Tips That Will Bring a New Rhythm to Sales and Marketing

Out with the old

The traditional sales and marketing process relied on marketing to create and launch complex campaigns that positioned products around a specific message as a way to create brand identity and drive customer interest and demand for these products. Sales organizations were then charged with picking up all of these leads and converting them into paying customers. Among the drawbacks to this process – and they are numerous – are the fact that it is slow, cumbersome, disconnected from what is happening in the real world of sales, and often failed to create enough qualified prospects to move the needle when it came to driving revenue and closing new business. The inefficiency of this approach inevitably created internal friction between sales organizations – who often complain that marketing‘s strategy did not result in enough good leads – and marketing organizations – who complain that sales simply wasn‘t working hard enough or smart enough to convert the leads into customers. Either way, that argument is now moot, because the paradigm is no longer suited to reaching customers in the 21st Century. Customers have changed the way they approach the buying process.

In with the new

The Sales 2.0 revolution, driven by the fact that the world has migrated to a digital and social communication culture, has forever altered the way business is done. Today, the Internet supplies customers with immediate and highly detailed information about your company‘s products and services, along with information about all of your competitors. The advent of social media accelerates this process by giving buyers real-life and real-time reviews and opinions of your products and services. Now, rather than waiting for marketing to come up with a product campaign or waiting for a sales person to approach them with something that they might find helpful, customers are proactively scouring the Internet looking for the product or the company that appears best suited to meet their needs. In addition, these web-savvy customers prefer to do business online, using the tools, interfaces and amenities available through the Internet to do business their way, according to their schedule, to meet their specific needs.

Today‘s more sophisticated customers have a sense of power and entitlement, which means they are likely to already be fully aware of the options and solutions available to them. They are no longer willing to settle for a product just because a sales professional says it is a good choice. Most customers these days aren‘t necessarily looking for products at all. What they are interested in finding is a specific outcome.

With this end in mind, here are 10 tips to accelerate a truly integrated sales and marketing strategy:

Eliminate the chasm between marketing and sales – The sibling rivalry between sales and marketing must end. The old disconnected, cumbersome system in which two independent divisions both fight to achieve the same goal must be replaced by a fully collaborative, integrated approach where Sales and Marketing function as one seamless team, supporting each other and sharing information with each other in real time as they work together to deploy and close focused sales plays in shorter sales cycles.

 Senior Executives clearly articulate a vision for this highly integrated and collaborative approach to sales and marketing and hold both sides accountable to create and pursue a fully functional process that will guarantee success.

Both teams must consider themselves fully integrated members of the same revenue creation process, rather than members of distinct groups operating from separate missional perspectives who are simply collaborating to create an opportunity for ultimate mutual gain.

There must be a tightly integrated communication and feedback link between Sales and Marketing that regularly accesses and updates information about the type of leads needed, the strategies being deployed to deliver and develop those leads, the process being used to follow up those leads, and the progress being made to follow up on those lead.

Implement a rigorous, highly collaborative model requiring Sales and Marketing to work together to formulate all strategies involving the assessment of potential opportunities, as well as the design, deployment, monitoring, measuring and review of all sales plays.

Define and adhere to clear rules of engagement that define things like hand off points for important tasks.

Create a clearly defined decision chain to specify who needs to be in the loop from both the Sales and Marketing functions in order to initiate, review, and adjust ongoing sales plays.

Manage sales plays according to a clearly defined cadence that stipulates what will be done by Sales and Marketing each week to support each other‘s efforts.

Sales and Marketing must have access to and work from the same set of metrics, goals and timelines to guide them in the management of all sales plays.

Migrate all activities to the CRM – It is imperative that the company‘s CRM becomes the bridge to map, drive, monitor and measure all activities relating to sales and marketing. The CRM must not be allowed to run in the background as a contact database or a sales accounting tool. The entire organization must begin to see the CRM for what it really is – a vital source of urgent, insightful, real time intelligence that can help every function of the organization nimbly and rapidly adapt to changing conditions, adjust goals, identify customer trends, and uncover and coach to team skill gaps. With everyone accessing, analyzing and acting on the same just-in-time information, the entire organization will be able to fine tune strategies, boost efficiency, scale resources up or down more economically, boost productivity and drive revenue and grow business faster.

There is one thing about sales and marketing that hasn‘t changed and never will. The prospects are still out there. What they are looking for is a sales organization that is accessible, flexible, informed, responsive and willing to help them achieve their desired outcomes. The sooner you begin to aggressively, persistently, creatively invest in making the changes to catch up with the way the world is already doing business, the sooner you will reap the rewards.

Action Items:

• Is your company still operating under the old, segmented sales and marketing system? If so, why? How is that working for you today?
• Does everyone in your company who is involved and sales and/or marketing use the CRM to access the same data at the same time, and use the same metrics to measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing activities?
• Are senior executives driving a strong message about the need to operate within a tightly integrated sales and marketing strategy?
• Describe the process you are using to assure that your organization‘s sales and marketing activities will achieve a fully integrated status.