approach can make these parallel processes happen more effectively.
Various marketing communication tools lend themselves to each stage of the sales process, depending on the nature of the interaction between the seller and the buyer. Although a marketer could conceivably design any IMC tool to support any stage of the process, there are general patterns around the types of marketing communication tactics that work best at each stage, as illustrated in the figure below.
Stage 1: Early in the sales process, optimal IMC tools are those that cast a wide net to build awareness about both the problem and the organisation’s products and services that address it, as well as its proposed solution(s). This stage is the widest in the so-called sales funnel. Ideally, organisations take a coordinated IMC approach to lead-generating activities, so that advertising, the website, conferences, trade shows, and social media activity all reinforce one another by using common messaging to share the value proposition.
Stage 2: With qualified leads in hand, the opportunity is ripe for IMC campaigns that target leads based on what they are looking for and their progression through the decision-making process. Electronic direct mail is often an essential tool at this stage. Website content should be carefully designed to support prospective customers’ “information search” processes effectively. By monitoring contacts’ progression, the organisation can provide additional materials as needed to keep people interested and engaged.
Stage 3: When a contact recognises that he wants to give serious consideration to the company’s products or services, a very solution-focused set of IMC tools comes to the fore. Tools such as presentations, case studies, videos, product comparisons, demonstrations, and free trial offers are all designed to help prospective customers understand the product features and benefits they will enjoy. These tools and the process for accessing them can be integrated into a cohesive campaign that guides people smoothly from one stage to the next as they learn more.
Stage 4: When the buyer and the seller home in on the final selection process and specific terms for sale, another set of IMC tools can be particularly useful. Testimonials and references from satisfied, successful customers can play a crucial role in helping to finalise a decision. At times, offering sales promotions and discounts can make the difference between signing now vs. months from now. By applying an IMC approach to supporting the entire sales process, this stage can feel like a crowning validation of the chosen path, with all the other touchpoints leading to this point.
Stage 5: As the prospective customer becomes an actual customer, IMC tools like email and social media can help deepen and individualise the relationship. A new-customer-orientation IMC campaign, for example, might provide the kickstart a customer needs to move ahead successfully. Online surveys and other feedback tools can help engage new customers, monitor their experience, and confirm that they are receiving the value they expect.
Case Study: IMC and Zombie Apocalypse Supporting the Sales Process
In 2013, it was the height of America’s fixation with zombies. The hit TV show The Walking Dead was a popular obsession, and the highly anticipated summer blockbuster was the zombie-filled action-horror film World War Z. At the time, Christine Nurnberger was a new-to-the-job vice president of marketing. Her boss had challenged her to breathe excitement into the ho-hum reputation of SunGard Availability Services (SunGard AS), a B2B company that helps organisations improve their IT infrastructure to avoid service outages and plan for disaster recovery.
Tapping into the zeitgeist, Nurnberger hit on an almost crazy idea for an integrated marketing campaign: “What better way to convey our message around the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure than to test it by seeing if you could survive a zombie apocalypse.”[1]
Almost crazy, but not quite. Nurnberger set her team to designing a pilot to test the concept with a small number of corporate chief information officers who were in later stages of the buying process. This first phase of the IMC campaign used direct mail. Marketers sent a flash drive to the CIOs, informing them of the imminent zombie apocalypse and telling them to stay tuned for a backpack of survival materials, which arrived a few days later. Sales representatives followed up with sales calls, and they were elated to find their CIO sales leads enthusiastic about the creative zombie campaign and open to talking business, as well. The campaign provided sales representatives with the ideal opportunity to discuss the company’s offerings and innovations, as well as address concerns about SunGard AS’s perceived image as a stodgy “dinosaur” in the IT world.
The first wave went so well that the marketing team expanded the campaign to additional audiences in ways that impacted multiple stages of the sales funnel:
- All stages: A version of the campaign targeting industry analysts and influencers with a message about the company’s recent updates and innovation. This effort resulted in positive social media posts from analysts about SunGard AS and the campaign. This helped bolster the SunGard AS brand and generate further interest at each stage of the sales process.
- Stage 1: A social media campaign and zombie-apocalypse backpack giveaway were initiated to build awareness and generate new leads.
- Stages 1 and 2: A targeted campaign was developed to generate, qualify, and educate new leads among IT decision-makers, utilising email, direct mail, and Website content.
- Stages 2 and 3: A second targeted campaign focused on recontacting promising sales leads who had stalled during the sales process to restart conversations with SunGard AS. Coordinated IMC elements in this campaign included email, direct mail, personal selling, website content, and social media.
In the following video, Christine Nurnberger explains the approach behind the IMC campaign (including the zombie apocalypse backpack), how her team executed different phases, and the results of the campaign.
- Multichannel Marketing: IT company's zombie-themed campaign increases CTO 3% at the president and owner level. (2013, November 20). Marketing Sherpa. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/zombie-themed-campaign-sungard ↵
