The CMO Council recently published a report entitled “Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative.” Among other key findings, the study revealed that “…there is an urgent need for marketing, sales, and channel management to align and embrace technologies, processes, and programs that enable wider and deeper customer conversations, as well as leverage the knowledge, influence, and access of the channel and continuously refine the delivery of products and services in the most painless, seamless, and satisfying way.”

Although that’s definitely more than a mouthful, the points made are important ones and likely resonate with most marketers.

In this week’s #B2BChat, we will share ideas and thoughts on sales and marketing alignment. We will be joined by three of the leading sales and marketing alignment experts, Rod Sloane (@RodSloane), Ardath Albee (@Ardath421), and John Cousineau (@JCousineau).

Some questions we will pose to help guide the conversation include:

• Why is sales and marketing alignment difficult for most organizations?
• Who should take the lead in the alignment process—marketing or sales?
• What are marketing’s main complaints about sales?
• What are sales’ main complaints about marketing?
• What role do leads play in the effort to align marketing and sales?
• Does automated lead management help or hinder sales and marketing alignment?
• Should the marketing and sales teams share common goals and compensation plans?
• How do you measure sales and marketing alignment?
• How can sales and marketing alignment impact the bottom line?

Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on sales and marketing alignment on Thursday, April 15 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern (5:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.

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About the B2Bblogger: Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless, America’s only nationwide wireless equipment dealer and integrator. Kent is the Co-Publisher of a new digital publication for marketers, Social Media Marketing Magazine. He is a published author and has been featured in Forbes, Marketing News, BtoB, Computerworld, and Texas Technology magazines. Kent also serves in advisory roles for the CMO Council, MetricsBoard, and Social2B. You can follow him on Twitter at @KentHuffman.

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In the B2B market, where there’s often a long cycle from first touch to sealing the deal, trust and rapport are critical to the sales process.

Colleagues who can vouch for your quality of service, and be a source of leads, help grease wheels too.

It’s all about creating relationships.

In-person interactions are important — think about how many deals are made on the golf course or in swanky supper clubs — yet you can lay groundwork online through LinkedIn. It’s an ideal platform for developing and maintaining business relationships.

Here are tips on how to leverage LinkedIn for sales purposes.

A LinkedIn profile is a sales pitch for your personal brand

LinkedIn profiles offer an easy way to present professional credentials.

Sales prospects you’ve met with may use LinkedIn to check you out. People may search LinkedIn to find reputable persons purveying your particular product or service.

Tailor your profile with these possibilities in mind. Include relevant keywords to attract anyone searching for your sales offering. List pertinent certifications. Post presentations, and link to a blog (if you happen to write one) to showcase your know-how.

Get recommendations. They’re testimonials for your personal brand. Have co-workers, colleagues and satisfied customers sing your praises. Point to these endorsements if a prospect needs reinforcement regarding your quality of service.

Let the profile to do legwork on your behalf. Add a link to it in your email signature: Without precisely saying so, this sends a message to look you up on LinkedIn.

Don’t just create the profile, work it.

Find out who knows who

One of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn is the connections feature, which let’s you see the network of your personal connections. You can peruse the connections of direct contacts; however, that’s not necessarily the most efficient way to go.

Get into search mode. Look up names of prospects using LinkedIn’s people search, where results show connections to your network.

Advanced search enables hyper-targeting through keywords, industry, company, relationship to your network and more.

People who know people open doors

Whatever method you choose, the next step is to pick the best mutual connection and ask for an introduction. This can be done through LinkedIn’s “Get introduced” wizard. Or, call or email a direct contact to work things out.

A connection may vouch for your expertise, and/or the quality of your product.  This helps establish trust and familiarity with a prospect. Talking about how you’re both acquainted to a shared connection makes for a nice icebreaker and serves as a short-cut to a more congenial relationship.

Note: It’s a good idea to determine how well an intermediary knows your prospect. If the direct connection hasn’t spoken to your prospect in a long time, or they’re not well acquainted, see if there are other options within your network.

Warm-up strategies for a targeted sales pitch

Canned cold calls have a high degree of failure, and for good reason — they’re impersonal and are often irrelevant to the person on the other end of your line. Having background details about a prospect changes that dynamic. Now you can defrost a cold call.

Read a prospect’s LinkedIn profile and use that information to craft a targeted sales pitch.  Look for commonalties, such as having attended the same college or shared certifications (perhaps you’re both Six Sigma Black Belts). Shared experience are opportunities to build rapport.

Read recommendations to glean insights about a prospect’s personality. If you know someone who wrote a recommendation for a prospect be sure to bring it up.

Look into company dynamics

Note how long the prospect has worked at a current employer. Pay attention to who he/she is connected to within the company to get a sense of internal political capital. If the person is relatively new you may have to sell more up the ladder.

