In the 1990s, salespeople were the only source of product information. When a customer asked, the salesperson would deliver it, piece by piece, over the length of the sales cycle. You didn’t want to give too much information at once and overwhelm the client but you also wanted to give enough that they would move to the next step.

That’s why trade shows were so popular. Customers could access lots of product information quickly by going from booth to booth. Get a quick demo, grab some customer collateral (and a squeaky toy or whatever was the tchotcki of the day), shove it all in a bag, and then try to make sense of it when back to work.

As the web entered into the picture, many vendors floundered. First they put brochures online and added some company information. Over time, they created a one-stop hub for all things company related, including product information, information about the company, locations and phone numbers, job postings, and so on.

Today, the customer knows as much (or more!) about your products than your salespeople. With so much content available—from web site product info as well as that found in social media—a customer is likely to have accessed much of the basic product information and may also have found good and bad remarks (today’s version of “references”) about your company and its products.

So where does that leave salespeople? Are they irrelevant? Or are they needed more than ever?

The shift: from salesperson as conduit of information to sales team as customer advisor.

The sales team: negotiation and configuration

A salesperson in Maryland is the go-to resource for his customers. They call him daily to explain their problems and get his advice on the solution. Why do they call him? Because he doesn’t sell, he advises. Sometimes his company has a solution for the problem and he explains the details of the solution. If not, he recommends products and services from other companies in the industry. He’s not just a product expert; he’s an industry expert.

Customers know he won’t sell them anything that won’t solve their problems. As a result, he’s consistently above quota and never has that end-of-quarter hysteria that others seem to have.

Customers don’t want a social relationship with you and your salespeople; customers want a business relationship. So the old back-slapping, plaid-suit wearing salesperson is obsolete—and has been for years.

Enter today’s sales team.

In virtually every customer visit, except perhaps in the late stages of negotiation, salespeople want knowledgeable technical help on-hand to answer the client’s product questions. Instead of the salesperson guessing at the answer or saying “I’ll get back to you,” a sales engineer—a product expert--is on-hand to answer any question. (There are several common titles for this role including sales engineer, pre-sales consultant, application specialist orproduct specialist.)

A sales engineer is a product expert in the field. Of course, that means the sales engineer needs to be expert on the products within a portfolio. Most sales engineers are tied to a small set of products. For large companies, you cannot expect a sales engineer to be expert in more than one portfolio or more than a few products. Regardless of title, the sales engineer is an expert on installation and configuration. What title do you have for the role?

Pragmatic Marketing’s annual survey reveals the ratio of salespeople to sales engineers has changed over the last few years. Where once sales engineers were a limited resource, companies with complex products, a direct sales channel, and a long buying cycle are pairing one sales engineer with one salesperson to create a unified sales team. The salesperson focuses on business issues while the sales engineer focuses on technical issues. The salesperson is the expert on buying the solution; the sales engineer is expert in using the solution. The salesperson’s chief skill is negotiation; the sales engineer’s is configuration. The salesperson spends more time with the economic buyer; the sales engineer spends more time with the technical reviewer.

And they’re now demanding a new set of tools from product marketing.

Product marketing: from reactive to proactive

Where once product marketing managers responded to requests from individual salespeople, today’s product marketing is much more proactive. It starts with the buying cycle. Instead of  “how do we want to sell,” the question is “how do customers want to buy?” That means we look at all deliverables in the context of the buying cycle and from the customer’s point of view.

One product marketing manager analyzed the most recent set of successful sales and was surprised to find that all sales had one thing in common: a standard product demo at corporate headquarters. So the marketing team created a “day at corporate” program which included 45 minute segments with the president, CTO, and product manager, followed by a standardized product demonstration offered by a product specialist.

Remember the days when the president, CTO, CFO, product manager, and a few others spent all day in the customer meeting? While it appeared valuable to the sale team, it was an incredible waste of precious resources. This standard day was low-impact on any of the individuals supporting it—since no one except the sales team spent more than an hour in the meeting.

And sure, the sales team groused at first that they needed a tailored demo using the customer’s data, but they changed their tune when they saw the solid results.

The important part was that clients were sure to see the best bits of the product in a top-notch presentation offered by someone who did this for his living. Not a product manager with a ton of other things to do; not a developer who wanted to show off the “cool” stuff.

The demo center was funded in the marketing plan as a program, staffed by a full-time demo specialist, and always ready for a killer customer meeting.

Will this work for you? Do some win/loss analysis to find out.

By interviewing the best salespeople and by analyzing both wins and losses, today’s product marketing manager looks for patterns of success to develop a comprehensive sales toolkit that aligns the customer’s buying process to the sales team’s selling methodology.

Do you need an ROI calculator? How about a web-based demo? These are solutions to sales problems. Turn it around. Talk to some salespeople and customers to learn what information is needed and when. Then brainstorm an ideal solution—a repeatable solution--with your marketing team. Maybe it’s not a demo; maybe it’s an ebook. Maybe it’s not a sales slick but a customer-focused product information portal.

A company analyzed the way people buy their product and created a series of web-based tools for the salespeople to use with clients. Because they were web-based, the sales team could walk the client through one or more of these over the phone. Because 100% of their successes involved a product trial, they skipped product demos and went with “try it before you buy it.” That meant the sales team moved quickly to the trial phase with phone calls to check on the client’s progress. Just because you have salespeople in the field doesn’t mean they can’t do some high-value selling over the phone, using services on your website.

Ebooks are a popular tool these days because they can be downloaded and shared within an organization. In effect they do 24-hour selling while the sales team isn’t around.

Here’s another idea: imagine articulating a list of specific problems that your product solves. (You should already have this if you’re doing requirements and positioning correctly.) Now get the sales team to go down the list of problems with the client: “Check off the problems that you’re encountering.” Now, your sales team is helping the client identify their problems and can tailor the product configuration to the specific problems that the client experiences. Isn’t “what problems do you have?” better than “which features do you want?”

Today’s sales team combines business-savvy with technical-savvy. It’s hard to find both skill-sets in a single person. So let’s partner a salesperson with a sales engineer to create a winning team. Product marketing empowers this type of team with sales tools and customer collateral that teases out customer problems so that the sales team can focus on the right solution for this client.

Steve Johnson is a recognized thought-leader on the strategic role of product management and marketing. Broadly published and a frequent keynote speaker, Steve has been a Pragmatic Marketing instructor since 1996 and has personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams on strategies for creating products people want to buy. Steve is the author of the Product Marketing blog.