The best way to connect with marketers? Don’t sell them, educate them!

I had a lightbulb moment during a recent conversation with a prospective client.

“Educate me,” the prospect said. “Tell me what the best companies in the world are doing.”

Those words validated my long-held belief that the members of a company’s sales team need to be educators as well as sales people.

As I see it, any sales pitch will have a much better chance of success if it’s accompanied by basic education about the product, the service, the technology – or anything else that helps the client address their pain points and improve their understanding of the industry.

This is especially true if you’re selling a product or service the client hasn’t used before.

They may not know it exists, or that they need it, or how to use it. Which means they don’t even know what questions to ask to begin a conversation. You need to begin it for them.

And even long-standing customers familiar with the product want to know what’s new, what’s trending, and how to use the product more efficiently.

So for best results, sales people should be putting a lot of effort into educating clients and prospects.

Some customers are open to it.

My prospect made it clear from the outset that he viewed our conversation as a learning opportunity.

He’d been in marketing a long time, and he’s made it his policy, he said, to use encounters with new people as an opportunity to seek out information about cutting-edge stuff: emerging technologies, the latest best practices, the most current innovations.

He’d recently been asked by his boss to drive efficiencies in the creation of marketing campaigns, and he was eager to learn how he could harness the latest tools, technologies and practices to do that.

So basically his (very pragmatic) question to me was: How can your tool help me meet my objective of driving efficiencies in marketing?

He basically left me no option but to educate him.

We talked for two hours over coffee – about how Knak could help him meet his goal of improved efficiency, but also about what was happening beyond Knak in the industry in general.

Was it a formal sales pitch?

No.

It was a lesson for the prospect on how to solve the particular problems he was facing.

Not every prospect is as open to change as the one I had coffee with.

Getting people to consider something new is not always easy. You may need to challenge a few assumptions.

It can sometimes be difficult for our salespeople to frame the conversation in the right way, especially when it comes to challenging a prospect.

There are ways around that. For example, the sales staff can have someone like me do the challenging – someone whose monthly income does not hang on making a sale.

It’s not always easy to get people to consider new things. As I like to say, people may want change, but they often don’t want to change the way they do things.

Yet in business as in life, growth requires leaving your comfort zone. Growth and comfort cannot coexist. And growth comes from learning new things.

Turning salespeople into teachers

To learn, you need teachers.

Which brings up another point.

I love being a teacher; it excites me. And because I’m a marketer, I feel it comes naturally.

But it may not come quite as naturally to everyone on our sales team.

That is why we are training our sales team to be problem-solvers for our customers. And to be problem-solvers they have to become educators.

First, they have to be experts in what we sell. We want them to be familiar with the nuts and bolts of our tools so they can educate customers in how to make the most of Knak.

And second, we want them to see their role as helping as well as selling.

That means they have to understand what it’s like to be a marketer – what challenges marketers face, what they want to achieve, what it’s like to be in their shoes on a day-to-day basis.

Prospects, we now know, don’t just want to talk to salespeople, they want to talk to experts who can guide them. They don’t want just a sales pitch, they want to learn something. So our sales people are spending a lot of time educating our customers on why Knak is the way of the future in marketing.

There is a side benefit to educating our customers and prospects.

Education doesn’t just spread knowledge, it also builds trust.

If we can solve a problem for them or introduce them to someone who has just overcome a problem similar to theirs, they will be inclined to view us favorably.

If we can teach them what questions to ask, it will help them understand products and tools better.

And if we talk to them about the industry and technology in general, we can become a trusted partner, a go-to resource when they have questions.

That sometimes means helping solve problems that have nothing to do with Knak. But that, too, builds trust.

The point is, it pays for people in sales to put a lot of effort into educating the people they would like to sell to.

All of us, in everyday life, look to the people around us to educate us and answer our questions.

Planning a vacation? You will tap your friends for tips on where to go and what to do.

Wondering how to be more efficient at work? You’ll sound out colleagues.

And sometimes even an idle conversation with a family member can lead to you discovering a new product, app or service that improves your life.

In other words, we are constantly learning from the people in our network.

I want to make sure Knak is part of our clients’ network. I want them to know they can turn to us to keep on top of things.

And learning goes both ways. We can learn a lot from our clients, too, when we are part of their networks.

So we all benefit when we lean into our role as educators.