What I Learned at the First-Ever Sales Assembly Summit

I had the pleasure of being in the room with sales leaders from Chicago’s top tech companies this week at the first-ever Sales Assembly Summit. It was an opportunity not only to learn what it takes to drive growth in an organization, but I wanted to hear the perspective of sales leaders on the topic of aligning with their marketing counterparts. I was pleased to see that the alignment conversation was one of the first sessions of the day.

Below are some of the points that stood out to me during the summit that were relevant to aligning Sales and Marketing:

• If Content is king, then Context is god. Marketing provides Content and Sales provides Context (via John Barrows)
• We have to be able to translate marketing messaging to sales messaging to be effective at closing more customers.
• Both Sales and Marketing must continue to remind the customer why they bought in the first place to provide good CX and increase the probability of renewal (via Brian Study)
• Be proactive in thinking what does day 2 look like for the customer to ensure good CX
• Sales and Marketing should get together at least weekly (via Isabelle Papoulias)
• Doctors are the best salespeople – they ask us questions and based on our response they make an assessment and tell us what to buy (i.e. medication, test, lifestyle change, etc.) (via Wade Burgess)
• Average sales cycles continue to increase
• Sales leaders must understand the sales process and what is going on throughout the entire pipeline. They must also understand at a high level what Marketing is doing to help support pipeline revenue.
• Marketing should be involved in the onboarding process for sales new hires and specifically should be contributing to the sale playbook where it makes sense such as messaging, value prop, customer personas, target profiles, etc. (via Dave Mattson)
• We must be more transparent when selling to customers today as they have access to more information than ever before. The ideal customer rating is between 4.2 and 4.5 out of a 5.0 scale as customers find this range more believable and credible. (via Todd Caponi)

Looking forward to next year’s event. Thanks to Jeff Rosset and Matt Green for cultivating a great event and community here in Chicago!