May 13, 2003

To align sales and marketing, work backwards from the customer's perspective (Or, How to fix the plane while it's flying)

by Scott Santucci, BluePrint Marketing

Many companies will admit they have a problem with getting their sales and marketing departments to function well together, but most are not doing much to address the issue. Some CEOs have tried in the past only to have lackluster results. Others are replacing their sales and marketing leadership in hopes the new blood will fix the problem. Regardless of the orientation, most CEOs agree on one thing — sales and marketing execution must improve.

Why have so many sales and marketing programs — ones that seemed like good ideas at the time — failed to produce the results we expected?

Without an eye for detail, the best-laid plans, from the smartest people, fail to produce the expected results. When you attempt to change the way your company operates, the opportunity for problems dramatically increases. Improving your sales and marketing effectives requires you to transform these disconnected departments into an integrated machine that manufactures customers. Before introducing you to the steps and projects required to achieve this, we need to first focus on a few execution fundamentals.

Fundamental #1: Create governance. Given the various projects to be performed, and the many different people that play a role in driving results, you should develop a list of high-level guiding points to help people calibrate their daily activity to the overall initiative.

Key principals for sales effectiveness include:

1. Traditional "stovepipes" between sales and marketing must be systemically broken down and eliminated.
2. Providing customers the information they need, in their context, is the design point of all sales and marketing activity.
3. Your brand and value proposition is primarily communicated through individual sales people.
4. Sales effectiveness is an ongoing process, not a one-time project.

Fundamental #2: Blend intellectual skill sets. To achieve best practice sales effectiveness you need people who are:

• Strategic thinkers and problem-solvers that can help you uncover challenges and develop ideas to address them. This is required for true innovation.
• Capable of understanding all of the specific tasks required to meet these goals, create plans, and get the organization to act on them. We call this the assembly component.
• Who are specialists that can perform the required tasks. This third skill set determines the ability to succeed at delivery.

Fundamental #3: Break down transformation into manageable pieces. To successfully transform your organization, you need to understand where you are going. You must create milestones along the way, and break down all of the activities into manageable, independent, yet interconnected projects.

The diagram below is a visual depiction of a structured transformation program to help you integrate sales and marketing.

The ovals represent the intellectual skill sets required to successfully achieve the objectives for each project, which are indicated as boxes. Because you are changing your organization, sales effectiveness should be viewed as a series of iterative phases each tackling a defined set of tasks that will produce the quickest results.

Project #1: Program game plan
The goal of this project is to select the set of activities to that will yield the greatest impact, in the shortest amount of time, using the minimum amount of resources. To succeed, you have to have a strong plan. Start by doing financial analysis: Figure out your firm's close rate, sales cycle time, and average revenue per sales transaction and then ask sales people what could be done to improve each of these.

Also, speak with your customers. Ask them to recall for you all of the steps they went through to buy your software. Find out when the project got started and why, who were all of the people involved, and what role they played. Finally, analyze the pipeline and see if you can see any trends.

Based on this analysis, you should have a good idea where the "low-hanging fruit" is. For example, in speaking with your clients, you might find that each one of them spent a huge amount of time trying to justify your project internally. You also found that the pipeline stage for "funded project" is where most of the opportunities are getting stuck. Therefore, a quick-win possibility would be to provide your customers with the information that will help them acquire funding for their projects.

Internal communication is extremely important for any type of transformational activity, but is especially important for sales effectiveness. Sales people are often reluctant to embrace marketing programs because they see them as coming from an ivory tower; they're pre-judged to be impractical and not based in the real world of sales experience.

Additionally, many other important stakeholders will be skeptical about an initiative like this. It is critical that you develop a well-composed business plan, create a clearly articulated game plan, and communicate the program to all of the stakeholders involved in the project.How well you internally sell your initiative will have a direct bearing on the success of your first iteration of the program.

Project #2: Impact analysis, audit, and alignment
This project is a more detailed analysis of the problem. Now that you know the specific areas you wish to tackle, collect as much information on the problem as possible.

• Understand your firm's sales pipeline and forecasting process in detail
• Follow the lifecycle of a few opportunities from first lead to close
• Quantify your value proposition, review it with a few sales people, and see if they agree
• Model your customers' buying process and review it with a few customers to see if it's accurate
• Profile all the stakeholders who are involved in your buying process
• Map your customers' buying process to your sales process and compare both to pipeline data
• Work with the finance or sales operations department to analyze pipeline stage to stage conversion rates, the length sales cycle time, and the financial value for improving these metrics

[Editor's note: To help you get started with sales efficiency metrics, use the "Sales and Marketing Effectiveness Model" that's in the SoftwareCEO's Downloads Library; it's in the Sales and Distribution section.]

