August 2008: In this issue...

Since the launch of CLOSE in January, I have heard so many analogies about the sales and marketing relationship. Personally, I see the two functions more like siblings. OK, more like siblings who sometimes HATE each other. I recently asked a friend how he got past the battle years.

1. Mom and dad told them to get along or else—no cars, no tv, no allowance, no living past the age of 16
2. They figured out where they fit in the family—who was the responsible one, who was the flake and who was in charge of handling mom and dad
3. They locked themselves in a room, fought like cats and dogs and made the decision to get over it

Oddly, this isn’t too far from the solutions drawn from our CLOSE Best Practice Workshops. No matter where the event was held—North America, Asia, Europe or Latin America—the collective voice of both sales and marketing clearly demonstrated that there are ways to reconcile this relationship.

1. Senior management mandates and supports programs that align and integrate
2. Clear definition of roles, responsibilities, and agreement on a common language to report, share and collaborate
3. Lock everyone in a room, fight like cats and dogs and make the decision to get over it.

As we launch the first CLOSE report, I want to take a moment to thank all of the participants in our global workshop series. I was honored to be present at each of these six events. My sincere thanks to John Williams, our tireless facilitator, and his troupe of ridiculously talented graphic recorders who continue to fill me with shame when I see my own chicken scratching. (Even if you have the most aligned sales and marketing team in the universe and you aren’t really interested in best practices, you MUST see these graphic renderings…Dana, Gabriella, Don and Gavin, you are all truly amazing!)

I also want to call attention to our incredible keynote speakers. Each brought their unique perspectives and thought leadership to this experience. Special thanks to our keynote leaders from Oracle. It is rare to get such an intimate and honest view behind the curtain of one of the largest sales and marketing machines.

To download the Scenarios and Solutions: Mapping the Gaps and Sales Effectiveness Traps, visit http://www.cmocouncil.org/resources/form_scenarios.asp.

Too all, our continued thanks and appreciation. Have a great month!

Liz Miller
Vice President
CMO Council
lmiller@cmocouncil.org

Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Lead Scoring

By Tim Wilson, Director of Business Process Analytics, Bulldog Solutions

Old school lead-generating efforts often fail because Marketing and Sales initiatives are dependent on each other but disconnected. The image often associated with this relationship is a funnel. At the top of the funnel is Marketing, which finds and lures leads that are then pushed down to the lower portion of the funnel, which is Sales.

This funnel image is fundamentally flawed because it suggests a linear process. Rather, to succeed, the process must be ongoing and circular, like cogs that continue to rotate and engage each other. One cog is Marketing (tactics), and this must be in alignment with a Sales cog (engagement), both of which are driven by a third cog: the continuous process of lead marketing optimization.

Complaints from the Sales department often occur because Marketing prematurely hands over leads to Sales, which creates efficiency problems. First, some of the information that needs to be gathered could have been gathered automatically through a Marketing dialogue. Second, the lack of that information results in lead handoffs that have little or no near-term potential. Over time, these inefficiencies cause Sales representatives to lose trust in the value the Marketing department is providing. In the worst case, it results in the salesperson starting to cold call himself, which makes the level of inefficiency even greater.

Successful Companies Must Be Customer-Centric

In The Customer Century: Lessons from World-Class Companies in Integrated Marketing and Communications, Anders Grondstedt writes:

Has your organization moved beyond Marketing and Sales silos? Does Sales have a regular voice in your lead-generation planning and lead-scoring processes? Does Marketing support Sales well beyond simply throwing leads at them? If so, then you have cleared a significant hurdle in the optimization of your lead marketing.

Now, is the way you measure the potential of future customers during your lead generation based on what the customer really needs, or is it based on what you think or want him to need?

In an exchange on Brian Carroll’s blog, Jeffrey Eisenberg wrote, “I’ve seen lots of marketers sacrifice early- and middle-stage buyers because they had to show an immediate ROI on each campaign they ran. Who is accountable for all the potential business they lose by saying the wrong thing to the right people at the wrong time?”

Your prospects are deluged with information. They have virtually infinite sources for researching and identifying solutions. To successfully reach these potential buyers, you need to start by putting your future customers—whether they buy this month, next month or next year—at the beginning of every strategy and tactic that you pursue.

Taking Your Lead Scoring to the Next Level

You score your leads and use that score to determine which leads are qualified and which ones are not. But, somehow, your Sales organization still complains that the leads you are giving them are not good leads. This is frustrating, because you did everything right:

• You involved Sales when determining what attributes to base your lead scoring on and how those attributes should be weighted.
• You looked at lead conversion data to determine the attributes of leads that turned into customers.
• You optimized your lead collection processes so that you were only asking leads to provide basic contact information and information that you would use to score them.

Overall, though, the feedback you are getting from Sales is that the leads are better … but still not very good. The reason for this may very well be because your lead scoring is now geared entirely towards identifying one thing: leads who Sales would most like to talk to.

What is missing here is a critical dimension of your leads: How interested are they in talking to you? Is it possible that Sales now sees that the leads are better because the job title, company size, or whatever you are scoring exactly match the profile of who they want to talk to, but, when they try to contact the leads, very few of them respond?

