Introduction to Sales Support

1. INTRODUCTION
LESSON 1

2. OVERVIEW
 Hitting your financial goals in sales means hitting quotas. And you can’t hit
quotas without a great sales team. How do you create such a winning team?
 If your sales reps are struggling to meet their quotas, you might think about
hiring new sellers, motivating your current staff, or bringing in expert
consultants. While these tactics can sometimes spur positive results, they are
often expensive and disruptive.
 The true leaders of industry are discovering that sales support is where critical
gains are made. Research shows that top-performing companies have
a 30 percent higher level of sales support than other companies. This little-
known fact is what separates great companies from the good.
 And this little-known fact makes sense: sales support exists only to help sales
reps make deals. That’s all they do, and they’re cost effective. They perform
their role by making connections: preparing sellers, nurturing leads, and
providing training. Sales support perform a variety of tasks that add up to faster
sales cycles, lower costs, and increased revenue. (Thomas, 2019)

3. What is Sales Support?
 Sales support refers to a variety of functions that help
your sales representatives focus on actually selling and
closing deals. These functions differ per company,
industry and sales team. And, they can be done by hired
associates, outsourcing teams, productivity tools, and –
worst case scenario – by the sales representative
themselves. While sales support is not the factor that
closes deals – it is crucial and important to your sales
operation.
 As your sales rep puts his or her best foot forward and
gets in the proverbial door, sales support has already
done the background work. It is the administrative,
research and customer support work that cracked that
door open, in the first place.

4. There are two major types of sales support that you need to employ: helpers and tools. Simply put,
these are people, tools and documents that you’d want to have available for your sales team to use.

5. 1.Sales Support: Helpers
 Helpers are people or functions best done by people. They require a good level of expertise and
decision-making skills that only trained men and women can provide.
Their sales support functions include:
• Lead generation
• Product training
• Customer services
• Active market communications
 Lead generation: Sales support finds, qualifies and filters leads for the sales representative to
contact. This can be through several channels, such as the company website, social media,
professional networks, email campaigns and online data mining. This already cuts a lot of time off
necessary research work.
Lead generation can be outsourced to qualified service providers or done internally by a sales
associate. It depends on the specificity of your requirements. The more specific and specialized your
target market is, the better it is for you to retain some of your lead generation functions within your
team.

6.  Product training and customer services: By making
product materials and customer support readily available
to your prospect, you are helping them make their
purchasing decisions.
They can read your product specifications and manuals. If
there are questions, they can reach out to your sales
support team. Nothing beats access when it comes to
tipping the scales in favor of your brand.
 Active market communications: This refers to your
public outreach, be it in the form of promotions, paid
advertising, PR press releases and other marketing
strategies. Market awareness is requisite to supporting
your sales team. The more aware the public is about
your brand, the easier it becomes to sell.

7. 2. Sales Support: Tools
 The tools of the trade are documents and software that help sales reps get their job done.
 This could be as simple as letter, presentation and video templates that are easy to personalize,
with a few clicks. Or, you might draft help documents on your brand’s benefits, and answers to
common questions and objections.
 Software tools include pre-programmed calculators and computer-aided designs (CAD). You might
even have a website, which gives your reps access to secure pages for the private viewing of their
prospects.
 You can also invest in printed paraphernalia to
leave with your prospective clients. This is still
employed in certain industries, such as real
estate. However, it may be redundant in some
cases. If you already have a website with requisite
information, product manuals and the like, why
waste your budget on leaving a paper trail. You
just need to make your market aware of these
readily accessible online materials.

8. 2. Sales Support: Tools
 A comprehensive customer relationship
management (CRM) system, integrated with a
reliable CTI system, is today’s indispensable
sales support power tool. CTI makes your team
more accessible and responsive to your
prospective clients. While CRM can help you
track the progress of each lead, at each point of
contact.
• Print and digital sales materials
• Sales web pages
• Email campaigns
• CRM
• Sales automation tools

10. Sales Support Job Duties:
• Generates and processes new sales leads as necessary
• Answers phone calls from customers and deals with problems as they arise
• Takes sales information and puts it into an easily readable format
• Follows up with customers to make sure that they are satisfied with a particular product
• Makes sure that sales persons are on track with sales goals
• Meets with other departments to make sure that sales people are doing their job correctly
• Provides any necessary data or reports to the sales team
• Exerts attention to detail, as customers may have the same problems; reports the problems as
necessary
• Arranges appointments with clients and sales team
• Acknowledges customers by responding to emails, texts, and phone calls
• Updates all contact information for clients
• Deals with any customer complaints and resolves the issue as necessary
• Arranges travel and accommodations for any sales person that is meeting clients outside of the office
• Does any necessary administrative work including filing reports or presenting sales team with
necessary documents
As successful enterprises have proven, sales support is a critical ingredient to a
successful sales team.

