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The Sales and Marketing Alignment Conversation

The path to sustained sales and marketing alignment can be a simple one – simple to do, simple to repeat, simple to remember. All you need is a map. In that spirit, I attempt here to boil down some alignment opportunities for Sales and Marketing leaders, into a single graphic.

The chart below shows the three main focus areas each for Sales and Marketing which, if approached collaboratively, can improve business results and transform the relationship. Below the chart is a set of definitions, followed by a few examples of how to apply it to your own situation.

Sales and Marketing Alignment topics chart — Sales and Marketing Alignment topics

3 Sales goals – Value, Volume, Velocity

Value. Since it is almost as costly to close a small sale as it is to close a large sale, Sales professionals would be wise to focus on increasing the potential Value of each sale. In larger organizations, differently skilled teams manage different sized deals.

Volume. The more dealflow you can create, the better your chances of growing your customer base, learning from their needs to improve your offering, and improving the company’s financial ability to innovate and fulfill those evolving customer needs.

Velocity. Increasing the speed of deal flow can also increase your capacity to sell, grow the customer community, and learn from them to help you innovate and improve. It becomes a flywheel.

3 Marketing goals – Content, Community, Conversion

Content. The more compelling and relevant your content, the more you will attract the audience most likely to benefit from your offerings.

Community. The more your content resonates within and among audiences, the greater your capacity to build a community and engage in dialogue to improve sales, products, services, and support.

Conversion. The more effectively you convert sales, the more you can learn from customer experience about how to improve your engagement, conversion and product improvement processes.

Conversations Worth Starting

Using the 3×3 chart above, look at the 9 intersecting boxes and ask the questions implied by the two nouns whose paths cross in each box.

Example 1: Value + Content. In the upper left intersecting box, where Value and Content intersect, Marketing might ask: How can we improve our Content to increase the Value of each sale? Sales might ask: How can the improved Value of each sale guide us in improving Content? It’s the same question, asked from different perspectives, that aligns your response.

Example 2: Conversion + Velocity. In the bottom right box, where Conversion and Velocity intersect, Marketing might be asking: How can we improve the Conversion process to accelerate the Velocity of Sales? Sales might ask: What sales accelerators (velocity) can we use as input for improving the Conversion process?

See how it works? You may come up with better questions to suit your organization’s culture and challenges. Now, formulate your own questions using the relevant nouns for each intersecting box, turn those questions loose in your organization, and watch what happens.

Measuring results with analytics, sales CRM and marketing automation solutions can help you measure and manage your improvement. If you need assistance here, contact us.

How’s it working for you? What questions would you ask your colleagues to help you get better aligned? Drop us a comment here; we’d love to hear your feedback! Visit our Resources page for more free strategy tool downloads.

Sales Pipeline Best Practice (reference chart) (fanfoundry)
5 Reasons Marketing and Sales Should Get Married (hubspot.com)
Does your Marketing Automation have a Human Problem? (SAVO Group blog)
The use of Hansei in Lean Sales and Marketing (customerthink.com)
Does your Website copy suck the life out of your conversions? (seocopywriting.com)
SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement (ForEntrepreneurs)

Sales Pipeline Best Practice (reference chart)

Having led goal-beating sales and marketing teams (details: see my LinkedIn profile), I have found that cross-functional synergy to be an essential ingredient in business success. ~Ed

To help keep sales teams focused on essential steps and processes, try using this simple, downloadable Sales Pipeline Best Practice reference chart. Assess any single prospect using this plain-English chart, and you will instantly understand their deal value relative to their place in the pipeline, and pinpoint the next steps you can take to increase that value – or devalue it as appropriate.

Topics include:

Sales Stage Summary – helps you assess whether your prospect is Qualified, Scoped, Evaluated, post-mortem evaluated, etc.
Key activities – chores and self-test questions for validating and moving prospects up or down the Pipeline;
Milestones – Decision points and signposts for verifying your assessments;
Control documents and tools – essential elements for effective assessment and communication;
CRM tasks – recordkeeping duties which help your CRM system update the forecast and schedule/prompt you on next steps;
Probability – relative value of each prospect at each stage of the Pipeline;
Partner Forecast – analogous information for assessing your resellers and partners

Hope is Not a Strategy. Groom better sales pros using the Best Practice chart

What makes the top 15% of sales pros into stars, another 50% solid contributors, and the remainder only occasionally brilliant? I believe that you can have more top sales pros on your team if they could make this single page Sales Pipeline Best Practice chart into a habit.

