SalesVPI

Another Case for Marketing and Sales Collaboration

We have to be careful not to take words too literally.

Consider the idea that marketing delivers sales ready leads to sales. By doing this, marketing has moved the buyer X% (30% -70%?) of the way through the sales process, right? Well, maybe, but maybe not.

Let's look at what has to happen with that "lead" on the sales side. (Reminder, we're talking complex not transaction oriented sales here.) In most B2B sales processes 4-15 stakeholders are engaged. (A top technology company selling a multimillion dollar solution has 30-50 people on their People Map.)

When we say marketing has delivered a sales ready lead, do we mean the 4-15 stakeholders to a specific opportunity, or a single individual?

Obviously, waiting for marketing to get an entire buying team to sales ready status introduces serious risk factors of being late to apply the critical sales professional resource. After all, people progress individually at different rates, and in a non-linear manner, through their buying process. It's often difficult to determine the specific stage for each individual.

So, at best, what we can say is sales gets a good start. Hopefully they receive confirmed:

• Business needs
• A decision by the customer to resolve some need
• A participant to the buying process who is willing to engage immediately with a sales person (considerable time and effort saved)
• Some degree of information about the customer's preference for the approach of the solution provider (SP) -- at least on the part of the contacted lead.

What we don't know is, do we have:

• A thorough and accurate diagnosis or assessment of the business needs (anything overlooked like peripheral needs, programs, functions or people?)
• Clarity about, or relationships with, all affected participants to the buying process, especially key influencers and decision makers
• Complete understanding of the customer's buying process, criteria, assessment of fit with the SP's capabilities
• The customer's flexibility to modify or evolve those criteria (are the criteria favorable to a positive outcome for the SP, or for their competitor?)

OK, you get it, not all the factors by a long shot (and many more are on the list). And that's the point. A lot of work to do, possibly even to determine if they really ARE a legitimate prospect -- hence the Sirius Decisions distinction "sales accepted lead" and "sales qualified lead."

What's most important from a sales and marketing perspective is, sales must begin enrolling, educating (nurturing), building relationships, trust and credibility with the balance of the buying team, the other people on the People Map.

Without effective marketing collaboration, sales lacks the tools, resources and time to do this efficiently and effectively. They work in a cacophonous, interrupt driven world of phone calls , meetings, travel, preparation and learning -- and did I say meetings?

They need content (tailored to role, issues, buying stage, competitive factors and communication objectives within the downstream portion of the buy/sell process). Sales needs delivery and tracking assistance -- resources and automated tools -- to execute in a consistent and timely manner.

For marketing and sales managers, this raises the question: how have you defined, documented and communicated with your counterpart, requirements for core services that marketing can provide as part of their content marketing and automated delivery and tracking systems, so everyone gets timely and accurate visibility to actions and the "digital body language" of each buying stakeholder?

Marketing: how does this inform your content strategy and execution priorities? For example, have you identified with sales all the downstream risk points that sales experiences after you hand off that lead? Have you defined how you can create content, first, as "bait" to uncover and identify individuals who are at those risk points, and then created content to help sales address those issues?

The most obvious area involves competitive alternatives, but also those nasty related risks of "do nothing" or "deal with it ourselves".

It's natural for marketing to deal with early stage, lead generation requirements that are in heavy demand by sales and senior management, and are more familiar and comfortable for marketing to address.

But if we're talking about collaboration and having marketing take more responsibility to "drive the revenue engine" it's critical to see the whole process as a system that requires alignment and execution of all the elements that make a sale successful.

Too often in the past, these activities were hostage to siloed ownership where the parties never spoke (maybe other than to say your stuff s*cks) let alone had regular meetings, developed a common strategy and process, provided helpful feedback, and shared execution.

This is a great opportunity for marketing to add further value, establish higher relevance, build better relationships with sales, and make a visible and significant difference to the business.

Focus on the Conversation

Scott Santucci of Forrester's Technology Sales Enablement Group has an important blog post regarding sales conversations. (The Key To Sales Enablement Success Is To Focus On The Conversation)

"A B2B sale is really the synthesis of many discrete conversations, and value is best communicated when they are focused on a common goal: solving the client's problem. What most organizations fail to address is how complex a task it is to corral many discrete conversations into a consistent value communications strategy.

