For Senior Management, it is often difficult to quantify the impact of poor alignment on corporate performance. But let’s face the facts: what does a stop to the battle between Sales & Marketing have on offer?

• Sales cycles get shorter
• Market entry cost goes down
• Lower Cost of Sales

Apart from considerable cost decrease opportunities, working together as a team directly impacts revenue. Think of aligned brand and product messages enhancing the company’s reputation in the market. Or increased profits when Sales follow up Marketing campaigns more effectively.

Everybody will agree that Sales & Marketing are supposed to work towards a common goal: maximising the company’s potential. Now what to do to close the gap between the 2 departments? Here are a few tips to get started:

• Introducing a common language is an absolute must

A common language enables development of goals and messaging that will be shared over departments and which every individual agrees upon. Also, it will become much easier to introduce aligned quantification and qualification criteria, e.g. for leads and campaign goals/results. Sales & Marketing will be able to correct and enhance each other’s work, and work together to achieve shared business goals.

• Aligning Sales & Marketing with customers’ readiness to buy

Most often, Sales & Marketing are driven by internal processes rather than the customer’s buying cycle. They will be giving company and product presentations, demo’s, sending proposals, etc … too often without any result. Sales & Marketing should learn together to understand the mental phases your customers are going through to come to a buying decision. These common insights will support Marketing to deliver sales-ready materials and Sales to better perform in the field.

• Introducing an experience sharing platform

Sales will learn from each other and Marketing will get a better grasp of what is really going on in the field. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contacts in the buying process. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.

Curious to learn about your experience with Sales & Marketing battles!

The most often used funnels nowadays are still based on subjective input from sales. It’s amazing to see how many managers are using such a funnel to predict revenue and use it as the basis for budget exercises.  This is the funnel that most people use yet it is a very outdated model. This type of funnel is an artificial invention taking the eye away from the prospect and puts the focus on sales actions.

The fact that doing something is putting the opportunity on a given point in the funnel is a totally wrong assumption. The thinking is flood. You can give company and product presentations, demo’s, send proposals even when asked, etc without achieving anything. The question is am I doing something which corresponds with the readiness to buy?

Here are the biggest funnel mistakes:

• input based on subjective sales rep input. The gut feeling of sales people in terms of funnel management are seldom correct because:
  • they are to closely involved to have an overall view
  • most sales are to much influenced by the opinion of their ’sponsor’ and/or last sales action
  • they have too little visibility on what’s happening at decision level
  • not enough, if at all, contact with the ‘real’ decision makers
• individual forecast building by using a percentage win-rate on each of the opportunities. Most funnels at sales rep level and even on corporate level have to little opportunities at the same stage with too much variation in size
• defined by selling activities: performing activities is not necessarily moving the opportunity closer to a decision
• lack of common definitions
• imposed as a reporting tool and not as a day to day self-coaching tool: The funnel will never be up to date or based on careful thinking if it is not in a format, and incorporated in the way of working, which influences the agenda and behavior of the sales rep
• tracking and reviews based on must win deals resulting in starved pipelines and pushing salespeople to do the right things at the wrong time.

Helping management and the VP sales to more accurately predict the revenue is to convert the funnel into a buying funnel which tracks the readiness to buy of the opportunity. This is even more true in more complex sales with quit an amount of people involved in the decision taking. Because each of the involved people have their own agenda and readiness to buy which must be synchronized in order to move the opportunity closer to a decision in the quickest way possible.

The mental stages a buyer is going through: These phases are universal and cultural independent.

• execution of existing solution and not interested in any information or offering in that area
• executuion and interested: something triggered the person to want to know more about something
• Field of Tension: Starts with an admitted pain which evolves over time into an urgent need. This results in the decision to buy something
• Market Research: The prospect goes out to the market to search for potential solutions and vendors
• Hesitation: This phase starts when the prospect thinks to be convinced to buy what from whom. At his point the focus shifts from looking to the benefits and advantages of acquiring the solution to all what can go wrong after having bought.
• Implementation: This is the period during which the solution is being implemented.
• Execution: The solution is in full use until the cycle starts all over again.

Perpetos has converted these phases into a 24 hour buying clock™.

