Time and time again we enter an organization only to hear (or maybe we’ve already heard) that there’s ‘a lack of sales & marketing alignment’. Like most relationship problems, this tends to fall on a lack of communication.
We wanted to share the 18 questions that we ask sales teams to complete as part of our onboarding process at Grey Matter. What are the outputs of this? Two simple answers:
- It immediately shows that marketing is invested in helping sales hit their goals (we get instant sales buy-in).
- The answers help us on the marketing side develop and craft our entire strategy. After we analyze and talk through the results, we start to put together content, ads, messaging, change website layouts, etc – all with the goal of help generate more sales qualified conversations and reducing friction in the buying journey.
So, here are the 18 questions that we ask at Grey Matter. Feel free to copy these and put them into your own form, Google Doc, etc. We guarantee that this will start to build a better relationship between marketing and sales.
- Who do you feel your best “buyer” or “target” decision maker is in an organization by title or persona (if you use buyer personas)
- Who are the influencers in an organization by title or persona?
- Describe the typical sales process from engagement through close.
- How much time does a typical sale take?
- List three (or more) objections you hear from prospects. Are these similar across products and solutions? If not, how do they differ?
- What questions do your prospects ask of you?
- What’s the hardest objection to overcome? Why do you think that is?
- List the key product/solution differentiators you have over your competitors? (This may differ from what your website messaging suggests)
- What do your prospects think is the company’s best attribute?
- What frustrations do your prospects feel in doing their job? This might be different from decision maker to influencer.
- What are your competitors doing better than you?
- What are you doing better than your competitors?
- Is your website a valuable tool for you?
- What changes would you make to your website?
- How do your prospects find you? Or how do you find them?
- What do you think marketing could do better to support you?
- What does marketing do well?
- To you, what makes a lead sales-ready?
Interested in a sample engagement from Grey Matter? Get in touch with us today.
