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At yesterday’s annual ITSMA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Barbara LaGuarida, marketing communications director of Lucent Technologies, explained why and how Lucent has turned to a conversational marketing approach to increase sales effectiveness.

Lucent Worldwide Services, a $2 billion business with 10,000 employees, realized that to sell services it needed more of a consultative than transactional sales approach. The new senior sales executive told Barbara that he saw one major obstacle to being able to move to consultative selling: lack of tools.

“I was shocked,” said Barbara. ” I thought he’d say the issue was talent or training. But tools? After all, we had 1,00o different pieces of collateral available to the sales reps.”

After analyzing what existed, Lucent found that its sales tools were not helpful in facilitating conversations with customers, were weak on differentiation, and were too product oriented. The company overhauled its sales tools, going from 1,000 different documents to just three Engagement Marketing tools:

1. A customer discussion document for engaging prospects in meaningful conversations. This document focuses on the problems that Lucent is seeing in the prospect’s industry, which gets the prospect talking about his or her view of the issues and problems. Information about Lucent is at the back end of this selling tool. At least a third of the presentation is about talking about issues. Not selling service solutions.

2. An executive proposal that highlights the customer’s key business challenges and Lucent’s proposed solution The purpose of this brief document is to make it easy for the prospect to shop it around internally to get feedback and build support.

3. A statement of work — a short, clear document linking Lucent’s proposed solution to the prospect’s objectives and problems.

While Lucent has only been using this conversational marketing approach for a year, the results are impressive.

• 56% of the sales reps say that the find the customer discussion document a valuable and effective tool.
• 51% of the sales reps say they can customize the customer discussion document without a sales engineer, which is a big deal in technical sales situations.

Other results:

• Lucent has reduced sales cycles by 20%
• Sales and marketing productivity is up 20 - 30%
• The expense to revenue ratio for services marketing communications has improved 20%

Prospects don’t want to have to sit through a PowerPoint all about a company and its solutions. They do want to talk about their issues and needs, and see if you’re the type of company that they would feel confident in working with to address those needs. Follow Lucent’s lead and create conversational marketing sales tools that make it easy to get people talking. You, like Lucent, will shorten your sales cycles and reduce the cost of sales support.

Lucent marketing measurement

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