I’ve been blogging and Tweeting quite a bit on the theme of improving sales/marketing (mis-) alignment — initially exploring the concept of Engagement 2.0 and most recently exploring the challenges marketers face in actually improving sales/marketing alignment. It’s a timely issue. It’s also particularly front and center for me given Silverpop just held its global sales meeting (which I had some Tweets from) last week.
It’s great to have the opportunity as a marketer to participate in a sales summit. The most-significant take-away is hearing about the challenges and opportunities facing our business through the lens of the sales organization. This is a critical exercise to go through as a marketer.
“Marketing and sales look at the world through different lenses,” notes a recent Silverpop white paper on improving alignment, “And that’s not likely to change … .” Thus, sales empathy is a critical component of building bottoms-up marketing programs, and it’s more important than ever. The 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study, co-authored by sales guru Mac McIntosh, noted that — despite often opposite sales-team sentiments — the bulk of marketing organizations really do play a critical role in demand generation: “A majority (60%) of the companies reported that their outside sales teams find less than half of the opportunities in the sales pipeline on their own … .”
How Sales Views Marketing
So how does a sales organization view marketing? I’ve gotten a variety of perspectives from both sales professionals and industry gurus, but what stands out are two related questions sales professionals seem to lean on when assessing marketing:
> Does marketing actually add value? This may make most marketer’s jaws drop, but it’s a legitimate question. It requires a little bit of explanation, though. One seasoned sales professional I spoke with for this piece commented:
I would suggest marketers ask themselves this question before sending a lead over the fence to sales: Is this lead(s) that I have equal to or more worthy than a lead that a salesperson can get out of [a lead sourcing provider such as] Jigsaw where they already know the company’s revenues, the title, the company vertical, the URL and so on?
This comment really gets at the heart of the demand chain and of marketing’s critical role in demand generation. We often comment about how in the current B2B selling environment marketing must take on more responsibility than ever in lead nurturing and lead management. That also means that marketing must add more value than ever before, and that value must exceed what might be provided via an alternate demand generation channel (such as an online compiled lead sourcing provider).
Mike Damphousse, a demand generation expert, provides another perspective on the minimum threshold for added value in a recent piece on his Smashmouth Marketing blog:
There are lots of terms describing leads. … Acronyms or not, my opinion is that when sales gets a lead … it better meet three criteria:
1. It better be a company the rep wants to penetrate
2. It better be a person that has the role and responsibility to contribute to a decision
3. It better be someone that has an interest in what sales is about to talk to them about
> Can marketing demonstrate added value? This second point may be a bit more understandable for many marketers constantly asked about marketing measurement and return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. Regardless of whether you are, or are not, adding value in the demand chain, the question is whether this can be demonstrated.
Interestingly — from a sales perspective — how this is demonstrated doesn’t have to be complicated. Another seasoned marketing professional pointed out to me that basic information about the content of campaigns, targeting, start/end dates and channels used go a long way towards solving the problem and towards understanding the role marketing played in adding value.
Assessing Marketing Through a Sales Lens
What are some incremental steps marketers can take to improve their empathy for the sales point of view? As an exercise, I took the two questions from above and placed them in a two-by-two matrix format. It really helped to clarify what might be defined as the four types of marketers in the eyes of sales. The ideal is being a 100% “aligned marketer” — i.e., demonstrating and actually delivering value. And it goes without saying that the 100% “mis-aligned marketer” will not have his/her job for long.
What is interesting to think about is the other two types of marketers — the ones who aren’t 100% broken and could benefit from some help:
> The “spin doctor” is good at demonstrating value — probably using skewed top-down metrics — but is actually not delivering value that is greater than what might be achieved via an alternate demand generation channel. This type of marketer could benefit from better campaign-level insights, to understand what is working and what is not, and actually improve the ROI of marketing activities.
> The “silent operative” is getting it right but can’t show the causal connection in the demand chain. This type of marketer is a strong candidate for closed-loop analytics that provide lead-level insights — demonstrating the connection between marketing investment and results.
Technology can’t change the lens of sales or marketing, but it can play a key role in improving alignment — especially for a spin doctor or a silent operative. A marketing automation platform can help tune campaigns, and if integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, it can also deliver critical closed-loop analytics. And leveraging the lead scoring capabilities of a marketing automation platform can provide a common basis for sales and marketing to talk about added value — serving as a common “lingua franca” for sales/marketing alignment. It’s a start!
What are your experiences as a marketer (or sales professional) in closing the gap between the two different lenses?
As an IT guy, it is novel that I am even reading this post, let alone commenting on it. But I actually work for a Marketing organization at CA. My role is to assist Sales by being a product agnositic “value-add” for their constituents, with the goal of fostering stronger strategic partnerships.
Though my role does not require Marketing per se, I have a close proximity to some day-to-day Marketing activities. The aspect of this exposure I have found most intriguing is the relationship between Marketing and Sales. It has been interesting, to say the least, and reminds me of the “us and them” relationship between IT and the business organizations they support.
Given what I have witnessed, your post if very thoughtful and insightful. If I could be so bold as to offer my advice, though it comes from an admittedly pedestrian Marketing view:
Sales and Marketing alignment will be achieved when they are two roles in a single end-to-end process.