Read the full article »

Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales

Brought to you by Techdirt Insight Community and Social Media Today for TheCustomerCollective

A new set of business practices are slowly but steadily starting to creep into the way companies sell their wares to customers. This new trend in selling is being called “Sales 2.0” by some. It’s an unsophisticated, yet appropriate, moniker for this phenomenon, since many of the tools and methods that are fueling the Sales 2.0 trend have their roots in the Web 2.0 movement.

Before we focus on Sales 2.0, it is instructive to examine and to try to define Web 2.0, which we do later in this paper. Indeed, the definitions of Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 are problematic since both are relatively new phenomena. They are also hard to define because they are grass roots or bottom-up movements, and as such, have very hazy boundaries. It’s very difficult to determine where Web 1.0 ends and where Web 2.0 begins and the same can be said for Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0. Web 2.0 is a movement fostered by incremental improvements in technology and greater adoption of the Internet which fundamentally is altering how we live today. It’s changing how we gather information, how we shop, how we interact with friends and colleagues and touching innumerable other facets of our daily lives.

One of the central pillars of this movement—if not the central pillar—is collaboration. Web 2.0 is allowing us to work together and to share information and experiences in ways we never could before. It is empowering us to convey our thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams and to make them easily accessible to others online. In doing so, it’s allowed us to tap into a collective online wisdom that far surpasses what we could accomplish as individuals in the offline world. Now businesses are trying to harness some of the same empowering forces of Web 2.0 and to apply them to their sales and marketing efforts. They know from their Web 2.0 experience that working collaboratively online will allow them to better understand and connect with their customers and to market and sell their products and services more easily.

Read the full article »

Why Salespeople Have More in Common with Marketers Than They Think: An interview with Nigel Edelshain of Sales 2.0

Nigel Edelshain is CEO of Sales 2.0. Companies use Sales 2.0's telesales and consulting services to make their sales forces wildly more effective (typically boosting their sales results 3 - 10 times.) The company is dedicated to taking the sales profession to the next level. Nigel has sold millions of dollars of IT solutions to major Fortune 500 firms. He was head of sales for the financial services vertical for a 600-person system integrator. He sold e-business projects to senior business and technology executives. Nigel also worked for Platinum Technology (now CA) selling IT professional services. Nigel is the Chairman of the Wharton Business School Club of New York – the School’s largest alumni association. Nigel graduated from Wharton’s MBA program in 1993 and has an undergraduate degree in Microelectronics from Edinburgh University.

Tell us a little about your background and the formation of your company, Sales 2.0.

I got into sales by accident: I was working in a marketing role for a technology firm in New York who didn’t have enough marketing work to employ a full-time person. They gave me the option to work in a sales role instead. When I started selling, I got frustrated by trying to understand how sales should work. I wanted to learn and I asked my sales manager, “Can you train me how to sell?” He said, “There’s the phone. Let me know when you have some checks I can deposit.” They couldn’t give me any advice because they didn’t have a process, and I soon discovered that this is fairly typical.

I realized sales as a profession has a long way to go, and a couple of years ago this culminated in me forming Sales 2.0 with the mission of taking sales to the next level, by helping salespeople and companies realize and improve their selling process and patterns.

How can companies benefit from this?

If you’re the CEO of a company, you think of investments in terms of what you put in versus what you get back. Yet many CEOs feel that putting money into their sales force is more like roulette. Often they hire a VP of Sales and say, “Okay, you’re the magician, bring in the checks.” But have no idea exactly what the VP does, because the VP doesn’t document or explain it. Then if the VP leaves, or gets fired, the company is back at square one, left with nothing. This is obviously a huge waste of money.

You’ve spent time in both sales and marketing roles. What have you learned about each of these functions from working in the other?

Having been a marketer and a salesperson, I’ve learned that if you look at what we are really up to, we are all up to the same thing: we’re all trying to generate leads. The separation between the departments is something of a false barrier. It’s important to avoid the two departments becoming too separated psychologically; otherwise, you will create silos or even infighting.

What do you think are the biggest divides, or differences, between sales and marketing departments?

Companies hire marketers with the requirements that they be not only intellectual and creative, but also analytical. But often when these same companies hire salespeople, you get the sense that they feel the job could be done by almost anyone with good people skills, and that salespeople don’t necessarily need to be intellectual or know how to interpret a spreadsheet. Because many companies pigeonhole sales as being relatively simple when it is actually very complicated, they often hire completely different types of people for sales roles than they do for marketing roles.

When you hire different kinds of people and then put them in different departments, even in some cases on different floors, they’re set up to misunderstand each other and fail to work well together. Thus, it’s no wonder 80 percent of leads aren’t followed up. If there is separation between the two departments, marketing may spend extensive time and money generating leads that salespeople don’t perceive as useful. Then the salespeople say, “I don’t have time to waste on these marketing leads, I’m just going to cold call” and the marketing leads go in the dustbin. From a CEO’s perspective, this is a huge waste of money.