• Once you've developed an integrated customer and sales process, audit your marketing programs to see where they are targeted and determine the sell-through rate of those investments

All of these activities will provide a clear view into your alignment gaps; highlight key areas where improvements can be made, and what the financial impact on making those improvements may be. A quick-win possibility will be to identify ineffective marketing investments, eliminate them, and communicate that to executive management.

Project #3: Content framework and process
Your sales and marketing problems can be distilled into this one statement: Your company is not providing your customers the information they need, in their context, at the right time.

Global 2000 organizations require different information from each stage of the buying process. They will also involve many different stakeholders who each have their own criteria to evaluate you against. Because the majority of your marketing content is not mapped to these specific challenges, sales people struggle to locate useful collateral — and will usually create their own.

In creating a content process, you must develop a structure that aligns marketing content creation with sales and customer demands. Start by developing a business development process map: Show what happens at each step, beginning with an account not yet contacted and terminating with an executed agreement.

Plot out all of the key milestones that will happen throughout the sales process, and then superimpose your customers' buying cycle on top on it. Combine your business development process with your customers' buying process and solicit feedback from the entire executive team.

It is extremely important to get the organization to agree on this integrated business development and customer buying process framework; it will serve as the foundation for all future sales effectiveness projects.

Project #4: Content creation
After creating the organizing framework, the second biggest challenge to tackle is the messaging problem. Each of your products has many features designed to provide value to your customers. Every stakeholder will have different interpretations of the value those features provide, and each person will try to relate your capabilities to their own perspective and business problems.

Throughout their decision-making process, the questions buyers will ask will also be different. Your sales people are ultimately responsible for managing all of these multiple messages, while also driving a sales process. Therefore, at any given time, each sales person is required to be conversant on many different topics at a tremendous level of depth.

To help your sales people be more persuasive, you need to help them develop and manage the myriad messages that are communicated during a sales process. Each claim, or argument, should be broken down into the following elements and specifically tailored for each stakeholder involved in the buying process:

• Customer-focused value statement
• A list of specific business problems the customer has related to that argument
• The organizational impact those business problems will have on an account
• Credible proof on the existence of the problems and potential impact
• Questions designed for sales people to uncover the problems related to this specific argument
• Questions designed to help determine the organizational implications of the problem
• A list of specific actions that a client needs to take to address the problem
• A list of features and/or functions that specifically relate to this argument
• A list of personal (non-economic) advantages the stakeholder will gain by addressing these problems
• An ability to prove your capabilities will address that problem
• Examples of how your capabilities can be used to address these specific problems
• Examples of how they are currently performing with the problem and how they could be once it was addressed
• An ability to financially justify the argument

Additionally, you should create a sales team to help you develop and test this content. When creating the team, you should select a minimum of one superstar, two average reps, and one sub-par performer.

Also, make sure you select an outspoken critic of the marketing organization to participate. This selection process will help you develop useful content, but also provide you with a working group to help you begin to establish credibility with the field sales force.

When you put this team into play, make sure you have documents for them to react to. This will focus the conversations and will help maintain project momentum by not wasting people's time.

Project #5: Content distribution
Another key problem sales people face is accessing the right information they need at a given time. For example, most marketing departments will organize collateral by type or product. However, sales people look for resources to help them assist a prospect with a particular question or problem.

Based on the stage of the buying process, customers will have different questions and needs. Therefore, information will be more accessible to sales people if it is organized by their sales stages, and not by product.

Also, most of the marketing materials produced are distributed in PDF format, which prevents sales people from cutting and pasting content elements that they can use to rapidly assemble a proposal or letter. Ultimately, this results in sales people creating their own marketing collateral from scratch.

To help uncover these problems in your organization, create a sales content distribution team with a similar configuration as the sales content team. This different group of sales people will help you identify various ways to deliver the right information to them.

For example, most sales people receive far too much product-specific training and not enough on the business problems your company is trying to solve.

Also, these sessions last a long time and the retention rate is very low. You might be able to create self-service, pre-recorded training vignettes that will allow sales people to learn at their own pace, and give them more background information they can use when they are preparing for a big sales call.

Project #6: Sales enablement
This project will produce the first deliverables that will be rolled out to the sales force, and will serve as the foundation for all future sales programs. The objective here is to provide your internal sales organization with the information they need to engage in meaningful conversations with your clients.

