Arm Your Champion is a simple program to supercharge your B2B sales. During the recent Marketing Made Simple Podcast: How to Succeed With Bigger Clients and Their Gatekeepers, Dave spoke about the idea.
The whole concept is to have a champion within the other organization. You want them to take your information and display it in the right way and give them the tools in order to do that for you going forward. In B2C, you are talking to the decision maker and almost all the time that customer is the end user. However, in business-to-business sales, a lot of times it’s going to be decision by committee.
In essence, we take the information we want to give to our prospect and give it to them in a way that they can then disseminate throughout their organization. We also make sure it’s in a way that doesn’t lose the fidelity, frequency, or nuance of everything that you’re trying to give to them. And that is a significant differential for people who do that well and understand that the person that you are talking to is almost part of your sales team.
One of the things we do at Goalpost Group to help with this is take your marketing message and digitize it. This makes it easy for your champion to share. When you’re talking B2B, one of the primary objectives for anyone that you’re talking to is keeping their job. And you have to make them want to promote you within their organization. But you have to do it in a way that does not say, “Okay, I would like you to stick your neck out for me in a way that is dangerous to your potential livelihood.” By giving them a digital message where they can just basically take what you give them and hand it to the rest of the group, it’s not them advocating for you, it is you advocating for you.
The majority of salespeople go in, have a meeting with the individual that they’re talking to and they just knock it out of the park. But when the person you just talked to goes back to the rest of their job that has nothing to do with you, they lose a lot of the message that you just gave to them. And then the conversation within their organization happens over the course of days through emails and meetings, making you lose the momentum you had gained. Your job is to take that momentum back and find a way to impact that decision even when you’re outside of the room. And by giving them — your champion — a digital version of your sales message, you give them a way to use your exact words, your exact message, and really make an impact on the other people within that decision-making process.
What we do at Goalpost Group is help you create what we call a sales toolbox in order to arm your champion. The sales toolbox really consists of a digital version of the message that includes the knowledge, the value proposition, and the passion. Through elements like video (a key component), we make sure that your message comes off as clear and authentic. And when you arm your champion, you win more business.
Listen to Dave & Dr. JJ Peterson in the Marketing Made Simple Podcast: How to Succeed With Bigger Clients and Their Gatekeepers
