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!

I see 3 reasons which I will support by real life examples:

1. Many lack the necessary business insight to serve as a sounding board for line management. Therefore they behave as “prescribers” to questions from line management. Yey these questions are usually too symptomatic due to the daily ins and outs involvement of managers. A good example is a sales manager asking for closing skills training because of a too low hit-rate and/or decision dates continuously shifting over time. Result a closing skills training is being organized. Yet a lack of closing skills is in less then 5% the real cause of the mentioned problems. The solution should have been HR offering to analyze the root cause and to propose solutions with a lasting impact. This of course is only viable if HR is taken seriously thanks to their business insights.
2. Secondly, I see HR departments with new, good in itself, theories and plans that are too heavy and difficult to be implemented on top of the daily work that unfortunately does not stop because of a change process. This in turn leads to frustration in HR departments because they get too little involvement of line management to implement the necessary changes. These projects are usually not enough adapted and pragmatic to the real world which leads to quite large resistance. This in turn leads to a too low adoption rate and results quickly fading out. A good example is some of the competence and growth/evaluation practices and programs put in place. Heavy bureaucratic processes with formalized timing and reporting from managers to HR. Automated in user unfriendly intranets. Seldom based on simple deliverables and a common language which improves day to day communication between manager and employee. Let alone creating an environment stimulating people to give the best of themselves in order to create a chain of actions leading to optimized business results.
3. HR does too little effort to understand and create insights on management level in cross departmental issues and linkages. Their distance to the daily ins and outs puts them in the ideal position for those insights and to share these with their colleagues. Of course, they simultaneously need to propose pragmatic solutions. A good example is a solution consisting of building sales ready deliverables combined with sales training, coaching and upgrading sales meetings to becoming an experience sharing platform. This solution require budgets from 3 departments in a lot of large organizations.  Training from the HR budget, deliverables from marketing and coaching/consulting from the sales budget. I’ve seen very few HR people who took internal actions to launch such a project, let alone understanding the business need and internally sell such an integrated approach.

The above shows in a painfully obvious way that a lack of operational knowledge and insights on the one hand, and implementation focus on the other hand forms the basis of the problem.

Some possible actions which can resolve the problem:

Start by breaking down the HR walls. Translate theory into pragmatic solutions feasible even if it sounds like a bad idea from the theoretical point of view. This means that the broad and deep use of the skills and tools must get the upper hand on the theoretical appropriateness of the solution.

Focus on gaining more business insights through more time to spend in the workplace. Divide your time outside the company premises by not only networking and studying in HR circles but also spending a lot of time in broad management environments such as the vMA (management association in Flanders) to name only one. It will allow you improve your operational knowledge as well as being able to toss of your ideas and experience with line managers from other companies.

Only then will HR:

• sufficiently understand what really lives on the floor;
• get broad support from the staff and get surprised by the acceptance of their projects;
• asked to be part of the executive management team;
• and create lasting impact thanks to their efforts.

First something about scalability. Scalable organizations are:

• End-to-end aligned: Streamline your value chain by having coherent bundled responsibilities. Written processes are kept to a minimum to keep the organisation adaptable and agile. This will help to make individual contributions to the goal clear to everyone. The increased involvement and insights will enable people to be creative and to contribute to the result in the most effective way. Doing the right things instead of doing things right. The best bundled responsibilities are those allowing you to quickly find new people on the job market because you take available combined competencies into consideration.
• Dynamic organizations: Endorsing a culture of facing the brutal facts, where people and not the processes are central. Ensuring that people focus on their contribution and not on their career (plan). Learning from and celebrating successes but also learning from mistakes being made. Being convinced that uncertainty is the only certainty in life.
• Thought leaders in their field: They strive to be different not better. They educate the market based on their differentiation so that prospects seek their leadership. Lead nurturing based on valuable content for the prospect is their way of promotion. Improving the value proposition for each of their served segments is what drives product development.
• Customer focused: The customer and the market are central in everything they say and do. The front-line organisation is based on buying readiness of individual involved people in the decision making process rather then an automated nexst step sales approach.
• above all Vision and DNA based: All of above is impossible to execute in case of DNA dilution. Don’t keep people on your staff whom are not DNA compliant not even if you consider their contribution or importance indispensable for the organization. This is where the blindness to future problems commence. Managment will end up managing people instead of their business.

