Many of today’s B2B-focused sales and marketing organisations are implementing or considering Marketing Automation solutions - and with good reason. The new generation of software-based solutions from organisations like Eloqua, Marketo and others offer the potential to improve marketing effectiveness.

But if your organisation is engaged in high-value, complex and lengthy buying cycles that involve multiple stakeholders, marketing automation by itself can never establish the level of prospect engagement required to build strong relationships or achieve the all-important “trusted advisor” status.

That’s because - despite the clear importance of internet-based research - the most powerful influence on the B2B buying decision process remains the quality of the sales conversation. When your prospects are trying to understand how best to solve an important business problem, they are looking for an informed conversation.

Whilst their digital body language can provide some important clues about what is important to your prospect, automated workflows inevitably have their limitations. They may work in low-value environments with simple decision-making processes, but when multiple stakeholders and significant budgets are involved, there is no substitute for a proper fact-finding discussion.

Effective sales conversations provide valuable learning opportunities for everyone concerned. Your initial contact point within your prospect can find out more about the issue they are trying to address and how best it might be solved? They can ask questions, and reflect on the answers - and refine their thinking as a result. They can start to form an opinion about the helpfulness and competence of your organisation.

Effective sales conversations can help you learn more about your prospect, to find out more about the true cause of their interest, to understand the impact of the issue on their organisation, and to discover who else might be affected by the problem or involved in the decision. They can help you to arouse the prospect’s curiosity, and make them keen to continue the dialogue, and to want to learn more. This is particularly important when you are promoting a disruptive innovation that depends on market education.

Conversations allow you to establish patterns and to correlate information from a variety of key stakeholders within the prospect organisation. They allow you to explore subtle nuances and to respond to the prospect’s current perspective on the problem. Perhaps most important, they help to establish your organisation as not just knowledgeable, but also as a good potential partner and as someone they can trust to give them good advice.

It should be clear that this cannot be accomplished through a rigidly scripted, “20 questions” call plan. It depends upon your organisation being professionally represented by knowledgeable, enthusiastic people that can hold well-informed conversations and build productive relationships with your prospective customers. But they can make the difference between a poorly qualified lead that (no matter what the lead score says) your sales people may be reluctant to pursue and a fully qualified, sales ready opportunity.

On the other hand, the combination of marketing automation with effective sales conversation is helping a growing number of ambitious B2B-focused organisations to increase the value of their sales pipelines, shorten average sales cycles and improve sales win rates. It’s an area where Clarify has accumulated significant expertise and developed a number of unique methodologies.

If you’re thinking about marketing automation - or want to get more out of your existing investments in that area - we like to think that our experiences might prove useful. Why not call us on 0118 9126869 or drop a line to info@clarify-uk.com and let’s find a suitable time to talk about improving the quality of your customer conversations.