Sales v engineers: how a Sales Director can solve the war

If you are Sales Director of an industrial company, does this stalemate sound familiar?

• The potential client base wants to talk to your engineers, but your engineers don’t want to talk to anyone – so their information needs aren’t being met.
• Your Sales personnel want to talk to the potential client base, but they want to talk to the engineers – so sales continues on with dreaded cold calling.
• Your sales personnel and your engineers can’t even talk to one another anymore – so they continue on in different directions.

So where does that leave you?

It leaves you with three loose ends. A little like that the gripping shootout scene from ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’, where each part of your salesforce is dying to fire but the system is so dysfunctional it’s not pulling the trigger for fear of the outcome.

Perhaps the solution is in understanding the real problem. Quite likely it has nothing to do with the personnel. It could just be the loose ends.

Do away with them and the sun suddenly begins to shine. These are things I have seen before.

First of all, the salesforce. They’re stuck cold calling from a list. It’s a job they hate and its low percentage returns are totally demoralising. Turn this around and eliminate cold calling, step by step, by replacing it with a lead generation system. Generating leads is the future and any companies that have done this find their sales staff have all but eliminated cold calling.

Secondly, get the engineers talking to the market even without one of saying a word. How? Through a content-based public relations platform. It’s the ideal way to engage the potential market with the imprimatur of your technical experts without taking them outside their comfort zone.

Thirdly, and you don’t have to do much at all to achieve this, is to make sure engineers and the salesforce are united. You don’t have to do anything for this really because if Steps 1 and 2 have been done correctly the rest just falls into place.

And whether your marketing is in-house or external, you will find its job now has the politics largely removed from the equation and it can easily manage the lead generation and PR machines as an asset for both.

It’s a fundamental shift, facilitated by software platforms which we all only dreamed about 10 years ago, and it’s a cost effective way to ensure you don’t fall off the map in the modern world because it is far too easy to fall behind.

If you would like a little more information, that is non-jargonistic and very easy to read and understand, please download our free e-book. It will make it a lot clearer for you.