I spent some time last week with Paul Gottsegen, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Office at Mindtree.   Paul is one of our guest keynote speakers at our Sales Enablement Forum in March and Mindtree is one of the fastest growing business services companies in the industry.  Services marketing, let alone services selling is a particular challenge; and thought leadership and storytelling play an important role in ensuring success.  Like many companies, Mindtree has had to learn to elevate its story to align to the needs of business executives. 

                 

Paul and I discussed his upcoming presentation and here is our dialogue.

Peter: How are you helping your own salespeople to better understand their buyers?

Paul. Our buyer personas have gone through a major shift in the last several years. As an IT Services firm, it used to be all about the CIO and IT department. Now we are selling heavily into the line of business, CMO, chief digital officer. To help guide our sales team we’ve created formal playbooks to provide an in-depth guide on how to best approach and engage prospects. These 14 page playbooks give me the depth to cover detailed descriptions of the target buyer persona, what to look for, what to offer based on specific discovery questions. We are also deploying social sales training. Part of understanding the buyer is engaging with them, actually participating in the right Linked In groups, understanding and becoming part of their ongoing industry dialogues, helping to guide the discussion.

Peter. Do you think that you will need less, more, and/or different salespeople in 5 years time?

Paul.  A lot less sales people that are “sales” people – meaning, transactional-types who react to RFP’s or stay within the comfort-zone of what they already know how to sell. A lot more “challenger” sales people who can proactively architect solutions based on deep domain and technical knowledge. This new breed feels comfortable being confrontational, giving the client insights about their own business that they didn’t know, and creating possibilities for growth that they had not yet considered.

Peter. What are the three key takeaways going to be from your presentation in Scottsdale?

Paul.          1.        Refresh your website design, content and SEO in concert. If these are done in siloes you weaken your engine to drive leads to the sales team.

2.       The rise of integrated marketing campaigns puts more pressure on marketing individuals to NOT specialize. Everyone on the team needs to be a marketing technologist, and at the same time be fluent in the art of marketing to develop their own content.

3.       Marketing and sales automation need to be directly tied from the ground up, so that all marketing programs can be measured through the entire sales pipeline.

Want to hear more? Then come to the Forum (we have extended the Early Bird Discount until January 31st, by the way) or place an inquiry with me afterward if you are a Forrester client. As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics.

Always keeping you informed! Peter