You have questions? Experts have answers!
Selling Power put four questions on the subject of the current state of sales and marketing alignment to five experts. The experts are:
LAVON KOERNER REVENUE STORM
PETER OSTROW ABERDEEN
TAMARA SCHENK MHI
Q: How well are marketing and sales aligning? Strohkorb: About 35 percent of firms are aligned. But there are different degrees. Some just collaborate on lead generation and management. True collabora- tion uses marketing for segmentation and thought leadership. Ostrow: Marketers are less accountable for activities, clicks, registrations, and eyeballs, and more for sales- centric data, adding to pipelines, and revenue from campaigns. For salespeople, micro-marketing to specific prospects is a must-have skill. Koerner: There’s still a huge problem. Salespeople are not good at coming up with the sales script, a riveting message. Marketers should be doing that. Schenk: First, establish a shared vision before aligning processes and technology. Sales and marketing should both be measured by revenue contribution. Winter: Sales is catching on to the importance of targeted messaging to generate quality leads. Com- panies are getting smarter about enabling reps to provide the right message, at the right time, to the right people.
Q: Do you align from top down, bottom up, or both? Strohkorb: Initiative must come from the top, then get the bottom people together. Schenk: Both. Sales leadership sets the vision, strategy, and how to get there. Sales ops implements processes and technologies. Ostrow: Start with leadership modeling behavior they expect from staff. Agree on lead rejection and nurturing protocols. More than a quarter of companies include sales-forecast accuracy in compensation strategies for reps and managers. Company welfare is more important than lone-wolf sales performance. Koerner: Neither top nor bottom. Start by deciding the go-to-market strategy: transaction selling, solution sell-
PETER STROHKORB PETER STROHKORB CONSULTING
DOUG WINTER SEISMIC
ing, consultative selling, or partnering with buyers and sellers having skin in the game.
Q: How does technology help? Ostrow: Sales enablement focuses resources on sales and marketing content. Best-in-class organizations are 27 percent more likely to align specific content with the stages of the buyer journey. Koerner: Technology must be aligned to the go-to- market strategy. You can’t have the tech tail wagging the strategy dog. Tech is generally good at pipeline management but not at managing funnels before the pipeline. Schenk: Technology enables and partially automates strategy, methodologies, and processes – including ana- lytics at each stage of the customer journey. Winter: Technology improves visibility into the sales pro- cess. Content analytics provides feedback to marketing. When marketing gets insights into sales, the two teams will be more aligned.
Q: What is the biggest roadblock to aligning sales and marketing? Strohkorb: Lots of denial and relying too much on technology. IT is rewarded for fast, economic implemen- tation, but forgets people. Then they try to compensate with more training. Ostrow: Lack of access to sales-enablement content. The worst performers give little content to quota car- riers. The best firms enable mobile content and use configure/price/quote (CPQ) solutions. Koerner: Politics, turf wars, and lack of messaging librar- ies with proven content. Schenk: No vision of success and no plan to remove bar- riers such as budgets, responsibilities, targets, and met- rics. The vision must be based on the customer journey. Winter: Lack of urgency to change.
SELLING POWER AUGUST 2015 | 33 © 2015 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
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