Here’s Why the Best Marketers Think Like Salespeople
Not all salespeople are marketers, but all marketers have to be salespeople if they’re to actually sell anything.
I’m not just saying this because I come from a sales background. In fact, I have a very love-hate relationship with my time in sales, but those years taught me a lot about customer psychology and how to be a better marketer.
The landscape in which marketers are vying for people’s attention today has completely changed. Consistent blog publishing is no longer a guarantee that your Google rank will improve. Nor are elaborate email campaigns a guarantee that your conversions will increase.
That’s due to two things.
First, generative AI has inundated our digital spaces with mountains of new content that is simply difficult to sift through.
Second, people’s preferences have long been shifting towards personalization.
If we add to the mix our shortening attention spans, it’s obvious that the marketers who’ll come at the top are those who can speak directly to each individual consumer in a language they understand.
How do you do that? By leaving the backstage and meeting your customers exactly where they are—on the (digital) shop floor.
Salespeople know that storytelling tramps data
But, isn’t sales all about data? It is, but not in the way you think.
When I worked in sales, we had a huge whiteboard in the office where we wrote down how many calls we’d made, how many demos we’d booked, and how many sales we’d made that day and week. We had all that data in our CRM, of course, but this was one way to have the whole team cheer on each other’s wins and to always have a visual representation of what we were doing.
Data is cool.
But, how did we convert the people we talked to?
It wasn’t by quoting the amount of time they’d save by using our product (though that didn’t hurt). And it wasn’t by regurgitating the ROI formula on all the money they’d save (and make!) by using our software solution.
These talks did happen, but they happened at a later stage when I’d already established a relationship and built trust with our customers.
When I talked to new prospects, most of the conversations revolved around their day-to-day challenges.
How difficult it was to pull a report at the end of the month from a gazillion, manually-populated spreadsheets.
How they had to work on weekends to make sure their training courses could start on time.
How labor-intensive it was to print all those course materials for their students.
In response, I told them stories.
A new version of their future where they could pull all that data with a click of button. How they no longer had to work weekends because everything was automated and scheduled ahead of time. How they can use our learning platform to share all their course materials in a digital format.
Marketers who don’t understand these day-to-day struggles of their customers can’t speak to them in such rich detail. They cannot build a narrative around the specific challenges each “persona” faces on a daily basis.
The good news is that you don’t have to work in sales in order to think like a salesperson. What you can do is listen to sales calls (recorded or live), talk to existing customers directly, and read online customer forums and feedback. This will give you a clear idea of what pain points your audience is having, and use those to incorporate personalized storytelling in your marketing strategy.
Salespeople use the product they’re selling
Understanding your customers is only one side of the coin. Understanding your product is the other.
It’s hard to deliver personalized messaging when you don’t know that there’s this cool merge field to automate the document generation process. Or, that customers can use different tags and colors to better organize their assets.
When I worked in sales, I was lucky that our training management solution came with a built-in CRM, so I had to use the product day-in and day-out. Often, I used the pain points customers shared as an opportunity to learn more about the software I was selling. How would I solve that problem here? What are some other ways I can achieve the same thing?
This quest for answers often opened up new questions and introduced me to new cool features I never knew existed. Had I stuck to my high-level demos, it would have been impossible to face my prospects’ objections head-on.
Use the product you’re selling.
Ask your developers for a dev instance as a playground to explore features and functionalities. Talk to your account management team about how they’d solve a certain problem or what their favorite software feature is. You’d be surprised how often this knowledge would crop up when you’re brainstorming new content ideas. And how much it would resonate with your audience.
I never planned on working in sales, but I’m incredibly grateful I had the experience to understand how customers think. When you’re on calls with people day in and day out, you get to learn how to spot the nuances in their tone, anticipate their objections, and, most importantly, understand their personal drivers in buying your product.
That, right there, is the holy grail for any marketer.
Want to learn more about how we deliver highly targeted, personalized content for our clients? Give us a ring, and we’ll happily spill the beans.