Some of the reported results you acquire by this system are:

• a true shift towards customer focused thinking and acting
• an objective pipeline with a much better accuracy
• improved internal communication based on the hours of the clock
• lower cost of sales (i.e. less multiple people meetings because sales and pre-sales exactly determine when their presence is needed)
• improved hit rate
• more balanced pipeline

Let my know your experiences!

Entering late in the buying cycle is probably the single most important reason. A project manager is taking the lead once an opportunity is in the closed minded phase (in some businesses when the RFQ/RFP has been send out). This means that all requirements have been gathered and translated into buying criteria. Therefore real decision makers and those faced with the business problem are no longer involved in the market research phase. They will of course come back into the loop at decision time but that’s way to late to build a meaningful relationship for this opportunity.

5 tips to help overcome the main obstacles:

• Research the power structure and contact the highest ranked person faced with the business problem:Marketing should influence all decision makers faced with business problems you can solve. See: how to influence key decision makers And the one with the biggest impact should be contacted by sales to make an appointment based on a value proposition adapted to the business problem you want to discuss. They will only accept an appointment if their ‘readiness to buy’ is far enough developed but not yet to the state that they’re already convinced to know the buying criteria the solution must meet.
• Speak their language: Sales people are often pushed down or don’t get access to them because they’re unable to have a value add business conversation. Decision makers are not interested in a product or technology pitch. Nor are they interested in knowing more about your company. Remember: Decision-makers believe they know the destination but they have a problem getting there.
• Understand the psychology: Your contact will probably have cold feet of introducing you higher up in the organisation. They’re not sales people and therefore be reluctant to sell the idea to their boss. Afraid of the impact in case of a wrong judgement or setting up an appointment with a sales rep that doesn’t speak the right language.
• Get agreement on value chain impact: Showing that the business pain has an important impact on other key people in the organisation will help you to get access even higher in the organisation. the reasons are:
  • You helped your contact to build the needed story to sell the appointment
  • You proofed that you understand and have experience dealing with the business problem
  • You proofed that you speak the right language.
• Negotiate access: You have to negotiate access if all of above has been insufficient to get access. Remember to check the status of the opportunity in terms of readiness to buy. All of above will probably fail if you came in via the project manger or buyer because the opportunity is already too far down the buying cycle. So if you came in at the right time you will get access when agreeing on certain work or commitments from your side that are of value to your contact in exchange for that meeting.

Closing tip: Be careful with your forecast if you put in opportunities without having access to the real decision makers. These opportunities will drag on and on in your pipeline. Quit normal of course since you have very little insight and control over the ‘real decision’.

It’s amazing how time flies when I see how long it took to find the time to finalize the second part.

Yet it was worth waiting since I’ve been involved in 2 change projects at the same time where I could practice my previous blog and can deliver this post with 2 recent cases incorporated.

10 must do’s: (Part II, 6 -10):  post with must do’s 1-5

• Build an experience sharing platform: It’s amazing to see how much information and experience stays underutilized and leaves the company with former employees. An experience sharing platform, ideally, managed my marketing is pivotal to leverage, study and optimize the best practices. Sales-marketing alignment is the immediate result. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contact in the buying process of prospects and customers. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.
• Facilitate market ready innovation: The information gathered during the visits by marketing (see  post with must do’s 1-5) and aforementioned internal meetings will deliver a wealth of information to help inform and educate R&D and product management on market needs and what they should be capable of doing. I’m still surprised to see how R&D,  product- marketing and management are limited in their view and understanding of the market because sales is translating customer needs in features themselves leading to the battle of prioritizing development on the product roadmap. On the contrary of what they think at a first glance, R&D and product marketing/management will be able to be creative and innovative to an unprecedented level because they will understand the native customer environment.
• Educate your internal customers: Increase the value of the marketing department by playing a pivotal role in all communication from and to the market. Keep the following up to date:
  • win/loss reasons by calling key decision makers per deal yourself a couple of weeks after a decision has been taken. Assemble those winning and losing buying criteria per supplier;
  • best practice per segment and key-contact and use it as a base platform to streamline interdepartmental communication;
  • prioritised market pain/capability area’s for which the product should be upgraded.
  • This will enable you to monitor proposed product upgrades and new versions in terms of competitiveness and hit-rate thanks to a better coverage of market needs.
  • It will also enable you to focus your external market education to a group of prospects who are seeking your leadership.
• Implement a lead nurturing program: You main mission next to the management of the experience sharing platform deliverables and educating internal customers is to deliver ‘real’ sales ready leads. The only ROI based approach is to start communicating with your targeted market on a continuous basis with ‘role-based’ messaging. Meaning language adapted to the specific role in the company of each of the different contacts involved in the decision making process. also see: necessity of lead nurturing
• Measure and communicate: Make sure you can measure most if not all of the marketing activities. It will help you to communicate progress on all these area’s. Some of the mentioned points might be quit heavy change projects and thus will take time, patience and continuous improvement. This is the best way to ensure a large enough budget to accomplish all of the 10 must do’s.