11. Sales and Marketing
 The difference between sales and
marketing is that sales focus on
working directly with prospects to get
them to convert, while marketing
focuses on sparking interest in your
products. Essentially, marketing is the
first step to getting leads interested,
while sales take that interest and
nurture it.

13. Sales Marketing
Process
Focus on sales process, how to
interact with customers, how to
answer questions, and provide
relevant information
Focus on explaining what the product
or service is, how much it costs, who is
most likely to be interested, and where
you can reach those users
Goals Hitting sales goals or quotas Promoting your product, company or
brand, communicating its value, and
attracting leads or earning sales via
marketing efforts
Strategies Phone calls, networking, promotional
events
Paid ads, social media, SEO
Prospects
Working with known prospects
Obtaining new prospects
SALES VS. MARKETING

14. Process
 The processes of sales and marketing is slightly
different. Think of marketing as the precursor for the
sales team.
 With the marketing process, you establish basic
information like who you are, what you offer, and how
much it costs. You establish your brand and
showcase what you have to offer your audience and
you explain how you can solve their problems and
the pain points you address.
 In the sales process, you focus on taking the
information your audience already has and trying to
provide them with additional information, as well as
answer any questions. You focus on providing strong
selling points, personalized solutions, and making
pitches to convince leads to convert.

15. Goals
 When you look at sales vs. marketing, you’ll find the goals are slightly different. With sales, your focus is
on earning conversions. Your sales team works on nurturing prospects towards becoming customers.
 Marketing goals are slightly different.
 While marketing can focus on sales, its main goal revolves around promoting your company, product,
service, or brand and communicating its value. Communicating this value does help you earn sales, but
you need to establish brand trust through marketing first.

16. Strategies
 When you look at the difference between
marketing and sales, you’ll notice the strategies
are different.
 Sales strategies focus on making direct contact
and connections with your prospects. You use
strategies like phone calls, promotional events,
and networking to try and engage prospects to get
them to convert. These are known as outbound
strategies because you reach out to prospects.
 Marketing strategies, on the other hand, focus on
getting prospects to reach out to you. You use
strategies like paid ads, social media, and SEO to
get prospects to reach out to you about your
products or services.

17. Prospects
 Another difference between marketing and sales are prospects.
With sales, you know your prospects.
 You know who’s interested in your products or services, from their name to their phone number, so
you can quickly contact them and provide them with information to sell them further on your
business.
Marketing, on the other hand, focuses on obtaining new prospects.
 You have an idea of who is in your target audience, but you don’t know the specific people. Marketing
focuses on reaching those most interested so that you can turn them into prospects for your sales team.
 The misalignment between sales and marketing is directly caused by a lack of transparency and
communication. Over time, this evolves from small miscommunications to big issues. At its boiling point,
sales and marketing might not even talk to each other anymore. Tension is a sign of misalignment, and
this results in poor close rates, overspending on marketing materials, and low ROIs.

18. Slow to Market
 When your sales reps can’t quickly follow up with prospects, their close rate will go down.
You may recall that 35-50% of all sales go to the first sales rep to respond. If your sales reps
must wait 2-3 weeks to get the materials they need, then they’re missing opportunities to
close sales. This lag between ordering materials and receiving them is generally due to
misalignment between sales and marketing.
Misalignment with Client Needs
 Sales within a distributed sales organization are almost always consultative. Using a custom
pitch is a proven way to increase your close rate. The study mentioned earlier showed
that 77% of buyers want their sales reps to integrate custom data or insights into their
pitches. But, this doesn’t happen when there’s weak sales support. When there’s inadequate
sales support, reps tend to rely on their best pitch instead of taking a truly consultative
approach. This is because custom materials take longer to receive, are more complicated to
create, and add hassle to the process.
"Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days."- Zig Ziglar