This is something that has occurred to me in my short time in Marketing. I am just using your post to throw it out there.
Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist
http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceevangelist/
Steve,
A comment on your comment… you say, “Sales and Marketing alignment will be achieved when they are two roles in a single end-to-end process.” It’s a mighty big process — marketing supports sales but also has to create brand recognition. Marketing has to create messages that appeal to a broad market; sales has to communicate the messages that will resonate at the client level, showing how the solution will meet individual client needs.
There were a few years in my career where I got a lot of requests (I was a product marketing manager for a tech firm) where I was asked to create sales tools for specific client situations — usually in the form of a specific feature/function sheet or a competitive checklist.
It was frustrating — I was trying to provide the info/tools that sales needed, but most of it seemed to just miss the mark.
We finally figured it out. We made sure we understood how marketing supported the sales process by clearly delineating the objectives and metrics for brand, lead gen, field and product marketing. And we invested in an excellent sales training program — ValueSelling. Sales, marketing and product management went through the training and we finally were all on the same page.
But it’s not just the process that needs to be on the same page; it’s the taxonomy and terminology. If I am in marketing and I send sales a “qualified lead,” we better agree on what “qualified” means.
I think you and I probably agree that we might be able to really get to a single end-to-end process, but we need to recognize that sales and marketing have different objectives and goals over the course of the process, and that makes it more difficult to pull it off. And maybe more fun.
@ Steve – Thanks for the comment. I could not agree more. While there may be some functional differentiation, there needs to be a cross-functional singularity of purpose and process.
And it has to be collaborative. It’s critical as a marketer to see things from the sales point of view, but it also is critical for sales to see things from a marketing point of view.
@ Wendy – Your insights are very thoughtful interesting to hear. There are different roles being played, but I also would submit that some of the traditional approaches to marketing — as with any business science — need to evolve.
I think one of the major transitions — and this is something technology can help change our take on — is moving marketing’s role from being in the business of one to many communication to mass one-to-one communication. We need to be more sophisticated than ever about our targeting and close-in support of sales. And our marketing communication needs to adopt the voice of sales.
We also need to shift our stance — from one of a strictly proactive nature to one of a forward thinking but reactive nature. What do I mean by this? With a buyer driving the purchase, we’ve got to anticipate their needs and be ready to respond, but ultimately that needs to be a communication interchange initiated by buyer. It’s a new posture that requires a new approach I have talked about in past presentations as being ‘dynamic’ and iterative campaigns, versus traditional static campaigns.
where am I going with this? I agree that there are different roles and points of view. You’re totally right, but I also think that we need to be open to shifting those roles and points of view and that this is going to be a critical component of improving he effectiveness of the go-to-market process.
Great dialogue! Thanks for jumping in.
Excellent post Adam. The 4×4 is real contribution and I hope it finds profile outside of this blog. I’ll do my bit.
The constant struggle of sales and marketing for hegomony is something that I have been leading a discussion on recently. In my view, perfect alignment rarely exists in organisations because:
1) Neither side invests the time to understand the other
2) Marketing in its broadest definition is too big a role for one person or department and hence marketing is often seen only as ‘sales support’.
3) Marketers don’t invest in their own leadership skills and hence rarely get to a level within an organisation where they have the mandate they aspire to.
Marketing doesn’t have to bow down or vindicate itself to Sales, but it does have to justify itself to the board in a language and measures the board understands. The key is firstly to identify those measures and then to align the marketing strategy and plan to them. A functional board will see that these should extend beyond short-term sales performance.
My discussion for anybody that is interested is here http://bit.ly/oPBlb
Excellent thread! From my experience, aligning sales organisation and the marketing organisation is one where not only do you need to clearly communicate and align marketing objs vs their business goals, you need to constantly engage the sales folks on a weekly basis, reiterate objs, reaffirm actionable deliverables on both sides in order to keep the whole close loop marketing going. Lastly, the leadership team has to see importance of this happening and ensure it is aligned and communicated between the sales and marketing leaders.
@ Marketing Eye – Your comment points 2 and 3 are interesting because they speak to a new impetus for marketing — to narrow what you promise and to make sure you have the leadership and infrastructure to back it up.
I wrote a blog piece a while back that suggested that the new role for the CMO should be to drive BOTH organizational and technological change. And I believe this. You need to make things happen, but you need to have the back-up so you can scale, repeat and efficiently operate, while still having time to focus on and understand constantly-changing priorities.
FYI, that piece is at: http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/a-cmo%e2%80%99s-dual-imperatives-%e2%80%93-driving-organizational-and-technological-change/
The inherent conflict here is that sales is a one-to-one, and sales expects marketing to support them one-to-one. The way we attacked this 20 years ago was to ignore what happens on the street and just build ‘big brands’ – a la Mad Men. But we’re all wise that that doesn’t work — especially with B2B marketing. The good news is that new systems give us the architecture to be able to support one-to-one and lead-level marketing on a massive scale.
Also, thanks for the link. I will check out that discussion thread and participate with some comments.
@ George – Internal communication – as you cite – is, in fact, the greatest tool we have for addressing mis-alignment.
Great ideas, guys. Thanks for the insights.