No matter how great a relationship builder your top sales pros may be, they don’t stay at the top without attending to a customer’s pain. It requires methodical, relentless focus that can seem intuitive but can definitely be learned. Such learned, relentless focus keeps the client so comfortable that they can’t even imagine alternatives, relying on your top sales pro (“TSP”) for all their resource needs. Your TSP knows how to make him/herself an indispensable, irreplaceable, joined-at-the-hip resource for life, turning the client into a raving fan.

Of course, even TSPs don’t always win, for a variety of other reasons, some of which are covered in previous articles, like:

“Buyer Bias: How Deep is Your Dive?”

“Your Three Constant Competitors and How to Beat Them”

“Accurate Sales Forecasting: The ‘Aim High’ approach”

Over to You

Can you groom more top sales pros? Yes, if they are willing. Are you a good enough coach? It requires a few essentials, like instilling in your team the ability to accurately forecast. I have seen accurate forecasting offset even the limpest personal skills. Customers respect the diligence and focus of an accurate forecaster who gets to the heart of the matter and focuses on the critical path to their satisfaction. A limp but accurate forecaster may receive fewer golf invitations, but they keep the customer and your organization effectively engaged.

Making it Work for You

The Sales Pipeline Best Practice reference chart has been jokingly referred to by colleagues as the “eye chart”. If you can read this chart, you know how to accurately forecast, and you always know what to do next. You can avoid overblown optimism and unrealistic assumptions. You can detect bottlenecks, derailment and other disruptive patterns. You can reduce financial miscalculation. The result is improved situation awareness and a more consistently productive sales and marketing team. Every aspect of this Pipeline Best Practice chart is also rooted in, and links back to, fanfoundry best practice. Diligently applied, it will help your Sales and Marketing team sing from the same piece of sheet music. You will share a common language, a shared mission, and a common set of criteria that maps to CRM, performance management and other processes.

If you are student of your profession, you will likely recognize that some terminology on this reference chart has been borrowed from widely popular sales training programs. This is done deliberately to mesh with your sales organization’s frame of reference, to facilitate understanding and immediate application. I have many colleagues to thank for helping to shape and tweak this chart over time. Your input is welcome.

Enjoy, and if you have a question, call or write.

Selling is Not about Relationships (Harvard Business Review survey)
The Vanity of an Enlarged Pipeline (customerthink.com)
The Difference Between a Sales Funnel and a Sales Pipeline (paceaustralia.wordpress.com)
Where is Your Sales Funnel Leaking? (customerthink.com)
Are Top Salespeople Born or Made? (Harvard Business Review)
Your Three Constant Competitors, and How to Beat Them (fanfoundry article)
When Sales and Marketing Align, Good Things Happen in Threes (fanfoundry article)

Ready for Sales CRM or Marketing Automation?

Technology solutions tend to exaggerate things. If you have a good process, implementing a technology solution will improve it. If you have a bad process, likewise that effect will be magnified.

In the course of helping our clients with selecting and implementing sales and marketing automation solutions, our initial discovery talks often lead us to jointly conclude that it’s not yet time, and we instead agree to implement a readiness plan. Over time, our project load has become about evenly split between readiness projects and implementation projects. By first assessing readiness, we tend to find you’ll make better decisions and enjoy improved outcomes.

Assess your readiness: 3 questions

Got a minute? take a readiness quiz. Alternatively, here are three questions you can ask yourself to determine your readiness:

Are basic processes currently in place?
If yes, are the processes working?
Do we have the resources to close any process “gaps”?

If the answer to any of these is no, then you may be a candidate for a readiness project. You certainly wouldn’t want to automate a bad process, and automation is definitely not a cure for a “vacuum” – a lack of process. Above all, don’t buy from anyone who tries to convince you that you’ll figure out the process once you’ve implemented their marketing automation solution. We have seen that course of action result in disenchantment, poor outcomes and underused, expensive tooling. The moral: Implement when ready – not before.