To make matters even more complex, most companies have solutions that can address multiple different problems, so this set of questions must be answered for each opportunity. We all know that good conversations are dynamic, reciprocal and most effective where there is trust between the people involved in the dialog.

To accomplish this, the salesperson must communicate information that is:

• Relevant: to the specific circumstances and realities of a given company


• In context: to the roles and responsibilities of the individual with whom you are having the conversation


• Timely: in concert with where the customer is in its problem-solving process and to the relative importance of that issue to others that could gain investment."

Key Role for Marketing

If you're in marketing, where is "helping to drive better sales conversations" on your priority list?

As important as lead generation and lead nurturing are -- they're a key component of sales enablement -- sales needs marketing to help them design the selling conversation.

For any organization that is involved in, or desiring to move to, a complex, consultative or "solution oriented" sale, this has always been a requirement.

Fortunately for those of us in sales, this requirement now aligns with the newly discovered marketing requirement of creating "relevant" content to support lead nurturing initiatives.

My observation is, marketing organizations lack methodologies and frameworks to simplify and support the task of designing customer relevant conversations at different stages of the buying/selling process.

In much the way sales organizations have struggled to define, implement and embrace a formal sales process, marketing organizations continue to employ an ad hoc, almost artistic approach, to messaging and content development.

If you don't have a documented messaging and content strategy and creation process, that is accepted by all message and content creators, and managed as a formal process, it doesn't really exist.

Help Sales Become Thought Leaders to Customers

Adding to the complexity is the fact that MOST conversations don't take place face-to-face anymore, especially in the critical early stages of the customer engagement. Telephone and email are relatively weak conversation tools.

I'd like to see marketing organizations deploy more content through sales people rather than in direct campaigns to customers. Help us become "thought leaders" in our customer's eyes. Give us something of value to talk about -- and to deliver.

Marketing sends blasts to customers -- despite new technologies. Sales people, if they know their customer, are in the best position to define relevance, create context and select the right timing for delivering valuable information to customers.

But they are not the creators and originators of the information. Communication (conversation) is a function of message, content and delivery. Companies need to rethink their marketing and sales communication and content strategies.

Avitage POV on Marketing and Sales Communication

My company, Avitage, has recently updated our point-of-view.

Over fifteen years the core vision has not changed: to enable front line business communicators to assemble and deliver multimedia (aka video) programs, that can be easily tailored to each audience -- even an audience of one.

But the delivery methods have certainly evolved, expanding the need for, and value of, our approach.

Enabling sales to meet revenue, growth and profitability targets is the responsibility of marketing and sales working in a collaborative effort. How you sell is a primary differentiator and opportunity to create value for customers.

These efforts should also be aligned around the common process of the customer's buying journey, and the objective of facilitating a faster buying process.

Seeing these objectives through a communications lens is an important distinction.

Communication is a function of:

1. Messages -- knowing what to say and how to say it - stories


2. Content -- relevant, compelling, for multiple purposes and in multiple formats


3. Delivery -- convenient and appropriate engagement of target audiences

More than ever, you ARE your content. People engage your content more than they engage your people.

Delivery opportunities and challenges dictate how content should be created, managed and deployed.

Delivery issues -- especially sales conversations -- are key drivers on sales productivity and effectiveness.

To be relevant, content must be tailored to the specific interests of each audience, packaged in their preferred content type, and delivered in a convenient and timely manner.

Front line business people -- sales, sales support, marketing, training, executives -- are responsible for directing communications with their constituents and are best at determining the appropriate message, content types and delivery timeframes.

Enabling front line communicators to access, assemble, personalize and deliver tailored, relevant content in the right format and at the right time for each constituent is a new and critical challenge for organizations.

To be compelling, more content must be available in rich media formats.

To support these and other requirements associated with new, digital media and web delivery options, requires a new approach to creating content -- a publishing approach rather than the traditional, "point production" process.

This must start with a new approach to messaging -- an "outside in," customer oriented approach.

In much the way accounting, manufacturing and software groups have standardized around common process supported by automation, the content creation process must be standardized around a new but common process -- to create like publishers.

This must focus on creating for multiple purposes, delivery media and methods from a single creation effort.

Automation is an important enabler, not the full solution.

