What advice would you give someone with a marketing background who's about to go into sales?

Marketing involves priming the sales pump or the "psychology of the buying *consideration*" where sales involves the execution of completing the buying decision...

Those are two very distinct but complimentary skills sets.

There are two different personality traits involved here. Understanding the message and message medium to motivate consideration of the sale is the critical skill set (IMO) for a marketer. However on the flip side the sales execution involves bringing a prospect completely to a purchase decision and then finalizing the deal. This requires much more individual or personal persuasive ability. While a good marketer usually has some idea of motivations, drivers, personalities, and general psychology they don't have to have the moxie to keep on keeping on even after you've experienced several rejections.

IF a marketing guru has the right moxie then they would likely make a great sales person. But in my opinion they would probably struggle with closing the deal. It would probably be good to team a good marketing person up with a moderately strong closer to give them someone to study from.

Below are several recommendations I'd have for those making the jump from marketing to sales.

Keep watching (and learning from) your numbers
As a marketer, you’ve been used to watching the metrics behind your campaigns, the conversion rates of your lead generation waterfall, and so on. Use those same metrics to manage your own sales pipeline and performance. How many leads do you need to create an opportunity? How many return calls to a prospect does it take to reach them live? How do you manage your own daily activity to hit the pipeline growth and closed business goals in front of you?

Take the customer’s perspective
Marketing doesn’t work unless you’re speaking the customer’s language, offering benefits that solve their problems. There is no more acute place to recognize this than the sales floor. Marketers may occasionally get credit for producing materials that don’t hit the customer mark, but sales professionals rarely get that kind of leeway. Taking the customer’s perspective is the only way to efficiently find and close business as a sales professional.

Values first
Lead with features and you’re dead in the water. Talk about product details too early and you’ll lose credibility with the prospect, let alone their business. Lead with values. Benefits. Outcomes. Responses to the customer’s needs, problems and priorities. Ask questions to identify or confirm these if need be, but let your sale be about the value first.

Writing skills are crucial
Successful marketers are also typically good writers. And the written word is still a critical tool for every sales professional. It’s how they persuade and sell not just in email and written communications, but it comes across in how they organize their spoken word as well.

Practice social selling
Not enough sales professionals have tested, let alone mastered, the art of finding buying signals and qualified prospects on the social Web. Use your knowledge of social channels and identifying the keywords, phrases and qualifying statements/questions by prospects to gather a steady stream of new future sales for yourself.

Nurture marketing = Nurture selling
Most prospects are qualified but not ready to buy. This is the basis for lead nurturing programs on the marketing side, but the same methodology applies to your sales pipeline. Deals will take much longer than you think (or expect, or hope). Prospects will take longer to re-engage, get back to you, get in the mindset to buy. Be patient. Work a bigger pipeline. Stay with them. Because when they do close, you want them closing with you.

Learn from the masters
Sit down with established, successful sales reps. Ask questions, sure, but more importantly watch them in action. Listen to them on the phone. Watch how they manage their day. Learn from their focus, their instincts, their discipline.

Art, your clarification helps immensely! The first advantage I see is that you would be selling to people who have similar jobs to the ones you've held or reported to. That's great, because you understand your customers' pain very well. Make sure you leverage that in all your communications.

Since you've launched the product, you actually have to fill the role of both the marketer and the sales person. So use your marketing hat to work on lead generation with inbound and content marketing. That will help reduce the amount of time you have to spend knocking on doors.

To get started with outbound sales, I'd recommend that you start out calling on the people you know in the industry - friendlies - and do informational interviews to discuss your new product and get their ideas for how to market it (position them this way - it helps reduce the concern that you're going to try to sell them, and more people will take the meeting if you're asking them for help and advice.) In each meeting, ask them who they think you should target, and get a list of company names (and referrals or introductions whenever possible). This can help you pull together your initial targets to start calling on. As you get started, you'll learn more on every call that will make you better on the next call. Use the prospects' questions and your answers as road maps for creating more content. Marcus Sheridan shares some great tips here: http://blip.tv/marketing-update/hubspot-tv-can-your-pool-man-blog-with-guest-...

marketing and sales are so intetwined their isn't that much of a differentiation. In marketing - you push your message and encourage others to take notice of you and what you have to offer. In sales, it's the same. You are essentially marketing and selling yourself because people buy people. So in sales, the message you are pushing is you (not the company or product 1st - that is later). You are presenting you first - so you are the package/the message you are pushing because you need to develop a relationship with your prospect and they need to come to know and trust you. So you are selling you first. You are pushing the message of what I call "The Package You" (what you are about as a person - your character, ethics, loyalty, professionalism, leadership, positive attitude, solution provider, willingness to learn, willingness to go above and beyond anything to assist your potential client/customer, etc etc.

So they should just go in the new area with confidance and excitement and just be them. All the marketing skills are really quite transferable to sales once you build the repoire/relationship because then it's all about packaging both the company and the product/service. So then it's marketing (creating the idea in their mind that your service and product is useful to them if they have a need for it).

