One of the life experiences I credit most for teaching me about marketing was the five years I spent in sales. I came to that job in a roundabout way 鈥� a division of Wells Fargo Bank wanted a paperless office and asked me to make that happen. I knew nothing about technology (and ultimately failed to create paperless-ness) but I quickly fell in love with computers.

My boss at that company helped too, giving me some of the best career advice I鈥檝e ever received. He told me 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got to love the core business you鈥檙e in or you鈥檒l never get ahead.鈥� I hated the core business I was in (banking), so I cut bait and started trying to find a job as a salesperson in a technology company.

My first assignment was a sales 鈥渙verlay鈥� position that focused on winning more business from the current customer base. I loved it and grew revenue by 300%, but the reps weren鈥檛 happy that someone else was making money from their customers. Management didn鈥檛 want to irritate the reps, so they eliminated my position and offered me a job in marketing.

Fast forward ten years, and in another company I spent four years in charge of both sales and marketing teams.

So while I consider myself a marketer, those five years in sales helped me see that several aspects of the way we differentiate the two roles is illogical and costly.

Consider this:

1. Sales and marketing are both about persuasion. The sales person鈥檚 job is to persuade one buyer at a time, while the marketer鈥檚 job is to persuade markets full of buyers.

When I was in sales, it was marketing鈥檚 job to get a buyer to notice us, and then it was my job to persuade that buyer to choose us. This was a great division of labor, because it鈥檚 way more difficult to persuade a market full of buyers than one at a time. But today鈥檚 buyers have changed the rules, navigating 60% to 80% of their decision before they talk to a salesperson. Companies that haven鈥檛 made the shift to persuasive marketing risk elimination before the salespeople have a chance to do their job.

2. Salespeople have the opportunity, permission and training to listen to buyers before they build a strategy to persuade them. Marketers have none of these things.

As a sales rep, I learned to dedicate the first part of every sales call to listening to my buyer, gaining real insight into that account鈥檚 needs and expectations. Then it was my job to describe our solution in a way that established a perfect fit between that buyer鈥檚 needs and our product. Go tell sales management that you want their reps to stop listening to buyers before they sell to them, and they鈥檒l look at you like you鈥檙e crazy. But everyone expects marketers to do just that.

3. Sales people have to optimize their time to persuade buyers to buy now, but marketers have to optimize their investments to build pipeline for the future.

By the time I started running sales, I completely understood the importance of marketing. 聽However, it wasn鈥檛 long before all of my time and attention shifted to the salespeople. Faced with the urgency of meeting this month鈥檚 numbers, our longer-term investments suffered. I learned that it鈥檚 really difficult to balance short and long term priorities, and that marketing metrics need to focus on results that impact the next quarter or next year, even if this seems less tangible.

4.听 While there are dozens of things that every good sales person learns about each buyer, the ability to be persuasive hinges on just 5 key insights.

When I decided to help marketers understand their buyer personas, I knew that many of the things I learned about buyers in sales only worked when I had the opportunity to build a strategy to persuade one buyer at a time. It was easy to see that tracking all of these distinctions about buyers would cause a lot of confusion and far too many different strategies. So I started thinking about what really helped me to be a persuasive sales rep, and that鈥檚 how the 5 Rings of Buying Insight became the foundation of buyer personas.

5.听 Despite everything you鈥檝e heard about price, the company that wins the buyer’s trust wins their business.

The solutions I had to sell were invariably more expensive than our competition. So we didn’t win on price. We competed for the buyer鈥檚 business by being the best listeners and using our insights to persuade buyers that we were best qualified to meet their expectations. Now that buyers can avoid sales contact for so long, a lot of that responsibility belongs to the marketing team.

I think it鈥檚 fair to say that when I was in sales, we had a lot more impact on the outcome of a deal than the reps I know today. And because this change is driven by buyers who have ready access to the information they think they need, this trend is unlikely to reverse itself. It’s time for marketers to gain the deep buyer insights that have always been the foundation of successful sales.

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A: What color did you choose?

B: How did you choose the color?

C:There are great apartments for rent right now. Have you thought about moving?

Answers vary on this selection (more on that later). But it’s clear that the question needs to follow the woman鈥檚 lead, that we would never script our conversation in advance of the social interaction. Imagine the confused, annoyed or bored response from this woman if we asked 鈥渟o what do you think about that new play that just opened?鈥�

Most people are perplexed when I ask them to conduct unscripted buyer persona interviews. These are the same people who will happily show up in any social situation, listen for threads of topics that others find engaging, and guide the conversation to mutually relevant topics.

Why not take this same approach with buyer interviews?

While it is definitely more taxing to develop questions in real time, the pressure to do so keeps us listening intently. And each time we base a question on a point that the buyer has recently made, our rapport with the other person builds. The buyer might even tell me, a perfect stranger, something he hasn鈥檛 told anyone else.

Pre-defined questions can only address topics that we found interesting before we started listening to the buyer. Worse yet, we are unlikely to learn anything new, having missed the opportunity to probe deeply on an interesting point..

This approach is especially critical for win/loss interviews. We need to get buyers talking at length about their decision criteria and process. We aren’t going to discover any actionable insights by writing down the buyer鈥檚 short answer — that we lost the deal on price and features, or won it because our sales rep is such a great guy. We need much deeper insights into how and why the company made this decision.

For instance, if the buyer told us that one of the triggers for this decision was that our solution was easiest to use, we might follow up by asking the buyer to describe what, specifically, they found to be easy. Or we might ask what level of user would find it easy to use, and what training they expected that user to need. Another line of questioning might reveal details about how they assessed the solution’s ease-of-use.

Returning to your interaction at the party, if you selected question A (what color will she paint her apartment), you have just learned that your new acquaintance likes light yellow, which might be interesting if you are selecting colors of paint to carry in your store, or what colors to feature in a marketing campaign for paint.

Question B (how did she choose the color?) is a great follow-up question, or likely your best first question, as this should trigger a story about the way this person thinks and makes decisions. This question will probably get you the answer to the color too.

Question C (did you know there are some great apartments for rent?) is changing the subject, a terrible technique when you need to build rapport, and one of the major reasons that interviews should never be scripted.

Unless you鈥檙e marketing home improvement products, you shouldn’t care about anyone鈥檚 choice of paint 鈥� buyer鈥檚 decision processes vary dramatically based on the products, services and solutions they’re considering.聽 But we want to have an agenda, perhaps three-to-five topics that we hope to explore, and not a structured questionnaire, if we want buyers to tell us what really persuades them to make decisions about our category of solutions.

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