We often see Sales & Marketing departments working from different planets. Over 90% of marketing support tools and training goes unused by sales people, who spend 40 to 60 hours a month of selling time (!) re-purposing customer communications. The one accuses the other for low lead conversion rates. Sales mostly blame Marketers to be out of touch with customers. In short, they don’t get along. Isn’t this remarkable?
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!
How to questions from readers and customers prompted me to write an add-on to my previous post on funnel management.
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.