The biggest advantage of  ‘design for scalability” is that it works both in periods of growth and during recessions. Scalable organizations can more quickly adapt to their environment in both good and bad days. Every crisis forcing you to reduce headcount or reorganize the company is a unique moment of choice to increase your scalability. This means also having the courage to leave trodden paths.  This implies not to:

• reduce your headcount by letting go of people with the cheapest severance package;
• cancel the simplest costs and investments such as training and educating people, change processes necessary for the long term, sales and marketing spending etc…
• put your best people on the biggest problem rather than on the largest opportunity;
• deviate from the long-term strategy thereby losing focus. Losing clarity throughout the entire organisation will be a consequence. Thus increasing the uncertainty resulting in paralysis;
• acquire companies when the market is on its top and everyone is bidding as if the sky is the limit.

but on the contrary:

• Cut inefficiencies grown over time;
• Continuously adapt to the changing circumstances without undermining the long term vision. Being vision focused;
• Transparent and timely communication;
• Putting DNA, people and competencies central in your organisation to avoid bureaucracy and maximize involvement.

Leaders and managers will no longer have an excuse to take resolute decisions improving the scalability of their organization once the economy is picking up.

This is the only way to maximize your potential!

The first thing that has to be said is that few companies have changed their sales approach in an appreciable way over the last few decades. Yet buyers are seeking to buy and not to be sold to for over a decade.

I still see sales trainings and managers telling their sales and to look at the sales cycle and behave in an way that is inward looking. Sales force automation (SFA) and customer relation management systems (CRM) haven’t really helped to convert the front-line in an outward looking mode and helping people to buy from them instead of being sold to.

I was pleasantly surprised to see one of the outcomes of the 2009 sales conference in Miami where the buying cycle emerged as the new standard for funnel management. I trust this to be a stimulus for all  the Perpetos customers bringing this into practice since 2005. But their is still a long way to go. It is indeed the best way to get subjectivity out of your funnel, yet it demands a mind-shift of the whole sales organisation and another way for management to coach and interact with their sales team. They all must learn to ask way more questions and ‘really’ try to understand what the customer is saying.

The principle is simple: Ask the customer questions which allows you to know the readiness to buy of each individual in the decision making unit (DMU), align them all so that they move through the buying cycle in a synchronised way and adapt your actions to it.

A couple of tips to improve your funnel management:

• Stop tracking and discussing sales steps and process. Start using readiness to buy phases based on reactions and answers to questions from each individual involved in the buying process. Ideally start using the Buying Clock. Using the time on the clock is an easy way for implementing a, consistent used, common language.
• Are we asking for and tracking the next step or are we engaging the sales rep to first decide on the next objective to facilitate the buying process on a project level before deciding what the next step should be, when and with whom? Do we track this in our funnel?
• Track the pain level of the customer by also knowing the impact of the challenges on the customer. Is their a compelling reason or an urgent need?
• Has your sales rep access to the decision maker? Is he continuously involved in the process and kept up to date by the sales rep?
• Is the go-live date the most important date we discuss with the customer? Is it a fixed date and why or can it easily be postponed?  Do we know and  are we tracking the go-live date?
• Has the customer actually confirmed your solution fit and did we postpone drafting the proposal until that moment?
• Split the weight % in 2 distinct ones: project%=what is the probability of the customer actually buying and win% = the probability of you winning the deal.
• Are you tracking the most important mandatory buying criteria and what is the perceived scoring of the customer compared to the competition? Do you discuss ways to influence these buying criteria?

Finally:

• Convert your weighted funnel in a scenario based funnel on which you coach the sales rep.
• Engage in vivid 1:1 discusions with sales to set a continuous improvement process in motion.

Your benefit and result: An accurate forecast with a highly improved visibility.

Trying to create certainty by extrapolating a known past into a bright future has definitely proofed to create an illusion of predictability. Spreadsheet management as a way to do business planning has been a common practice for too long in too many companies.  Optimal functioning and productivity of people has long been linked to the wrong assumption that people need certainty. The difficulty to break the ’status quo’ within companies, and definitely the political world, has supported this way of thinking. People prefer the known discomfort over the unknown future.

Seneca once wrote: “The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.” Yet uncertainty is the only certainty.

It is my conviction and experience that people are not afraid of change but are afraid of the unknown personal impact of the change. Too many leaders and managers are trying to sell certainty to overcome this. Yet many studies have proven over and over again that people need a certain level of discomfort to to stimulate creativity, productivity and focus.

The reason for all of this is the fact that their is no such thing as rational decision making. Dan Ariely (author of Predictably irrational) wrote the following in a recent Harvard business review: ‘Your company has been operating on the premise that people (customers, employees, managers) make logical decisions. It’s time to abandon this assumption”

Creating an environment of  ‘balanced uncertainty’ is therefore the biggest challenge moving forward.