Undecided? Try these two tools

Here are just 2 tools we use to help assess readiness: a Sales & Marketing CRM Maturity Scale, and a “3C” (Content, Conversation, Conversion) process flow map.

Click the on-screen images to enlarge, download etc.

Sales & Marketing CRM Capability Maturity Model

Here we have adapted Carnegie Mellon University‘s venerable Capability Maturity Model for Software Engineering organizations, modifying it to suit Sales and Marketing organizations.

This tool is helpful in stimulating discussion about your organization’s current and desired state of capability, so you can establish goals and plan for success. When interpreting results, you should consider that:

self-raters tend to over-rate;
Most raters gravitate toward the middle of a range – in this case, “Level III – Defined”. Upshot: most organizations readily admit there is room for improvement.

Download your free copy of this 1-page guide at our Resources page. Enjoy!

3C Conversion Model

This chart is useful for helping stakeholders examine how they influence the Content, Community and Commerce aspects of customer acquisition. It focuses on phased data gathering to support the buyer’s journey. For any part of the organization, the questions are similar:

How should we be involved?
Do our processes and our content create a strong CTA (Call to Action) that engages and satisfies strong prospects so they will return, value our resources and assess the fit for our solutions?
Do we elicit and gather data of a sufficient depth and breadth to help us fulfill visitor expectations, fulfill their needs, and inform our strategy?

Help yourself to these tools, and let us know if you find them useful or need advice. You can either “Leave a Reply” below, or ask privately using the “Got a question” button, or take the quick Readiness Quiz.

10 Marketing Automation Tips for First-Time Users (customerthink.com)
Blogsite page: Marketing Automation
B2B Marketing Automation Growth Slowed In First Half of 2011 (customerthink.com)
When Sales and Marketing Align, Good Things Happen in Threes (fanfoundry article)

demand management, lead generation, social media

Social Media ROI, a Case Study (Tech Event)

Many of the social media success stories kicking around the interwebs these days are indeed inspirational, yet I get frequent client comments along the lines of: “Oh, sure, Dell and Cisco can do it, but what about my small to mid-size enterprise? What is realistically achievable? Our experimental budget is limited.”

The following true story may offer some insight as to how one small organization leveraged its existing relationships creatively. I have withheld names by request, however if you contact me for specifics, I can share more. It is told from the point of view of my experience with a start-up software company. In this story, everybody wins, and social media makes it possible. No, it’s not a multi-million dollar landslide victory, but it’s an important demonstration of how incremental change yields great results.
~

Today’s Featured Post:

Social Media ROI, a Case Study

Case study: Executive Summit event

The Players:
1. Startup Software company
2. Online community
3. Executive Summit (event management organization)
4. Industry portals

Their needs:
1. Software company – customers, inbound prospects, PR
2. Online community – affordable professional development
3. Executive Summit – speakers, tuition, attendee satisfaction
4. Industry portals – enrichment, community, reputation

PART 1 – THE CAMPAIGN

Software company purchases speaker/sponsor role at Executive Summit, and negotiates with summit management to discount* sponsor/speaker fee for every attendee the software company recruits.

*Note: discount arrangement was only possible because the Summit management company and the Software company had previously exchanged value by partnering on other successful events that similarly enriched their communities.

PART 2 – THE COMMUNITY

Software company announces Summit registration discount:
– via email to precisely targeted clients and prospects in its enriched database
– on industry portals, professional organization sites, and communities such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Announcement goes “somewhat” viral – LinkedIn, re-Tweeted, blogged. Event website, SW firm site and community portals are linked back from those sources – expanding the community’s resources and increasing brand value for all involved web properties.
PART 3 – THE ROI

Discount code announcement combined with viral circulation results in increased event revenue sufficient to WIPE OUT entire speaker/sponsor fee (over ten thousand dollars) for Software company while significantly increasing the value of the event for all.