Remember that you got points in marketing for figuring out how MARKETS worked. In sales, you'll get points for figuring out how PEOPLE work. In professional services sales, success is often measured by how well you can wrap the resources of the organization around the client to deliver the outcomes they deem most important. One more thought: sales is an experience you deliver to your prospects and clients. Make sure the experience has value, not just what you're selling!

I would point out that sales is very definitive and clear (zero - 1: sell and no sell) vs marketing which is less directly accountable/quantifiable. Often times, the two are confused. fact is that you can market brilliantly, but not be able to sell as as the end of the day in sales, someone has to buy and pay for what you have vs just hear about it. I have seen titles such as Sales & Marketing which worries me as these are quite different beasts!

Art -

The best answer to that question takes into account specifics about (a) the person, (b) the sales role, and, among other things, (c) the company he/she will represent as a salesperson.

Short of having this information, my advice would be:

1) Prepare to work systematically. Sales is an occupation dedicated to the conversion of sales potential into actual sales, which requires a process and its systemic application. Such a system must be balanced and allow for revisions / improvements.

2) Be flexible. Unlike a static marketing message, sales practices involve dynamic interaction and are most effective when adapted to yield favorable results from a specific situation.

3) As in marketing practices, collect, assess, and apply data in order to create something you can leverage. Excellent salespeople know how to use data, which is an essential skill that has value throughout the sales process, and may begin with being able to gain a prospective buyer's interest to meet with you.

4) Maintain a positive attitude throughout the sales journey. Many experiences in sales can be disheartening and disillusioning. Aim to be a valuable resource. This necessitates having a positive attitude.

5) Develop the skills most relevant to your sales process. You will know what these skills are in the same way that you learn which marketing messages are most effective - tests. Develop and test sales strategies.

I hope this helps.

-Steve

These have all been really insightful -- and diverse -- answers. I just wanted to thank everyone for your responses.

One to one sales is, along with the proper tools, just the verbalization of a product's marketing positives. If you are good at verbalizing and forming positive relationships with customers that will last, you will do very well in sales.

Art, is that what is happening in your life or are you asking in general? If you are actually facing that transition, you should provide more detail about your target industry and role. I think you would get a stunning amount of good advice from this bunch....

Dale:
Thanks for the question. I've already received an amazing level of advice, but here's the situation: I've been a marketing writer (advertising/corporate video/websites/sales training) for most of my career, and have recently developed two products -- one for delivering online role play training, and one which brings the "elevator speech" approach to online presentations.

It's become pretty clear to me that I can't just write about it and hope some customers come to me. Instead, I have to identify individual prospects, generate leads, and then actually sell it to my target customers (trainers and brand managers for the first, and mid-size companies who don't quite have the budget for video for the second).

However, I've never really had to do the knocking on doors thing. I do, however, have extreme admiration for the people who are out there everyday seeking out customers, dealing face to face with rejection, creating the occasional acceptance, and making those split-second adjustments that make sales so different from marketing...which always gives you time to think.

So there you have it. Thanks very much.

Take your content marketing mindset along with you: use your company's expertise to help prospects do their jobs.

Art, I suggest watching a TED Talk from Simon Sinek. He is the author of Start with Why, which I use for introducing people to sales. http://bit.ly/vYimPS This will especially apply since you directly developed your products.

Having read these responses, Art has generated a million dollar value from his simple question. My advice to Art on a tactical and personal coaching basis is that Art will also have to learn market share on a different and more personal level. In short, I think the challenge of shifting from marketing to sales is the transition from the group metrics to the personal individual relationship.

The marketer is attempting to persuade and influence groups and statistically change their perceptions, increase their knowledge, impact their actions and affect the outcome. The sales person is asking people to take a specific course of action. Buying is a binomial decision. Based on the law of averages, 50% of the time, your client will not take your recommended course of action.

If you can keep your personal goal in sales to be focused on helping an individual achieve their goal through a personal action, you can survive the grind of sales versus the grind of marketing. The personal no in sales is much more of a personal issue than the statistical implications of no in marketing.

My advice is that you need to learn how not to be frustrated or dejected by no, whether you are knocking on doors, cold calling or selling the best product at the best price, to your best friend.

I would also suggest that you develop your sales mind set to be helping your customer achieve their goals. In this light, a no, a do nothing and even the purchase of a competitor’s product or service is a positive sales outcome for you! If your sales objective becomes how to achieve your sales goals, instead of your customer’s personal goals, you will probably find the grind of sales and no, to be much less rewarding than the analytics role in marketing.

In this era, it's great to have a marketing background for a sales role. The two are entertwined like they haven't been in the past. But that being said, understanding marketing doesn't fully lead to understanding sales. I'd recommend reading some of the best sales books available, as well as training a bit to really get sales techniques down. The marketing will come in handy later.