Conversational Marketing

Chapter 12 How Sales Teams Can Create a Better Buying Experience with Real-Time Conversations

It’s time for salespeople to face the facts: The days of the “hard sell” are over. In a world where product information is freely available, and where people have come to expect real-time responses from businesses as the norm, and where owning the demand for a product or service has become more important than owning the supply, it’s clear that the traditional sales process has been rendered obsolete.

Today, helping is the new selling.

Think about it: Today, if you lock up white papers and other resources behind lead capture forms, potential buyers can simply go look for that information somewhere else (like on a competitor’s website) instead of wasting time filling out your form. Today, if potential buyers try to get in touch with your sales team and you force them to wait weeks, days, or hours before someone actually follows up, it’s very likely those potential buyers are going to slip away (and end up turning to a competitor who responds to their inquiries in real time).

Over the past few years, there’s been a growing disconnect between the experiences sales teams have traditionally been providing and the experiences modern buyers expect. And this is especially the case in the world of B2B sales.

Today, most B2B sales teams are putting B2B buyers through an experience that bears no resemblance to the buying experiences those buyers are having elsewhere in their lives as consumers. ...