CodySnider.com

If you're like most marketers, you're probably struggling with the best ways to help your salespeople have more meaningful conversations with customers and prospects. Perhaps you believe your salespeople sell too tactically, offering piecemeal solutions and missing the opportunity to serve in a more trusted advisor role. Or perhaps you have great salespeople, but their messages are inconsistent across the field and don't reflect corporate strategy and vision.

Effectively articulating any company's true business value is a challenge for even the best salespeople. So what percentage of your sales organization can engage customers in discussions that carry them from high-level challenges down to individual solution areas, without leaving the customer lost in translation?

When connecting the dots from marketing vision to sales execution, you can use these five quick tips for creating scripted conversations to help salespeople more effectively communicate your company's business value to customers and prospects:

Ever wonder why your favorite restaurant chain has the same interior color, design and background music? Have you ever considered why elevator music exists? Why is it that every Body Shop store smells the same?

Marketing has an answer - and as a professional, you can use it to strengthen your company.

Marketing is largely a game of getting the customer to perceive your product or service in a certain way. Perception occurs when one of the five senses - vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch - is affected. In this way, marketers use color, sound, flavors, scents and surface to shape your perceptions. Customers (and site visitors) will react to these things; even if they are unaware they are doing so.

But with these perceptions in mind, marketers can better execute their strategy.

You can learn how to leverage the five senses to improve your marketing efforts. Here's how:

Networking. Fishing for contacts. Mining for prospects. Networking is critical to your business success. In every survey my company has conducted over the past five years, the best source of new business was found to be "word of mouth." And the most successful way to accomplish this is by personal contact--talking up your company, talking to other professionals who may need your services--networking yourself and your business. Whether we like to or not, we must learn how to talk with others about what we do. We must learn how to develop contacts and informally exchange information. In other words, to succeed in business today, we must learn how to network.