Using Customer Value to Integrate Sales and Marketing

Marketing and sales activity often seem disconnected and misaligned, with marketing accused of lacking understanding of the customer’s reality. Direct sales activity is becoming increasingly focused on large key accounts, demanding new sales skills. This course uses concepts of customer value to integrate and align marketing and key account sales into a seamless unit focused on driving business growth.

You will learn how to apply the latest thinking on customer value to your marketing strategies, communications activities and lead-generation campaigns. You will also walk step-by-step through a value-based consultative selling process, providing new insights and enabling you to identify opportunities for close collaboration between marketing and key account sales.

Delegates will have a clear understanding of how customers perceive value, how companies create this value and how marketing and key account sales can work together to drive business growth. The result will be closer alignment between marketing’s demand-generation activities and key account retention, cross/up-sell activities and new customer recruitment.

For marketing practitioners and key account managers. New-to-role delegates and delegates with limited experience of marketing and/or sales will benefit, but the course is best suited to marketing managers and key account sales team leaders who can build on the course content to champion integration and alignment in their own organisations.

• Customer needs and perceptions of value.
• Strategic vs. ‘table-stake’ needs.
• Needs based segmentation and targeting.
• Value propositions: theory and practice.
• Value proposition positioning and messaging.
• The sales pipeline: the roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales.
• Creating the customer value proposition (CVP).
• The value-based consultative selling process:
• Preparation.
• Needs identification.
• Framing and positioning the CVP.
• Demonstrating value.
• Close/contract.
• Close-out: integrating and aligning marketing and sales activity.
  

This is a practical ‘hands-on’ course where delegates will spend much of their time working on case studies and engaging in role-playing exercises. The exercises will be ‘generic’, designed to demonstrate principles, but delegates will be encouraged to think about how these same principles apply to their own businesses.