How to Modernize Your Customer’s Sales Experience. With Daniel Rodriguez [Episode 508]

Daniel Rodriguez, VP of Marketing at Seismic Software, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Daniel says many organizations have up-to-date marketing, and 2017 websites, but offer a 1997 customer sales experience. Sales reps take outdated decks (that aren’t even customized for this customer) to their intro meetings.

Reps put themselves at a disadvantage by not using existing data about the customer in their intro. Reps may feel that they can’t access the data. The data needs to be on their phone and in Outlook.

It has to be easier for a rep to do the right thing than to do the wrong thing. Daniel suggests that the organization should provide tech to conform to the rep’s existing behavior.

Andy says the issue is that sales is in an unhealthy condition. Some behaviors need to change. Tech should make it easier to make needed changes. Daniel talks about the benefits for ‘B’ and ‘C’ players of a platform like Seismic.

Modeling after the ‘A’ players may be a bad idea, as far as the process goes. ‘A’ players are given more leeway to go outside the process, due to their overperforming.

‘A’ players use their strengths. Is a ‘B’ player able to become an ‘A’ player, working within the process? Stage advancement is a main metric of success. Study which materials are most effective at each stage, for any rep to use.

Knowing the correlation coefficient for material effectiveness is a challenge, by the large number of moving parts in any stage. Data suggests there are some things you should use that will be helpful, because they fit this case.

There are other materials shown by data to be ineffective or negative. Reps need to be able to find the right content. Sales and Marketing need to discard content that is not good, and make good content findable.

Marketing controls the overall message, but there is a targeted message for each sale. Sales wants control over that. Seismic gives content tools to Marketing and Sales, including required industry regulatory compliance language.

Seismic transforms your message and sales collateral into strategic assets for your business. Marketing is not about billboards anymore, it’s about handing leads to sales. Now ‘enablement’ ties the CMO to revenue gen. and rep success.

Seismic is used in Marketing and in Sales. It provides interaction with digital content. It allows screen sharing, and selling by iPad, to provide hyper-tailored content and follow-up collateral for that lead, in real time.

Just before a sales meeting, a rep opens the Seismic app, finds the intro presentation, opens it, and runs a wizard that customizes it through CRM for the specific account, with a fitting case study. Daniel explains the full process in detail.