Why every marketer needs sales experience Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 23:47, in Labels: co-operation of sales and marketing, sales

One of the key tasks of a good salesperson is to take advantage of a proper sales process. Within this process, especially important for good results is to identify latent and explicit needs of the customer. These emerge from situational and problem-related questions and create a bridge between the customer's business and your solution - a bridge you and the customer need to pass to reach a mutually acceptable agreement upon your future co-operation.

I've written earlier how important it is for a company that its marketers do not passively sit behind their market research reports, plans and campaigns. They need to involve themselves in the creation of relevant offering to the customer. They need to participate in the sales process by not only generating interest towards the brand but also convincing the customer of the value they are offering. This way, salespeople will have a little more easier time finalizing the actual sales negotiations.

So marketers are involving, but why do they need actual sales experience? The first argument is obvious - it's a lot easier to sympathise across functional boundaries when you know what it's like at the other side. Secondly, good salespeople continuosly train their analytical thought processes and solution building skills by asking good questions subsequently identifying latent and explicit customer needs. A marketer can devise so much better marketing messages and research that much more intelligently if he/she is aware of how to pose proper, insight-gleaning questions for the customer.

The same logic applies even if the marketers have little opportunity to involve themselves with the customers. In this case, the domain of knowledge are the salespeople, who have a holistic but tacit understanding of the customer. The one sequence of the sales process can be repeated internally, where marketers approach and ask the salespeople for the same information. Here, internal selling occurs and salespeople are sparred about their market knowledge at the same time. This leads to the third argument. It helps to share a common language between marketers and salespeople, and marketers are more able to learn the language of sales if they have the experience.