Sales is about relationships. Your sales team can boost your company’s image by blogging, contributing to trade publications, and presenting within your marketplace.

Use the Sales Team to Uncover Success Stories

Success stories are a factor in closing business and attracting new customers. When a potential customer can relate to one of your other clients, they can visualize themselves doing business with you and understand the practical implications of doing so.

Success stories and case studies are an essential part of your marketing strategy. Salespeople are in the perfect position to collect them.

Sales teams are most often in front of clients. They hear the positives and the negatives of the clients’ experiences.

Sales reps should be trained to dive deeper with their customers, collecting success stories. They should find out why clients chose to do business with your company, and what keeps them continuing to do so.

They need to capture and quantify the results that your client is getting thanks to your product or service.

Of course, your sales team focuses on selling. Writing success stories might not necessarily be in their job description.

Bring a marketing employee or a consultant on board and have the sales team feed her leads as to which customers should be interviewed and what the highlights of their stories are.

Make sure the sales team is familiar with these stories so they can relay them either in conversation or in writing to potential customers.

Another reason to outsource this task? Sometimes a third party will reveal different (more honest?) assessment of how the customer really feels.

Present Your Sales Team as Marketplace Experts

Sales is about relationships. Your sales team can boost your company’s image by blogging, contributing to trade publications, and presenting within your marketplace.

Training sales reps in the marketplace and helping them establish expertise can be just as valuable as cold calling skills and negotiating tactics.

Today’s buyers aren’t just seeking to do business with companies they know and like. They’re also looking for marketplace experts who add value to their purchase, eventually helping the customer to become more successful.

Seek out opportunities for your sales team to speak at conferences where they’re delivering practical presentations based on real marketplace successes.

Alternatively, encourage sales reps to participate in webinars—with or without customers—that educate your prospect base.

Get your sales team writing and commenting on industry blogs based around your customer success stories and using products and services to solve problems.

Your team doesn’t need to be doing the writing; perhaps someone else on staff is available to ghostwrite for them.

At the very least, ensure that sales reps are sending out the articles, positioning themselves as resources and experts to help generate leads.

Expertise Adds Value

For sales teams that typically focus on prospecting, the shift to spending time becoming experts can be counter intuitive.

However, by becoming experts, sales reps are looked at not only as successful business people. They are also resources who are laser-focused on helping clients solve problems and make their businesses better.

Eventually, they’ll find that more sales will result more easily and leads will be flowing more naturally.

Of course, much of this leverage requires for you to invest in your sales team. Provide them with writers or webinar tools, take selling time out to go to a conference, or send out a useful article.

The pay-off is huge!. By establishing them as an expert, you’re expanding your company’s reach and ability to close sales.