Rule 25

Separate Education and Sales

Customers know that sales reps are not trained or paid to provide objective, comprehensive education

You don’t pay or train your sales reps to provide objective, comprehensive education about your products. Even your marketing team is ill-equipped to provide it. Yet, that is exactly what customers need early in the sales cycle, and what so many reps and campaign managers end up trying to do. The result is an ill-informed customer who is distrustful of the information received from vendors.

Customers aren’t settling for this, of course. Empowered with online resources and communities, customers are turning away from information provided by vendors. They now complete an entire buyer’s journey of their own information gathering before you ever recognize them as a prospect.

Informing and influencing that buyer’s journey is critical, especially if you are selling in a significantly new product category. There are several alternatives for educating outside the marketing and sales cycle. Before deciding how you’ll do it, interview customers about where they do their research and whom they turn to for advice about your product category.

• Customers are the best third-party source of objective information. Provide means by which prospects can connect with your existing customers online in user communities and business networks, and offline via webinars, at industry conferences or other events.
• Analysts and industry pundits are also objective, trustworthy sources. Identify the most influential ones, and make sure they have accurate information about your company and products and are easy for customers to find.
• Online forums are great places to gather unbiased product and vendor information. Unfortunately, such forums often contain a mix of accurate information and rumors, hearsay, and mistakes. To help keep information accurate, find out what online information sources your customers use and what’s being said there about your company and products.
• Participate regularly in the conversation. Have product management (not sales or marketing) answer questions about features. Encourage and provide time for professional services and support people to weigh in on questions. Identify the most active members of the forum, and provide them with up-to-date documentation and information—not marketing collateral! Rather than seeking to control these third-party interactions, you can leverage them as education vehicles simply by enabling them and participating in the discussion. That means not only talking, but listening (see rules 15 and 17 on soliciting customer ideas).

Shift education away, and ahead of, your lead generation campaigns and the sales cycle. Your expensive direct sales resources will save time. Your sales cycles will get shorter. A better-informed market will be more confident in information about you because they have received an objective, comprehensive education.