Have fun implemeting the 10 rules to be a topnotch B2B marketer and keep me posted on experience and/or challenges.

1. take excessive actions on their existing opportunities. They hope or are convinced  to influence the outcome and decision date. These sales reps are typically faced with a starved pipeline. They will never experience the benefits of a balanced pipeline because of this. Moreover, they risk on ruining good opportunities by their behavior.
2. call on more and more potential customers. They will take massive actions on each of them willing to have a meeting. This will lead to too many unqualified prospects in the pipeline and create time shortage at the same time. It will lead to a lot of good actions on the wrong prospect and/or wrong timing.

So in other words, both actions will never deliver consistent resolution in the long run.

5 strategies to overcome typical quota issues:

1. Continuously qualify your opportunities:Is this really an opportunity?  Will I be able to differentiate myself. Woun’t I be used to put pressure on the preferred vendor? Do I see a lot of similarities with already won projects? Will I be able to influence the buying criteria? Is a budget available or can it be made available. Can I get in contact with most or all decision making people? All of these are examples of qualifying criteria to make sure you spend time on the right accounts.
2. Reduce your sales cycle: Stop using a sales-process. Use the buying clock. Think in terms of readiness to buy and adapt your actions and time between 2 actions. Who should be your next step contact? Use a structured way to prepare yourself. Think and report based on the outcome of your next steps instead of tracking the content of the next step. Keep all DMU members synchronized on their readiness to buy. Figure out typical time delays in the buying cycle and work ahead of time to overcome them.
3. Increase your actual selling time:Figure out a way to decrease your admin time. Stop writing visit reports but send bullet-based short emails to your contact. Save them in your CRM and ask for feedback in order to stay in sync with your contact. Use CRM as your central repository allowing you to self-coach and become more effective.
4. Build a pro-active opportunity pipeline over time:Make sure you work with marketing to create leads early in their buying cycle. This will allow you to educate them on their specific needed capabilities and link them to your differentiation. This will put the competition on the defence. It will lower your overall time spend per opportunity and increase your hit-rate at the same time.
5. Improve your hit-rate: Get to know the impact your solution has on different people. Find the link between their specific problems, needed capabilities, benefits and results. Use that knowlegde to adapt your questions, value proposition and sales pitch to each of the individual contacts. Make sure you talk to decision makers (Source of Power), people negatively impacted by not having your solution (Source of Dissatisfaction) as well as influencers. Don’t make the mistake of  having the project manager as your main contact. This is another reason why you need to get in early in de buying cycle. Add strategy 2 to the equation and you will experience massive improvement in your hit-rate.

 The nice thing about these 5 strategies is that they create a snowball effect if you work on all of them at the same time. Make sure you share these ideas with your colleagues and help each other to become more effective with these strategies. Get pre sales support and marketing involved and create a value chain instead of trying to do all things by yourself. After all sales has become a team-sport.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that a B2B marketer is using all tools at his/her disposal to educate the market in the early stages of the buying cycle. Doing so, should enable you to influence your target market based on your strengths. The prospect should seek your leadership by the time they’re willing to see a sales rep.

Being top of mind and perceived as being ‘different’ requires lead nurturing in which the Internet plays an important role.

Your website needs to combine the following:

• of course the traditional features and benefits but also deliver pain-based an educational content
• explain the impact of your solution and the capabilities it will enable for the customer
• explain the problem and capabilities looked from the different impacted roles in a organization. Have a look at the Protime (HR solution) website to see an example of role-based information 
• the ‘about us’ should include the value proposition to your specific targeted market
•  use compelling personalized landing pages in combination with email marketing in order to attract traffic to your website.

