Start thinking about sales people as your customers
Do your marketing and sales organizations work as one seamless team? Unfortunately, the vast majority of medium and large companies will answer “no” or “only sometimes” to these questions. Both sales and marketing organizations recognize the challenge. According to a CSO Insights surveys12 of top sales effectiveness initiatives, “more closely aligning sales and marketing” appears among the top five priorities year after year. Red Herring’s survey of CMOs13 also showed that marketing and sales alignment is a top strategic issue, with 42 percent of the respondents giving it a nine or ten (highest ranking) as a crucial issue to address.
Some complaints often heard from sales and marketing people are indicative of the common tension: “I don’t have time to read all the stuff marketing puts out, it’s too difficult to find, and most of it is useless anyway.” “Sales can’t see beyond quarter end.” “Marketing is more worried about the colors in the presentation than the real issues I face when I meet with customers.” “Sales just doesn’t get this new way of selling. We need to hire different salespeople.”
“Start thinking about sales as your customer,” Rick Jackson, CMO at VMWare recommends to fellow marketers. “If you just focus on the end customer, not on what the channel has to do to engage them, then you’re not serving your real audience,” he adds.
Rick recalls that when he joined BEA Systems to head its product marketing function, he found an organization that was uncoordinated internally and disconnected from sales. Marketing had been so enamored of evangelizing the technology that it had not made the effort to understand how the product was actually bought and sold. During his first two weeks at BEA, Rick talked to salespeople. He asked what tools and content they were using, what they got from marketing or created themselves. His objective was to understand how they got their job done, and how marketing could help. With the understanding of how sales reps really pursued opportunities and closed deals, Rick realigned product marketing to enable and accelerate that process.
The lessons from BEA and other companies that have addressed this issue head-on are clear. One is that marketing has to know how to sell the product. Understand the sales process and what demands are being made on salespeople and by whom. Make sure marketing understands what value claims resonate with customers and what obstacles customers face internally when proposing to buy from you.
Reading analyst reports and talking to a few sales reps are not enough. Pull marketing staff away from content creation and send them into the reps’ world. Have marketers attend new sales training and sales meetings with customers. Let them listen in on telesales conversations. Sales groups must be willing to allow greater access to accounts, understanding that a better-informed marketing organization will be a more valuable partner.
You can take another big step toward a sales-marketing partnership through a proactive, ongoing process for aligning objectives. Before committing to annual plans, hold direct conversations between sales and marketing about each organization’s goals. Agree on how much of the sales pipeline marketing will supply, and what role it can and should play in accelerating the sales process once an opportunity is in the pipe. Jointly define the characteristics of a good lead and the process for precisely how leads from marketing activities will be pursued and transitioned to the sales team. Be sure that there is consensus on how to nurture and when to promote the in-between contacts that are promising but insufficiently “hot” for immediate sales action.
Periodically review how messaging, campaigns, and the sales process need to change and why, and how best to communicate those changes to both organizations. Review what marketing tools and lead generation programs have and have not been truly useful in the field, and adjust future deliverables accordingly.