A Candid Interview with Mike Richardson

Q1: What do you think are the most significant changes to sales and marketing in the past five years?

A: In general, the main change is probably the way prospects self-educate themselves. With so much information online these days, a prospect can get a really good understanding of any product or service before contacting the vendor. Prospects dig deeper into the aspects relevant to their business before making formal contact. Traditionally, a sales person would have helped them through the education process, but sales don’t get that opportunity any more.

The marketing team must now make resources available to “prime” a prospect. By the time a prospect has read an e-book or looked up the best materials, they are much more informed. They almost become self-sufficient experts. This puts a different onus on sales representatives when it comes to converting them into customers…….

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An excellent article full of some very profound insights into how companies are conducting business in our era of ubiquitous, always-on information availability. One statement really caught my attention – “Sales teams don’t educate prospects any more”. We find that this is absolutely key to running a successful business today. It makes no sense for your valuable sales personnel to be spending countless hours educating prospective customers when they could be focussing their energies and time on getting the business in. There’s nothing more disheartening for someone in sales to have invested a huge amount of resources in a prospect, only to have them decide that they aren’t interested. It’s far better to get them to the point where they realise that your offering is a good fit for them, and if marketing can coax them to this point using electronic media then the sales team is in a much stronger position to close the deal.

I would imagine that the Hubspot Connector helps to get more of the right information about a sales opportunity and with better information valuable sales resources can no doubt also be allocated better.

Grant Chapman