These objectives are best achieved from a well defined program -- a content engine -- with clear strategies, plans, process, procedures, standards, templates and support. Your organization cannot achieve these objectives, and the required volume, quality, speed and affordability of content, from current, ad hoc and point production approaches.

On Sales Enablement

As I listen to the sales enablement conversation, it sounds like sales enablement is a euphemism for training, skill development and knowledge sharing.

The conversation is heavily influenced by system vendors. These systems improve access to content that delivers selling knowledge and customer collateral.

Reminds me of the old expression, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

Clearly improving skill and knowledge are part of what drives sales productivity. But I'm hearing two critical elements that have been missing from the conversation starting to emerge.

Leads Are Part of Sales Enablement

As a sales professional, I think one of the most important elements that enable sales to be more productive is a steady supply of qualified opportunities. Good leads vs. access to content? Give me leads every day.

It is now clear that an automated lead management program is a "must have" for B2B selling organizations. Our colleagues at Marketo are talking about marketing and sales collaborating to drive the revenue engine.

"The new revenue engine consists of systematic, repeatable processes than span marketing and sales to drive consistent, predictable revenue. It recognizes that demand generation is the key source of new customer acquisition, and it knows the primary job of a sales rep is to sell and close business, not create new opportunities."

By providing a program of formal lead generation and prospecting, supported by automated lead nurturing, marketing removes a large portion of the early stage prospecting and qualifying activities from direct field sales. These activities are time consuming and difficult to balance with working active opportunities. It takes a different personality and skill set to prospect and nurture effectively. For most organizations, this will also lower selling costs.

Support Sales Delivery

The second element of sales enablement that needs to be more fully developed I call the delivery challenge.

Forrester defines sales enablement in part as "a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation."

IDCdefines it as, "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward." "Sales enablement at it's core is maximizing the sales organization's ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent and compelling ways."

The sales job is fundamentally a communication challenge. Communication is a function of message, content and delivery. What's missing are more in-depth distinctions for communication delivery.

Conversations are a primary sales delivery method. This evokes the image of the rep sitting across the table, or belly to belly with customers.

Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power told me he believes, on average, only about 17% of sales conversations take place live and in person. Other predominant delivery methods include:

• Telephone
• Email
• Print
• Video
• Traditional mail
• Web site pages
• Webinars, web meetings and virtual events
• Mobile devices
• Social media
• Third party delivery

A common sales complaint is the challenge of capturing customer attention. Caller ID and email volume create significant barriers to reaching prospects. For years I've helped technology companies address the challenge of the "four legged sales call" because sales people cannot be subject experts about all that customers want to discuss. Often, their ability to conduct an effective conversation cannot be improved simply with better knowledge, training or even content.

Bringing customer stories and testimonials to prospects is another delivery challenge. Delivering these messages in the voice of the customer is considerably more impactful than delivering as a sales story or a PDF document.

Each delivery method requires different skills, techniques, and support. The content requirements for each method are considerably different. How messages and content will be delivered significantly impacts what and how content is created.

Sales delivery options have fundamentally changed over the last decade. Entirely new methods have been created. This is why I believe companies need new content strategies and creation methods.

Seeing sales enablement through the communication and delivery lens opens new questions, opportunities and requirements.

How long is your sales process?

One of the early questions I ask prospective customers with a complex, B2B sale is, "how long is your sales process?"

The answer is almost always, "it depends, it can be three to eighteen months depending …"

In the past few years we've all gained a stronger appreciation for the idea of the customer's buying process. Sharon Drew Morgan's contribution with Buying Facilitation(R) helps us. Ardath Albee's buyer journey gives us a clear understanding. Automated lead nurturing has forced us to think through the buyer's journey and how to support it with relevant, compelling content.

Sales professionals know the sales process applies to qualified and interested opportunities. Sales participates in the active consideration phase of the customer's buying journey.

Two primary factors determine the sellers sales process:

• How long it takes to assess an active buyer's needs, engage all buyer stakeholders, influence buying criteria, configure a solution, deliver a successful proposal and complete the contract process;
• How sales people are managed, motivated and compensated

In most B2B selling organizations, this is one to two quarters. With sales people pressured for monthly business with quarterly accountability, any opportunity that will enter the active buying phase outside this period will not be on the sales person's active dashboard.

The customer buying process may well be six to twenty four months, from initial awareness of the problem through final vendor selection and contracts.