Community members’ recent referral activity, combined with additional Profiles of affiliations, interests, networks, corporate roles etc., leads to refined lead scoring and fast identification of previously unknown high potential prospects

THE RESULT

Everybody wins – as stated earlier:
1. Software company – customers, prospects, PR
2. Online community – affordable professional development
3. Executive Summit – speakers, tuition, attendee satisfaction
4. Industry portals – enrichment, community, reputation

Commentary:

This success story has no precise ending, because we have agreed to continue the partnership. One thing seems reasonably certain at this juncture: there is no going back. Heightened audience expectations must be nurtured to keep bringing the mutual benefits to this enriched community. Once you have built a community, it requires care and feeding to thrive.

How have your community building efforts fared? Do you have a story to share? Love to hear your comments.

‘ Til soon,

~Ed

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inbound marketing, lead generation, sales forecasting, sales training

Your 3 constant competitors, and how to beat them

There will always be competitors upstream, downstream and alongside your solution offering. Neutralizing three other constant competitors first, however, often spells the difference between receiving an invitation to an RFP bake-off (becoming part of the noise) or aligning as a lasting, trusted inside advisor, effectively closing the door on that competitive noise.

Even if you were the only game in town, you still have three competitors: Yourself, your Prospect and Apathy. What steps are you taking to neutralize them?

Yourself

This is the most obvious of the three. Here are a few self-test questions. Are you a student of your own profession i.e. do you invest in your own training and education? Do you fully understand your own offering, the competitive landscape, and your ideal prospect’s latent pain? Are you able to articulate your value proposition in memorable, compelling terms? Are you able to accurately assess and reflect your prospect’s pain, budget and timing? Is your elevator pitch really that good? Are you able to politically align with your prospect’s decision makers and influencers so that they become your champions?

Your Prospect

Your prospect may be thinking they can solve their pain on their own, or some other way. This is also often called the “build vs. buy” phenomenon. They have already invested in people, process and technology assets; they might be able to re-deploy and cobble a solution from those assets, but they may not have weighed the opportunity cost of solving it on their own. Can you present a compelling proposal showing how your solution will be more cost effective and thereby free your prospect to re-focus their assets more effectively on other priorities to attain greater value? If you understand this, then you are also prepared to defend your reasonable pricing and position it well. Bear in mind, though, that corporate will can be strong; if internal momentum is carrying your prospect toward a “build, not buy” result, you might still cultivate the opportunity as a long term advisory relationship, ultimately helping your prospect succeed. Just remember, you are in sales. Don’t dwell too long on advisory roles if they diminish your long term prospects.

Apathy

Your prospect may indeed express pain but may think solving it is not a priority. Can you present a business case proving that their potential loss in not adopting your solution now is unacceptable, and thereby compel them to buy? You may have to be patient about their own self-discovery process here; you could conceivably work with them to build the ROI case and groom advocates….or, you could help them find a way to redeploy current budget dollars and assets based on the potential savings (short term ROI) of adopting your solution. Have you asked the right questions to gain that level of insight, present that case, and accelerate the sale?

What are you doing to neutralize your three constant competitors?

Dear reader:

Help me in my attempt to boil years of experience into the shortest sales training treatise ever. Have I omitted anything? Could I express it differently? Are there more layers? Of course… but my question is: does this one page article adequately stimulate all that subsequent thinking? You decide, and help me shape it. I welcome your comments.

It’s 2011. Do You Know Who Your Competitors Are? (outspokenmedia.com)
What’s In Your Sales Backpack? (customerthink.com)
Competition Got You Down? (customerthink.com)

Tag: sales 2.0

Your 3 constant competitors, and how to beat them

Yourself

Your Prospect

Apathy

Like this:

3 Sales goals – Value, Volume, Velocity

3 Marketing goals – Content, Community, Conversion

Conversations Worth Starting

Related articles

Join over 1,000 followers

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Hope is Not a Strategy. Groom better sales pros using the Best Practice chart

Over to You

Making it Work for You

Related articles

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Assess your readiness: 3 questions

Undecided? Try these two tools

Sales & Marketing CRM Capability Maturity Model

3C Conversion Model

Additional Resources

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Social Media ROI, a Case Study

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Yourself

Your Prospect

Apathy

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