If you need to deal with multiple people at the same company look up everyone’s profile. Use LinkedIn’s company pages to see how the business is organized and be sure to view names and titles of others within the company – it’s possible there’s a connection you weren’t aware of.

The more you know about who you’re dealing with the better able you are to map out a comprehensive sales approach.

Build visibility and reputation

LinkedIn Groups enable you to connect and engage with professionals based on common interest, experience and affiliation.

Groups offer advantages right off the bat, including the ability to see profiles of members who are not part of your network, and they’re an entrée to making connections (the default option is all members can contact one another directly).

That’s the tip of the iceberg. The real meaty value of groups is derived from discussions, which you can either create or comment on — either way gets your name out and provides opportunity to showcase expertise.

While you may be tempted to do a hard sales pitch as part of a group discussion, soft-sell is preferential in this environment. Share insight and be helpful. You’ll develop a reputation as a go-to person in your field. It’s another tool for personal branding.

Same goes for Answers, where you can ask a question to your network, or all of LinkedIn.

Engagement is the name of the game

Be prepared to wait a while before seeing success on LinkedIn. As in real life, it takes time to develop trust and prove you’re a knowledgeable engaged participant.

Remember that word engaged. The more you work LinkedIn the more it will work for you.

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About the B2Bblogger
Deni Kasrel is a seasoned (slightly spicy) strategic communications specialist. She helps companies build their brands and engage with communities so they can sell more stuff. Having enjoyed a fruitful eclectic career, Deni is versed in both traditional and digital communications, with special emphasis on content strategy, website development and social media marketing. You may contact Deni via LinkedIn, follow her on Twitter @dkasrel, or visit her blog: The Communications Strategist.

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Of course you are. You have an insatiable appetite for new business.

You know your products and services, features and benefits and unique selling propositions.

The meeting was pre-qualified, you know your competition’s weaknesses and you’ve done enough homework to know the prospect’s needs. You have Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech echoing in your ears. You know it all.

Put the coffee down. You don’t know nearly enough.

Satisfy your hunger this way and you’ll make more sales:

Go into every sales opportunity full of questions, not full of yourself.

You may have all the answers, but hold your powder. Lead your prospect to those answers with great questions first. Quit pitching and listen. Even if you have to count to three, let there occasionally be a few seconds of silence while you think (or at least appear to think) about their answers.

1…2…3 Go. Your response is now personalized and targeted. Your timing is perfect. Your customer is now really listening to you. And you, my friend, are about to close that sale.

Now this little lesson of mine is no Dale Carnegie course, but it’s keeping our B2B marketing agency well fed with new business, so I know it works.

This approach doesn’t come naturally for me. Ask any of my partners, staff or clients and they’ll tell you that I love to talk. Thankfully, I also love to ask questions. I ask a lot of questions. Some are spur-of-the-moment and others are premeditated.

One of the things I like to hear most in a meeting is “Good question.” I actually hear that a lot.

Good questions lead to great IDEAS. And I’ve learned to accept that all the great ideas don’t have to come from me (as much as I’d like them to).

When we’re meeting with a client or prospect, whether we ask the question or have the answer that leads to a great idea, the sale is often a done deal. Then we get busy making the idea work.

What’s your approach to selling? Go ahead, I’m listening.

About The B2Bblogger: Billy Mitchell is the president and creative director of Atlanta-based B2B marketing firm MLT Creative. Located on the east side of Atlanta, GA, with a Northeast office in Rhode Island, Mitchell co-founded MLT Creative in 1984 along with partners Craig Lindberg and Glenn Taylor.

Known as the Idea Launch PadTM for B-to-B marketers, MLT Creative’s services include strategic planning, positioning, brand development, advertising and sales promotions for business-to-business clients.

Posted With Permission From Paul Dunay. Original Post 10-5-2009 at BUZZ MARKETING FOR TECHNOLOGY

I had a chance to interview Jim Keenan, the author of the blog A Sales Guy – specifically to get his take on what marketers need to be doing to help sales more. Here is his take …

1) Why do you think it so hard for marketers to tune into what is effective at the sales level?

Marketing is “passive selling”. I think the problem is execution and rests in two places. The first is with corporate structure. Companies can do a better job at integrating the two functions. Marketing and Sales need to be tightly integrated with the same incentive and management plans. I don’t see this enough. I don’t know too many companies where the marketing people are on the same quota plan as the sales people. Marketing supports sales, if sales fails, not sure how marketing can be successful. The creative component is the other problem. I get the need the need for creativity in marketing, however all too often the creativity gets in the way of the message. If it looks cool, is hip, and wins awards for creativity, but doesn’t increase sales isn’t worth anything.