I see this as an alignment problem. The business challenge is to align the customer's extended buying process with the sales person's practical selling timeframe.

Traditionally, the sales organization was responsible for finding, qualifying and closing every opportunity. This made sense in a simpler, product oriented selling world. Once offerings became more complex, more solution oriented, and buying moved from the professional procurement function into the business functional group, the selling process had to change.

Most organizations I speak with are seeing selling costs getting out of control. IDC recently reported selling costs in the technology industry are rising 4.7% while revenue grow is growing 3.2%.

A fundamental challenge is finding ways to make the sales organization more productive -- to increase the yield from each sales professional. This is more than just improving skills, knowledge and time management. It has more to do with having well qualified opportunities to work.

We are in an era of specialization. The previous, monolithic selling effort has been disaggregated. This introduces a key role and opportunity for marketing. Lead generation, lead nurturing and telesales functions are more effective and affordable ways to handle the start of the buying selling process than an individual rep with a phone and email as primary tools.

This doesn’t completely remove the prospecting function from sales. But sales people are better at the in person activities, where marketing have better tools to engage the broader market with attraction and influencer marketing programs.

A marketer recently told me sales people need to take the long view. I disagree. Sales are the people who get the fish in the boat. Marketing are the people who take the broad and long view, who determine where the fish are, what will attract them, and how get them ready for sales to move them into the boat.

The classic marketing and sale disconnect is and will be replaced by a collaborative effort. This is the best way to deal with aligning dual realities: the extended buyer's process and the practical selling process.

Sales Enablement -- Revisited

I was on vacation when Gerhard's blog came out on July 29 "Is Sales Enablement just Lipstick on a Knowledge Management Pig?" I just saw it this past weekend and feel compelled to comment now.

Having read the post numerous times I'm not sure what the primary point really is: to denigrate the label sales enablement (why?), to criticize the "hype" of systems vendors, or to question the integrity of the analysts? ("Do you trust what analysts are saying about this concept?")

And what's with the non sequitur about the "delay economy" and Twitter and the "real-time economy"? I like the concept, but how does that fit with a rant about sales enablement? I think the blog comments were more useful than the blog points. The premise of the post perpetuates the problem of an over pre-occupation with technology. Let me explain.

Gerhard's comments exhibit a tool obsession. Isn't that what "Sales 2.0" (web 2.0 metaphor applied somehow to sales) is about? Comparing technology vendors and asking about ROI examples and comparison for each vendor seems to me to completely miss the mark and to focus on the wrong things. ROI attends more to the initiative than a specific vendor. The real differences between products are about fit and preference rather than ROI. When I insert the names Mercedes, BMW and Lexus in place of the vendor names he tries to compare,the comments reveal a peculiar perspective.

Definitions Get at Thinking

Gerhard's definition of the purpose of sales enablement: "to help sales organizations save time finding relevant information, create and organize sales content and create quick access to all experts across the enterprise."

Let's take a quick trip to the dictionary to be clear about the word "enable": "to make able; to make possible or easy; to make ready; equip." Interesting that "equip" is the third definition. But for Gerhard, sales enablement is mostly about knowledge management, becoming better prepared, and about technology. Pretty limited.

What of "the analysts" definitions?

Forrester defines sales enablement as: "a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle."

IDC: "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place, to assist moving a specific sales opportunity forward."

Gartner: "[providing] the sales force with communications programs and tools to drive activity and enhanced productivity."

Interesting. These definitions tell me it's about process, equipping a valuable conversation to help solve customer's problems. It's about delivery of information to assist. And, it's about providing the sales force with communication programs. These definitions are much more expansive and strategic.

I don't see a technology focus in these definitions? Learning and preparation is clearly a part -- it's part of everything in life. These definitions focus much more on the improving the primary selling activity -- communicating an organization's value to help solve customer problems.

Vendor Assessment

Well, what of the vendors? Gerhard criticizes vendor messages. (Is the language provocative -- a trendy concept these days -- or antagonistic do you think?)

I actually like Savo's "Never sell alone!" Gerhard doesn't know many lonely salespeople. Again, let's take another trip to the dictionary regarding the word "alone": "separate, apart, or isolated from others" For comparison, here's "lonely": "causing a depressing feeling of being alone; destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship." I agree, few sales people are lonely.