People will stay longer on your website, visit more pages and support your queeste to be perceived as a thought leader.

2 final notes:

• Use search engine optimization in order for prospects to find your content via search engines
• Make sure you balance the goal of capturing contact information and the risk of capturing up to 75% less registrations.  So ask only the ‘really’ necessary information. You should also give the basic information without registration in order to allow search engines to find your content.

1. Pitch their company story on how big, great, superior, experienced, financially stable, oldest in the market,…. they are.
2. Can’t wait to demonstrate their product convinced that the product is so good it will make the difference.

This is the best way to decrease your hit-rate and create a bad corporate brand despite the money and energy you put in corporate branding.

This is why:

This picture clearly shows the impact of field-driven activities on your brand in a B2B environment based on research

by sales & marketing management in 2006

So what should one do to increase your hit-rate and improve your brand perception:

Telling a story was definitely the right way. We all know that stories, pictures and metaphors are a great way to communicate a message.

Yet the story should be on ….. a customer.

So here’s a great way to open a first face to face meeting:

• Present the goal of the meeting and get buy-in
• Propose an agenda (and check available time dependant on the country culture)
• Present yourself

This is the part where the story kicks in. The story starts with your value proposition adapted to the prospect in front of you. followed by telling a story about a customer (don’t use the name)who was faced with several problems,…….. Together you found a solution which would enable him to ……..  and this resulted in an improved…. decreased by ….. (use numbers!) after a certain time of use. This story should be adapted to the prospect and the role of the person in fromt of you.

• Transition into needs analysis through questions

The story you just told is proof of your expertise and shows the prospect that you’re used to hear and handle confidential information. That’s why you should not give the name of the reference at this time since you would otherwise implicitly say that you will use his confidential information to other prospects in the future. It will create enough trust for the customer to start telling his story and explain the specifics of the problems their faced with. A better insight in the specifics will allow you to create a vision of an improved future based on capabilities they will acquire without mentioning your product nor its features. You need to wait to speak about your product until you get confirmation on the vision. We call it getting Vision-Lock.

Tip: Check your PowerPoint’s used by sales and adapt them in a way to facilitate the above scenario with quotes and pictures. It’s a great tool to be used in meetings with multiple people for the first time.

Remember what happens in a doctors cabinet: First diagnose then prescribe!

I’ve seen some hardworking marketing people over the last few months trying about everything to get more qualified leads and have a better view on the market. Indeed 2 critical elements during a recession. These are extremely important KPI’s in order to improve the sales effectiveness.

Looking back on my days in the states and some best practices build over the course of time, I learned a number of lessons that I think contribute to being a successful B2B marketer. It asks for a lot of discipline and hard work but the result will be measurable ROI and appreciation from your colleagues

10 must do’s: (Part I, 1 – 5)

• Visit your customers: The best way to know your market is visiting customers and prospects. Research done by Micheal Treacy shows that “Watching what the customers actually do is more reliable than listening to what they say”. Don’t rely on market research. 
  • Talk to the users
  • Understand what problems they were faced with prior to be enabled by your solution
  • Be able to quantify the situation before and after
  • Write a half-page pain-based reference story in bullet format from the perspective of each impacted “role” in the company to be used by sales when they speak to these people.
• Segment the market based on your differentiation:you can read more on segmentation in a previous blogpost: Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
• Educate the market: Building content deliverables such as white-papers, case studies, etc.. are the best tools in the quest to become top of mind. These deliverables should use the valuable information gathered during your prospect and customer visits. Don’t talk about your product/services or their benefits but rather explain a recognizable situation as is and a situation to be.
• Support Sales:One of your key roles is to facilitate sales’ ability to sell with the highest possible margin at the lowest possible cost of sales. Above mentioned deliverables are also key in helping your sales collegues to better understand their market. Work with them to build face2face best practices that work. You’re in the pivotal position to create and maintain an experience sharing platform.
• Study your competitors:Focus on their strengths not on their weaknesses and make sure you educate your internal and external customers on your differentiation not on your competitors. I see to many competitive reports and presentations leading to: ” We can do what they do and even better”. This makes your strategy to become defensive and positions you as a follower rather then a leader.

