BY CHRISTOPHER HOSFORD
SALES-MARKETING alignment is one of those corporate considerations seemingly more honored in the breach than the observance.
Sales managers and reps complain about what they see as low-quality leads and off-base collateral materials delivered by marketing, while marketing moans about off-brand messaging and lousy feedback from the field. Sales begs for more complete, easily available customer relationship management information, while marketing urges sales to be more proactive in sharing best practices.
In short, in many cases sales and marketing suffer from a major disconnect, worsened by mutual distrust and even a lack of respect.
Integration is essential, said John Neeson, managing director and co-founder of SiriusDecisions Inc., because sales alone “can on average effectively source only from 20% to 40% of the sales pipeline. And when you look at companies with $1 billion or more in revenue, that drops below 20%.”
In May 2007, SiriusDecisions hosted a Return on Integration Summit in Las Vegas, highlighting best practices in marketing and sales integration. Neeson said companies following these are 63% better at converting marketing campaigns into sales leads.
Any discussion of a sales and marketing disconnect always seems to come back to tools. John Aiello, CEO and co-founder of the SAVO Group, said as much as 40% of a salesperson’s job is consumed in putting together selling materials in preparation for meetings and presentations, a critical portion of time better spent selling.
“Sales enablement has got to be
the most critical endeavor in the minds of marketing executives,” said Aiello, whose company markets Sales Asset Manager, software that tracks and manages sales collateral and presentation materials.
Aiello sees a trend toward a new job description, which he calls the sales enablement architect, whose job it is to assemble correct selling tools from marketing, monitor their adoption and ensure mutual sales-marketing cooperation. These “ architects” possess what Aiello called “half marketing, half sales brains.”
Dow Jones & Co. is one company that’s put this type of position into service. The company’s alignment efforts have accelerated since Alan Scott, a former Gartner Research executive, was named chief marketing officer of Dow Jones’ Enterprise Media Group in 2003. The group’s Facti-va division sells business news, information and business indexes to financial institutions, traders, governments and the media.
Using a five-step pipeline model—gaining a customer’s attention, interest, conviction, desire and the sale—Scott and his team divided these steps between marketing ( focusing on the first two) and sales (hitting the last three). The new post was created as a conduit between the two functions.
The company measures its success by determining how much revenue comes from marketing-gener-ated leads; other measurements determine which marketing efforts work best toward this end, for further refinement.
Another company that’s created a special bridge between sales and marketing is Autodesk Inc. Of the company’s sales execution group, Mike Colombo, Autodesk’s senior director of worldwide sales execution, said, “It took a while to get it right, but our divisions see how crit-
ical this is once the right tools are in the sales pipeline.”
Companies in highly competitive industries, where product differentiation is crucial, may benefit the most from tightly integrated sales and marketing efforts.
A 2006 survey sponsored by the American Marketing Association found that product and services differentiation is the one goal considered most at risk from poor marketing and sales integration, with the ability to sell value over price also considered in danger.
Lack of tight sales and marketing integration can be masked, experts say, by already robust sales or lack of serious competition. But when the two functions drift, it shows up in higher costs associated with sales— in particular the addition of sales support staff—and delays in the sales cycle.
“The problem is revealed not in closing business once sales has qualified leads but rather in finding those leads, getting them interested and creating urgency,” said Bob Schmonsees, a marketing consultant and author of “Escaping the Black Hole: Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing and Sales Disconnect” (Texere, 2005).
Measuring success can be just as vague; pinning marketing dollars spent to sales dollars gained isn’t easy, but Dow Jones for one follows up on every point of customer contact.
“In the first year, our measurable results from lead generation were in the seven figures, and our results have, at a minimum, doubled each subsequent year,” Scott said. He added that Dow Jones wants to make sales and marketing “one continuous effort rather than separate ones.”
As competition increases, the greatest urgency may simply be in not overlooking any source of advantage.
“The point is, if your company is more aligned and coordinated, and everyone is sharing knowledge and saying the same thing, it will do better,” said Schmonsees. “Measuring alignment is like measuring a happy marriage. It’s just so much common sense.”
Sales/marketing integration a priority
IDC recently asked tech marketers at 41 companies to distribute a total of 100 points to the following sales and marketing alignment priorities within their marketing organizations in 2008.