Sales people require a lot of information and resources to effectively communicate the various messages involved in a sales process. Some examples include:

• Refresher background information
• Business driver "cheat sheets"
• Cold-calling scripts and conversation prompters
• Qualification checklists
• Pre-written letter templates that can easily be tailored
• List of value propositions (or sales arguments)

Work with your sales content team to create and test a suite of these resources that are specific to your pipeline stages and customer buying process. You can leverage the work you did creating the sales arguments to rapidly assemble these tools.

From an organizing perspective, you should create icons or some other way to visually relate the content with a stakeholder or sales stage to make them easier to access. You must also create a way to deliver this suite of tools in a standardized, useful, but simple-to-understand way (a tab-separated binder, for example, or via your intranet).

When training the sales force on the format, make sure you make it interactive and provide real-world scenarios that will allow them to get comfortable using these tools in a controlled manner.

Project #7: Sales empowerment
This project is focused on developing customer-facing tools that sales people can give prospects to help them achieve a specific buying-process milestone. After your sales team leaves, it is up to your internal champion to communicate on your behalf. You can help improve your chances by providing your internal champion resources to deliver your message.

Prospects do not read corporate brochures — they want answers to very specific questions. Develop an inventory of content that maps to various customer goals within the buying process.

The funded project scenario we used in the Program Game Plan section can be a good example here. Regardless of the nature of the prospect company, an internal business case to tackle the business problems your software solves will have a lot of the same elements.

Invest the time to create a simple-to-use template that champions can easily tailor to make their own. You should make sure it is accurate and not an obvious plug for your company. This will help achieve two things:

First, if you create the document correctly you will help the client justify their project more quickly and thus create a sales opportunity.

Secondly, you will have the inside track on the business because the requirements outlined in the business case will map to your capabilities. All sales enablement projects should be completely focused on helping a customer address a very specific problem.

Project #8: Sales portal
When you break down all of your content to the point at which it is specific for each stakeholder, aligned to each stage of the buying process, and designed for both internal and external consumption, you will have dramatically increased the amount of content available for a sales person.

This presents a few problems:

• If sales people cannot find the right information, they will not use it
• Providing a basic structure for sales people to digest and act on all of this information is critical
• Maintaining and version control of the content
• Physically distributing the content to sales people can limit scalability

Many software companies have sales portals, but for portals to be effective, you need to structure them so that sales people can easily navigate the site to find the information they are looking for.

To do this, you should organize your sales intranet by pipeline stage, solution, stakeholder, and vertical industry. You should also develop content review and maintenance processes to make sure the information remains fresh and relevant.

Project #9: Sales programs
Most marketing executives believe their job is done once a lead has been passed to sales. We don't. We believe marketing should help drive revenue, and therefore focus on moving opportunities from one stage of the pipeline to the next.

Having mapped your customers' business processes and understanding their milestones, you can develop very specific and highly-targeted events to help them reach their goals.

The impact of focusing your efforts on specific topics will be dramatic. It is not uncommon for people to experience ROIs in excess of 700% for programs such as these.

For example, you can build upon the issue of helping your client justify an internal project by creating a targeted and repeatable event on the subject. Use your leading expert on the topic to create a hosted or online event that only talks about best practices a client must go through to get a funded project around your solution. Then, to help them achieve the results they are looking for, offer them the template you've already developed.

For projects like this, do not talk about your products or services, because your objective is to help them achieve a buying-stage milestone and facilitate the sales process, not ask them for business — let your sales people do that.

Project #10: Measurement and reporting
What does measurement mean, and what should you track? While you need to develop success metrics for each project, such as sales satisfaction surveys, you must develop a macro-level tracing system.

Ideally, you should create a business development pipeline — specific for each solution or vertical market — that tracks the advancement of opportunities from targeted account to contract. You should track, at an aggregate level, your close rate, average deal size, and sales cycle time.

At a more granular level you should track: conversion rates from stage to stage, the average length of time spent in each stage, and average deal sizes by sales channel. This will provide you with the required information to monitor the effectiveness of existing campaigns, but also help you determine other areas where improvements can be made. Thus, you can then go back to Project #1 — the Program Game Plan — with a new set of challenges to address.

Finally, reports should be created and distributed to all sales, sales management, and the executive leadership to objectively communicate the effectiveness of your sales and marketing customer-manufacturing machine.

Summary
Achieving sales effectiveness is not easy, and to be successful, you need to develop an overall program that has many related projects. Using your customer as a design point, architect all of the information they require to make a buying decision from you and map that to your company's sales process.

Create a framework you can use to deliver this information to your sales people in a way they can understand. Marketing must establish credibility with the sales force and should focus on the suite of resources that will have the maximum impact.

Finally, to make sales effectiveness a discipline in your organization, you must develop a measurement and reporting structure to monitor activity and consistently seek new areas for improvement.