Smart companies are starting to realize this. I think in the future we will see sales and marketing departments look more and more alike.

What advice would you give to salespeople looking to work more effectively with their marketing counterparts?

Spend a lot of time with the marketing team and give them plenty of feedback—tell them what you need. When I was working in sales at one firm, I spent probably an hour a day with the marketing department.

Often marketers have to hear second-hand what clients really want, whereas salespeople are sitting face-to-face with clients on a daily basis. Marketers can’t be successful sitting alone in their office, staring at spreadsheets and whiteboards, trying to get inspiration on how to best engage customers. Salespeople have to communicate and work closely with marketers for both parties to really be successful.

Value Marketing

By Charles E. Waters

Many sales people can recite product features and competitive comparisons as easily as they can name their family members. Some can even articulate solution propositions based on the products they sell. But few are adept at selling value, which is what everyone buys. It’s a wonder anything gets sold.

I recently consulted for a company whose applications are based on a unique data collection and archiving architecture. The sales force told us that customers bought their products “because application X does this very well, and application Y does that very well”, etc. The marketing department, however, was marketing the data collection and archiving architecture and practically ignoring the applications. The sales force’s perception of value and the marketing department’s perception of value were two different things. It’s a wonder anything got sold. (Actually, I’ve found that good salespeople get the job done whether or not the marketing people are competent.)

Truly powerful business engines are built when sales and marketing tell the same good story. The good story is the one that prompts prospects to open their wallets. And what causes prospects to open their wallets is the value they believe they will receive in return for their hard earned money. The products deliver this value. Nobody really wants to buy a drill, the value they want is the hole.

Getting to Value

Values can be elusive. And there is only one magic formula to discover the values that prospects are looking for -- listening. Listen to the analysts, the press, competitors, sales people and engineers. Most importantly, listen to customers and prospects. They have all of the right answers that will cause them to write a check. In the technology market, value is rarely in the product itself. Maybe a techie thinks it’s a “cool” product, or maybe it has a technology that the techie wants to learn. In the latter case, the value is not really in the product but probably in enhancing the techie’s career. If this is the case, the salesman will find this out and close the deal. In the enterprise market, these kinds of values are typically not a general marketing issue.

Value propositions for technology products are about as numerous as the products themselves. The language you use to express values will vary according to audience.

Technical and operations audiences might find value in increasing service levels and streamlining operations. Sales and financial audiences might find value in increasing revenues and lowering costs. Resellers might find value in increasing revenues and market share.

One of the challenges in expressing values is that many of them don’t fall neatly into a single category, e.g. improving customer retention may span increasing service levels to improve customer satisfaction and also lowering the risk of losing a customer. Another challenge is that the same value might be expressed differently by different audiences. Enterprise sales generally involve bringing together parties with diverse interests and terminologies, even within the same department or division. Marketing must equip sales with a selection of core conversations that will allow sales to quickly guide these parties to a mutual “Conversation to Buy”.

In my prior example of the company whose applications are based on a unique data collection and archiving architecture, the IT people were interested in an architecture that streamlined IT operations but the end users were interested in the applications that lowered corporate risk. A successful sale was the result of communicating specific values to specific target audiences. In short, how you effectively express value depends upon how the audience perceives value. This is why knowing your audiences and listening to them is so important. It is also why there is no substitute for marketing experience across a broad range of markets and products.

Value Conversations

For the most part, marketing conversations are passive, one way affairs. This happens when someone reads an article, a brochure, an ad, a press release, listens to a presentation, etc. This monograph is an example of a passive conversation. A two-way or “active conversation” happens when two or more people participate in a continuous mutual interchange.

One of marketing’s chief challenges is to grab the attention of the listener without the benefit of an active conversation. To accomplish this marketing must first analyze the “noise level” in the market by researching what is being communicated by competitors, the press and industry analysts and influencers. Only then can marketing synthesize Value Conversations that rise above the noise and create a Value Relationship with the listener.

Value Conversations must communicate the values the listener desires and why those values are required. In essence, marketing is listening to understand what is needed and then is telling the listener “we know what you want and why you want it.”, and gets it right! After establishing the Value Relationship, it is then appropriate to describe the solution that delivers the value and then the product(s) that make up the solution.

In constructing these conversations, this hierarchy of Values > Solution > Product(s) must be easy for the listener to follow. And at each stage the values must be repeated to reinforce their association with the solution and product(s). These conversations must also provide comparisons that create competitive superiority and back this up with data, endorsements, case studies, etc.

Value Conversations must also be easy for others to communicate, whether it be the press, industry analysts, the sales force, resellers or prospects trying to convince their management to purchase the product or services.

Conclusion

Products don’t sell themselves; conversations sell products. And although these conversations will describe products and solutions, the most effective conversations are about value. Value Conversations must 1) describe values in a way that is meaningful to diverse audiences and communicable by diverse parties, 2) establish competitive superiority and 3) back up the conversation with facts. Value Conversations can be the most efficient and effective way to initiate “Conversations to Buy” and bring them to rapid and successful conclusions.