But in fact, sales people often feel they are alone in their responsibilities. The are alone in their quota responsibilities, alone in the way a significant part of their compensation is based on a high variable component, alone in the clarity with which their performance is measured and known throughout the organization, alone in picking up the phone and performing the task few like to do, engaging strangers, alone in getting the right support (anyone heard of the "marketing and sales disconnect" that's prompted all this activity) and often alone in figuring out how best to sell a product or service.

Actually, a significant part of sales enablement involves shifting the mindset of sales people from that of the "lone gunman" to the collaborative seller and manager of a process that involves multiple roles selling to buying committees.

I suspect if you ask the vendors what their biggest challenges are, top of the list would be customer's lack of proper content, or even a process to create the right content, to take advantage of their systems.

Peter Senge has said, "structure drives behavior." I think the vendors mentioned in this blog all help provide a better structure that changes not only their customer organizations but the industry that is now talking in a much different way than just a few years earlier.

Consider how we've:

• moved past "sales process," to conversation about "buying process"
• stopped complaining about the marketing/sales disconnect and actually have agreement that it IS marketing's job to help sales, and we have effective ways to make this change
• discovered that vendor/product focused content won't work with buyers today
• acknowledged that the internet has indeed made a fundamental change in the way customers buy, even if it hasn't yet changed the way we sell
• getting a much higher appreciation for the importance of content that is tailored so it is relevant to buyers based upon their role, needs and interests, stage of the buying process, industry, and other factors
• created sales guides and playbooks with less focus on intense product oriented information to better "how to sell" information with "ideal customer profiles", sales ready messages, and more
• started thinking about nurturing leads to "sales ready" status instead of taking every new contact and sending them to sales as a "lead," usually demoralizing the sales force and wasting their time!

Don't get me wrong, I agree with Lee Levitt, "we've only scratched the surface with sales enablement," especially with execution. But the knowledge of WHAT to do and the tools to help us do it are far better today than even five years ago.

Highlights from Blog Comments

Below are the comments posted to the blog by different individuals. I've extracted the sentences that provided value to me.

"Cohesive program that includes not only technology but sales assets, a common sales process, sales training and an accountability platform
Moreover the content of those sales assets is both relevant and compelling to the target audience
Highly differentiated message"

Jay Mitchell

"Most sales people are overwhelmed with too much information (and too much difficulty finding what they need)"

Chuck Carey

"I hold the organizations they (sales enablement vendors) sell to more accountable"

Mike Berman

"We focus less on definition and more on execution"

Tim Lambert

"Not too many VPs of Sales care about content
Issue is how to scale a sales organization
Drive repeatable behavior
Surface best practices -- activities, strategies and conversations that work
Have a sales enablement person spend one hour to save 1000 salespeople an hour"

Jeff Ernst

"Focus on enabling buyers to establish their desire to engage, and more a sales cycle along
New ways of thinking"

Michael Damphousse

"Too many companies lack the foundational work required to measure progress"

Trish Bertuzzi

"Sales enablement is a business process
Impact on new reps
ROI not as important as Competitive Advantage
We've only scratched the surface with sales enablement
Potential could be on the order of 30-50% or more
Net savings is substantial --
Higher sales productivity and lower cost"

Lee Levitt

My Perspective

I embrace the analyst definitions of sales enablement. I'm dismayed that so many people focus so heavily on technology instead of the much more important elements of a shift in thinking, strategy, process, sales messaging, content, the right investments and more.

I also think there is too much focus on "information" and not enough on "communication."

Communication: "the act or process of communicating; the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs."

Information: "knowledge communicated or received; knowledge gained through study, communication"

The distinction IS important because the issues are quite different, and therefore the remedies are also different. We need both. But the way we define our problems sets us off in a particular direction looking for answers. (Look at Sharepoint pre-occupation with managing content rather than improving the delivery of relevant information to buyers, as the analyst definitions suggest.)

A sale's person's objective isn't to make himself or his prospect "knowledgeable," it is to motivate a buyer to make changes and take action to work with his company -- preferably sooner rather than later.

Sales Enablement is an all encompassing label. The outcome we are after is to enable ALL sales people to conduct better conversations with prospects and customers, with relevant information (messages) for each stage of the customer's buying process, to improve the customer's business, and for the customer to understand how an organization can do that uniquely.