Why Positioning Fails to Make the Jump from Marketing to Sales (and what to do about it)

Feb 07, 2024

Great B2B positioning will die inside the company if it doesn’t successfully make the jump from marketing to sales. Once you’ve worked through your positioning inside the company, the most common way for that positioning to fail is to fumble its activation in the sales team. Making that transition work is harder than it looks for many reasons. I will cover the four biggest stumbling blocks I see in the companies I work with.

1/ The team falsely believes every sales pitch needs to be completely customized for the prospect.

Some teams will resist attempting to build a story because they believe every pitch should be completely customized for the prospect they are talking to. In my mind, this thinking ignores the basic fact that we can’t customize a sales conversation until we understand the prospect’s situation.

In a typical B2B enterprise sales process, the prospect is generally “lightly qualified” before they have a first “demo call” with an account manager. This qualification is minor and typically consists of ticking a set of macro-qualification boxes in terms of company size, industry, a problem we can solve, tech stack, etc. What we aren’t doing yet is discovery. Discovery is where we go deeper into the customer’s situation and figure out what they are doing today to solve the problem, what other solutions they have tried, what other vendors they are considering, what technical/security/compliance constraints they might have, how they define success, what the project timelines are, etc. This happens in the first call with the sales rep. So in a first-call situation, we don’t have enough information to fully customize a pitch. Sure, we might be smart enough to show a bank our banking case study instead of our retail one, but we don’t have the details we would need to go much beyond that. We could attempt to do discovery in the first part of the call and then customize our pitch on the fly in the second half, but let’s face it, that would be very difficult to do - particularly for a new sales rep.

In B2B selling, there is a massive difference between what happens in a first sales call vs what happens in subsequent sales calls.

Most enterprise software does not get sold in the first sales call. In the first call, we are doing two main things. We are doing discovery and helping the prospect understand our value enough that they agree to do a second call with us. On that second call, we are now armed to show them something very customized to their situation. But we don’t get a chance to do that if the customer fails to understand our value in the first call. Therefore, beyond gathering the information we need for subsequent calls, our job in the first call is to put our best foot forward and deliver the very best story about the value we can deliver for the types of customers we typically serve.

In general, Consistency trumps customization in very early sales interactions.

What we should have in a first call is a way for sales reps to consistently communicate our point of view on the market, our differentiated value, and why they should choose us over the alternatives. World-class sales teams do this very consistently in the first call - earning them the right to a second call where they can give the prospect a more customized view of how the company’s offerings can meet their specific needs and constraints.

2/ Sales never agreed with the positioning in the first place, so they pushed back against it or ignored it altogether.

In my experience, any team inside the company that doesn’t understand how we developed the positioning and the thinking behind it will not accept it. The slides can be pretty, and the story can be tight, but if the sales team (including, importantly, sales leadership) doesn’t believe the positioning is great, they simply won’t use it.

The obvious way to fix this is to have sales involved in creating the positioning in the first place. Not only will we benefit from the insights the sales team has from working with prospects as they navigate a purchase process, but we will also have the opportunity to ensure that their objections are handled and they buy into the final positioning.

3/ Marketing (or worse, an outside marketing agency) has created a sales pitch that fundamentally doesn’t do what the sales team needs it to do.

Most marketers have never been in sales, and most folks in sales have never worked as marketers. In larger companies, the teams often don’t even interact that much.

In my experience, the marketing team doesn’t always understand the sales process and, in particular, how sales folks do discovery, handle objections, and move the deal to the next step in the process.

Unsurprisingly, It’s not uncommon for marketing to create a pitch or other materials for the sales team to use, only to have the sales team either heavily modify those materials (to the point where the basic positioning has been lost) or ignore the materials altogether because they don’t meet the needs of the sales team. This is especially bad when an outside marketing agency attempts to build a pitch deck where not only are they ignorant of the sales team’s requirements, but they have only a very surface-level understanding of the product, the market, and the differentiated value that should be the core of the story. The sales decks I have seen produced by marketing agencies are gorgeous, fluffy nonsense.

A world-class sales pitch will not be created by a team of folks who have never pitched a customer.

Like the previous point above, we can avoid this by making sales an integral part of building and testing the pitch. The team needs to understand the discovery requirements in the first call and ensure there is a natural spot to do that in the pitch. The same goes for handling unspoken objections. The team needs to start with a sales pitch structure that allows them to easily do that as a combined marketing and sales effort.

4/ The team falsely believes that every persona across a purchasing team deserves their own variation on the positioning and sales pitch.

We know that there are typically a handful of people involved in a B2B purchase decision, but that doesn’t mean every persona needs their own special sales pitch. We need to remember the different roles that stakeholders play in the purchase process.

Many of the personas involved in a software purchase care very little about the value that the software will ultimately deliver to the business. Their job in the purchase process is to avoid costly mistakes. The IT group is often involved to ensure that the software can integrate with other systems and is easy to manage. Purchasing is there to make sure that the company follows a process that gets the company the best contract possible. Security and legal are involved to ensure that nobody gets sued or ends up in jail.

Then we have “the champion,” tasked with making a purchase recommendation to an “economic buyer.” These two personas care very much about the value the product can deliver to the company. In the early stages of a deal, we desperately need the champion to understand the value we can deliver that our competitors do not. If we can’t make our case with the champion early in the process, we won’t reach the later stages, where the other personas get more involved.

Our first-call sales pitch needs to directly meet the needs of the champion.

Part of getting the champion hooked might mean giving them a preview of how we might handle the objections of some of the other groups. For example, the champion might need to know up front that we meet their security or compliance requirements before they can put us on a shortlist. But in many cases, we won’t have to deal with the objections of the other deal members until after we are officially in consideration for a deal. At that point, part of our job is to arm the champion to get that agreement across the buying team.

Sell champions on value, but be prepared to help the champion handle the objections of the other personas.

If we get the champion to agree to move forward with us, we can then work on what we need to do to handle the objections of the other personas.

Not everyone agrees with me on this stuff (or anything else for that matter!) - what do you think? Sound off in the comments!

Positioning with April Dunford

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