2) What do you think is the most important thing a marketer can do for you to help you sell?

Create a compelling story. I think marketing forgets this sometimes. I see a lot of slick, aesthetically appealing campaigns, but they lack a story. Marketing has an interesting, and I’ll admit, difficult job. They have to connect with their audience through indirect, passive mediums. As sales people we get to talk to folks directly. Sales has the benefit of engagement. If we say the wrong thing, miss the mark with a point, we usually get a second chance to correct it and get back on track. Marketers don’t have that. If their campaign misses the mark they’re in trouble. This is why marketers HAVE to be compelling story tellers. If they miss the mark they don’t get a second chance.

It reminds me of the failed Nissan campaign in the early 90′s, when Nissan launched the Acura Brand. They didn’t show the car for the first few weeks. They ran ads talking about it coming, and how great it was going to be. But they never showed it. It was a cool campaign; it had intrigue, and was hip. But it didn’t work. People couldn’t act. The story wasn’t compelling. People love cars for what they look like. And until Nissan showed you the car, it didn’t matter what else they said.

Compelling stories gives sales a hook. Think of fishing; Marketing baits the hook, finds the best fishing grounds and sets the hook. They then pass the rod to sales to real it in. A compelling story is the bait. Sales needs good bait.

3) What 3 pieces of advice would you give anyone in Sales?

Sales comprises of three simple things: Access, Influence and Delivery. Anything a sales person does MUST impact one of those. It must get them access to their customers, the people buying what they are selling. It must help them influence those they get access to, if you have access, yet can’t influence you’re dead. It must help you deliver on what you say. If you get access, wield great influence, but can’t deliver, it will be a one time sale. Knowing this the advice I give is;

1. You better know your customers business and industry as good if not better than they do. Sales people are business enablers. They provide companies with the tools and information necessary to run their business. Extensive knowledge of your customers business and industry or market gets you access AND allows you to develop tremendous influence.
2. Be an analyst. When it comes to your customer analyze EVERYTHING, their markets, their strategy, their competition, their reasons for doing what they do, the solutions, the timing, the results, the plans, the people, the motives and then ask WHY, why are they doing it that way, why that approach, why that strategy, why that person WHY . . . ask it of yourself, and your customer. Learn how to get to why. The answer is in the why.
3. Believe in what you sell. Ya, I know it’s trite, but it’s true. When someone believes to the fiber of their bones their solution, product can make a difference, it shows. 3 1/2 Be creative. Do things differently. Look at them from a different lens. Push back on the status quo. Be as creative as you can be. 3 3/4 – Bust your hump. No one is coming. Out work everyone else!

4) How has the Sales function changed as a result of the economy?

It’s pretty simple. Budgets are tighter and sales take more justification. It’s become harder. It’s simple supply and demand. Less money is being spent on fewer things therefore the competition is greater. The sales function itself hasn’t change. It’s the execution of the function that has been impacted. Those that can execute better at Access, Influence, and Deliver will be successful. I don’t think it’s anything earth shattering. The economy is just forcing people to be better at what they were doing in the first place.

5) What impact do you think Social will have on the Sales function?

Social media IS having a huge impact on sales today and will continue to have an even greater impact as it matures. Social Media is changing the game when it comes to access and influence. SM is providing new opportunities for sales people to exponentially grow their sphere of influence. Social Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook give sales people unprecedented access to potential clients at all levels. The ability to connect and establish relationships with clients has never been easier. A new form of access is being created. This new access provides sales people with leads and opportunities once hidden from the world in person to person verbal conversations or the invisible conversation. Access to these “invisible conversations” is game changing. My favorite example of this happened back in April where an executive Tweeted about her “over the top” pushy sales rep and then tweeted 2 hours after about the pushy sales rep competitor seeing the tweet finding her number and calls to “pitch.” Get the full story here. I see cold calling also becoming an antiquated way to connect in the not to distant future. SM is also providing sales people with tremendous information about the customers, and their companies. Tools like Gist will change the information game, providing sales people with real-time, relevant information about their buyers, their companies and their competitors increasing their influence.

Sales is all about Access, Influence and Delivery and social media is changing the access and influence game.

Jim Keenan is a Sr. Sales Executive, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 Connector, an Entrepreneur still trying to get it right, and a PSIA Certified Ski Instructor for Vail Resorts. Husband to the Big E and 4 great kids. In a nut shell, he’s a Sales Guy and life is good!

Originally Posted on October 5th, 2009 at Paul Dunay’s blog, BUZZ MARKETING FOR TECHNOLOGY. Paul is also the author of Facebook Marketing For Dummies . This insightful resource focuses on the strategies, tactics, and techniques necessary to lead your organization into the world of Facebook marketing.