Better alignment and integration of sales and marketing IT/ infrastructure (e.g., customer database, lead management)
41%
Better alignment and integration of processes (planning, budgeting, forecasting)
31%
Better alignment and utilization of metrics/
performance measurement
25%
Source: IDC's CMO Tech Marketing Barometer, 2008
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
BY JAMES W. OBERMAYER
THERE, I’VE SAID IT. Self-interest tops the bosses’ orders, loss of market share, missed sales quotas and good, old-fashioned altruism (which took the last train for the coast in mid-2001).
We are a society of “What’s in it for me?” or at the very least, “If I have to do something for you, I’ll make sure it doesn’t hurt my budget or my reputation.” Painful as it may seem, until the good times roll again, marketing and sales have staked out opposite sides of the turf, and defense trumps offense if it means that the two sides must play together to win.
The loser in this “Retain-my-job-at-all-costs” battle is the company that hired marketing and sales executives to find new business. The issues are pure and simple leadership values. Of course, fear drives foolish actions and decisions—and seldom innovative thinking—but we can jump the chasm of fear by understanding that when our backs are to the wall, we always step up. When we feel there is no choice, choices appear. When sacrifice is asked of us, real leaders come through because … it is just the right thing to do. I suggest that for sales and marketing executives, the time to step up and be counted is now.
When something as unpleasant as lagging sales hits the fan, and marketing and sales refuse to work together to find new business, every one of us gets splattered with the consequences—some more than others. From shareholders to workers who are laid off, life becomes difficult for many.
One thing I have encountered in many companies JAMES W. is that when times are tough, the pipeline is drained of OBERMAYER opportunities; and salespeople with limited time can- is executive not recover without help. Help can only come from director of the two directions; marketing or a recovering marketplace. Sales Lead Few people can wait for marketplace demand to shift Management back in their favor. The only solution is that marketing Association. He must step up and create the wealth they are capable of can be reached generating. Marketing and sales must put aside their at jobermayer@ differences, step up and make a difference. saleslead I suggest there is a recipe for this. Do not leave out mgmtassn.com. any ingredients. You have plenty of opportunity to put your creativity on the outcome, just don’t change the sequence. But before listing the ingredients, I’d like to note the following facts.
■ Regardless of the severity of a downturn, someone is always buying and someone is always selling.
■ Pipelines are drained in difficult times and must be rebuilt.
■ Growth is sustained and built on a formula that simply says the larger the pipeline of opportunities, the more we will sell.
■ To increase sales, increase sales activities.
■ Marketing and sales can build a pipeline together to a greater degree than if each were to work alone. In this instance one plus one equals three.
■ Without the cooperation of sales and marketing people to build an opportunity pipeline, salespeople can seldom do it on their own; and they are left to the recovery of the market place. Exceptions to this fact appear in small companies but never in large ones.
Ingredients for cooperation:
Marketing must know the quotas for the salespeople. You must know:
■ What has to be sold and exactly how much in dollars and units by product and by salesperson?
■ The closing ratio of an opportunity. If a salesperson gets 10 opportunities, what percentage will be sold?
■ The average sales cycle for the products that have to be sold. How long does it take to sell the product?
■ How is the commission plan structured?
■ Do you have to make up for the past (lost sales) or can you be satisfied with just the future growth?
Marketing must create the most-qualified opportunities possible. The more qualified the sales lead is, the less valuable sales time will be wasted on talking to unqualified people. Marketing must find out the prospect’s need, desire, time frame, application, budget, etc.
When marketing knows the closing ratio of the inquiries and sales leads, they will know how many opportunities have to be created to reach the sales goals in the time allotted.
Sales must follow-up 100% of the prospects. No buts, no arguing. They have no choice but to do it. Complaining and whining about lead quality won’t sell product; only sales calls will sell product.
Marketing must evaluate every inquiry and lead created in the campaign. They must know the raw inquiry cost, qualified lead cost and closed lead cost.
Sounds simple? It is more simple that you can imagine for some companies. Marketing and sales must cooperate in building a predictable pipeline of opportunities based on quotas. When both do their parts, the company wins, no one in HR is laying people off, there are happy shareholders and life couldn’t be better. Can you rise to the challenge and stop the turf wars? After all, it is in your self-interest.
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