Don’t miss Part II, must-do’s 6-10 on “How to be a topnotch B2B marketer”

I see more and more companies seeking salvation in isolated short term plan of actions. Unfortunately these will only keep them out of the danger zone for a short while. Typical examples are:  searching new target markets, one-off lead generation efforts hoping to find prospects that are ready to buy. This last one is a typical returning strategy in an attempt to find the famous needle in the hay-stack (lead generation).

 Furthermore, today, more than ever, we have a multitude of tools and -techniques at hand. Numerous studies, amongst others the study delivered by the Aberdeen Group ,  have shown that optimal ROI can only be reached by using the correct mix of tools at all times.

 Let me drill down on this new method of influencing your target market based on your own strengths (LEAD-NURTURING) rather than using lead-generation as a means of attracting new business. Lead nurturing means entering into a 1:1 conversation, on a continuous basis, with decision makers in your target market. This means communicating about the pains and the possible solutions your products and services can offer to solve these pains looked at it from the viewpoint of each decision-maker. The most common channels to market for lead nurturing are: email, website, blogs, whitepapers, documentation, speeches, 3rd party articles, follow-up by phone, webinars, podcasts.

Let me emphasize the most important advantages:

• The number of qualified leads will be at least doubled
• Cost of sales will be lower because your prospects will specifically seek your strengths
• Average revenue per order will be 57% higher (see Aberdeen study)
• Salespeople will succeed in winning more deals
• Next to your product-differentiation, your sales approach will also differentiate you
• A higher ROI of your marketing investments.
• Furthermore, these methods are cheaper than traditional promotional and advertizing campaigns.

Important to note is that the ROI is directly linked to the level in which you succeed to be perceived different. In order words: be different from your competitors instead of  trying to be better.

Find more info on the Perpetos website:

To close off, some practical tips:

• Adapt the content of your message to the buying mindset of your prospect (meaning: Being interested, probably needing your solution or in the process of evaluating different suppliers)
• Define your product/market combinations directly linked to your your product-differentiation
• Make sure your website is optimized with the correct web key words (Search Engine Optimization – SEO). The website content must use language for all three mental stages
• Make use of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) to attract more traffic to your website
• Initiate a company blog. This is the ideal way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Don’t communicate  about your products and services
• Use personalized landing pages to your website in emails. These will allow you to get more information about the click-behavior and the interests of each individual person

A step by step implementation of the above combined with follow-up by phone and email will guarantee your ROI.

Good Luck!

2 immediate problems jumped out:

• Different metrics: Marketing had a lead gen KPI and Sales a conversion KPI. Both in itself good metrics’s but meaningless if measured in a separate way.
• Sales and Marketing were using a different definition for ‘a lead’

Here are some tips to improve the lead conversion rates:

1. Write a common definition (universal lead definition) for ‘a lead’ and make sure it’s known by all concerned.
2. define a process describing ‘who does what’ and ‘what needs to be reported’ to one another.
3. Make sure Marketing talks to Regional and Country Sales about their lead generation programs prior to decisions. This allows the creation of an integrated approach and making sure Sales will be ready with an adapted approach to be part of the process.
4. Define a common dashboard to track the results and attack funnel frictions from a corporate point of view instead of departmental.
5. Implement a process and reporting mechanism based on the readiness to buy, such as the buying clock™,  instead of a process based on steps already taken.
6. Make sure that sales is using the same buying cycle mechanism for their forecast and plan of actions. It will allow them to
   1. Be focused on the customer and adapt their next step accordingly, instead of following a pre-defined series of steps;
   2. Adapt their next step in function of buying readiness of each individual person involved in the decision making process;
   3. Get all their contacts synchronized avoiding them to be the reason for complications (i.e. a DMU member you didn’t meet yet who becomes a non-supporter because of  some wording or content in a proposal that was send too early in the overall buying cycle);
   4. Avoid doing the right type of action at the wrong time and maybe the wrong contact.

The Buying-Clock is based on the mental phases a buyer is going through from happy user over admitting pain all they to buying, implementing and using a  new solution. The 24 hour of a clock represents a full cycle .

Stay tuned over the next coming weeks for more sales efficiency and demand generation tips.