The following is key to success:

• Transparent communication whereas the truth can be said, problems and mistakes surfaced and discussed as soon as possible. Jim Collins already referred to this as facing the brutal facts;
• Building trust, thus building an environment where openness gets rewarded
• Avoid or get rid of a diluted corporate DNA
• Offering a realistic challenge in order to stimulate motivation, creativity and innovation
• and above all walk the talk 

Are you ready to maximize the potential of your people?

• too much leadership creating a superior vision and taking decisions whilst losing the necessary sense of reality. Dragging people and companies unnoticed into trouble.
• too little leadership because leadership is too often linked to charismatic leaders. The CEO as the captain under which leadership the organisation is led to unrivaled performance.
• too little management who should be capable of managing the execution.

And where does entrepreneurship fit in all of this?

A lot has been written and discussed ranging from charismatic leadership, Level 5 leadership, transformational leadership,…. The characteristics of the so called must have leadership profile is a long list that is impossible to find in a single mortal human being. Marc Buelens (Vlerick Leuven Ghent management school) wrote in a recent column:  ”Leaders need to combine the charm of Kennedy with the vision of Branson, the stubbornness of  Thatcher and able to speech like Obama”

I suppose that most of us agree that the world and business in itself has become too complex to be mastered by a single individual. A lot of people tend to think that the CEO can make the difference. A comparison with soccer is in place since many analysis have shown that changing the coach during the season never contributed to major result improvements.  I’m pretty confident that the future will show the same in the vast amount of cases where the CEO had to leave the scene as being responsible for bad results. CEOs at the same time should better think twice before contributing superior company results to their mastery.

Even management teams are no longer able to provide all the answers in the same way as sales has converted into a team-sport. I’m seeing over and over again how management teams are trying to come up with all the answers themselves. As a result expecting people to change and behave differently without a need to change themselves.

I’m therefore convinced that the whole debate is besides the point. since everything starts with an undiluted DNA. The following picture shows the logical levels needed in order to release the full human potential within your organisation. 

What we need is management innovation which includes getting ride of industrial age practices. Typical to those ideas are central and formalized processes trying to influence human behavior. Converting people into machines leaving their brain at the door when coming to work. Resulting in managers fighting battles ad hoc, rarely solving the underlying causes. Fighting symptoms, they’re unable to create a scalable value chain and properly utilize the human potential of the entire team. This need to change in order to realise your companies growth potential.
Leadership must be attuned to the information age, where progress is stimulated and jobs are managed – not people.

When will managers accept that they can’t control nor own the knowledge inside peoples head. We talk about the knowledge worker age but managers typically behave inversely.

 You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”Gandhi”

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’.

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.

Trap 2 – neglecting training and development:
Dirk Verhaeghe told me that his first sales manager once told him: ‘If you think training is expensive, try ignorance’. Many managers tend to think of training as very expensive in money and time (keeping sales people away from customers);

Tip: However, I look at training as an investment; an investment with both short term and long term ROI. Appreciation for the  investment in their development. Motivation of your staff. Long term, training & development will make them better performers. Nobody is born a top performer, not in any discipline in life be it sports, business or art. We all need to exercise and train to become better. Sales people need to be continuously trained on:
• Skills (right skills to talk to decision makers)
• The customers environment
• The value proposition and your solution portfolio (pains, capabilities, ROI, enablers, differentiation and benefits)

Must do: Make sure you have an experience sharing platform where best practices are created and kept up to date, experiences are shared, etc…

Trap 3 – quick revenue panic:
When under pressure, a lot of managers tend to turn to tactical stand-alone actions to bring in quick revenue and squeeze their pipeline. Needless to say, that lot’s of stand-alone actions creates de-focus, lowers people engagement and will cause more pain than gain. 

Tip:

• Narrow your focus;
• Dominate your market;
• Choose your battles;
• Have a balanced pipeline;
• Support your people.

Trap 4 – Specialists are the best managers for specialists:
A mistake often made is to promote the best performing account manager into the role of sales managers. This is never the best way to maximizing your potential. It takes a different skill-set to be a good manager.

Tip: Promote an account manager choosing or ready for a managerial role in another department to take on a first management experience rather than promoting them to sales manager.

Trap 5 – hiring a sales person to do a marketing job and much more:
In many companies sales are asked to:

• Seek the right prospect;
• Build the right pitch;
• Know the market
• Know the competition
• Know the full product portfolio
• Be experts in called calling
• Draft their own proposals
• Close deals
• Keep a long term relation

Obviously very few people are capable of doing all these things.
Tip: Create a marketing function and a support environment build upon best practices and have sales focus on developing qualified leads, closing deals and/or develop existing accounts.

In other words build a scalable organisation!