A common problem for many companies is understanding the best moment to sell a product or a service. Experience demonstrates that a customer won’t buy anything until he or she is really ready to do it. If a salesman engages a client too early in his/her decision process, he risks to lose a potential purchase.
At the Philadelphia Tech Week, I interviewed Daniel Tyre, director of HubSpot, who deepened and explained this topic.
The so called “Smarketing”
For many years, marketing and sales activities have never matched, but finally in 2017, thanks to the inbound marketing, they are able to go together. Smarketing is the word Dan Tyre invented to state this new achievement.
Nevertheless sales and marketing represent two activities often in conflict, they are the main weapons of a company. It’s clear if they are able to work together, all the company’s job can be more effective.
Maybe one of the most relevant tasks of marketing is to “prepare” customers for salesmen that have to intervene at the right moment of the buyer journey in order to make him/her switch in favor of a purchasing decision.
The inbound methodology of sales
On January 2016, HubSpot did a survey based on 505 global customers about sales perception. It came out that 60% of customers were willing to be contacted by a salesman during the consideration stage: after they had researched and had a shortlist.
Instead, only the 19% declared they were willing to be contacted during the awareness stage (when they are first learning about the product/service) and 20% during the decision stage (when they have already reviewed their shortlist and are ready to buy).
As Dan said, a salesman has to be smart enough to understand when the consideration stage comes and engage a customer when he/her raises his/her hand.
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