B2B Marketers, Be Careful What You Ask For

For the past few years, B2B marketing thought leaders and practitioners have been advocating that marketing should play a larger role in the demand generation process. Proponents of this view argue that marketing should have the primary responsibility for acquiring new sales leads via inbound and outbound marketing programs and for nurturing and qualifying leads until they are ready to begin a meaningful engagement with a sales rep.

According to its advocates, this model of demand generation is more consistent with how today's business buyers learn about issues and possible solutions and make buying decisions, and it also uses a company's demand generation resources more effectively and efficiently.

While the arguments supporting this demand generation model are compelling, implementing it will constitute a major change for many B2B companies. To understand how just big the change is, we only need to look at where leads are coming from today.

The following table is based on the annual Sales Performance Optimization surveys conducted by CSO Insights and includes data from the survey results published in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The survey question asked respondents to specify what percentage of their sales leads are self-generated by sales reps, what percentage are generated by marketing, and what percentage originate from other sources. As the table shows, B2B companies are still relying on salespeople to generate almost half of all new sales leads.



 

The distribution of lead sources shown in the above table has been fairly stable now for several years. The following chart is also based on data from the Sales Performance Optimization surveys and shows the percentage of total leads generated by marketing from 2005 through 2013. As the chart shows, marketing has been producing between 24% and about 30% of total leads for the past seven years.



 

The CSO Insights data makes two important points. First, it clearly shows that B2B marketers will need to "step up their game" if they want marketing to take the lead in lead generation. They must be ready to demonstrate to senior company leaders that they have a strategy that will produce enough sales-ready leads to enable their company to achieve its revenue goals.

 

Perhaps more importantly, the CSO Insights data makes it clear that successful lead generation will require the involvement of both marketing and sales (and other business functions as well), at least for the foreseeable future. Even if marketing significantly increases its lead generation results, it is likely that, for the next few years anyway, between 40% and 50% of leads will still be produced by sales reps and other sources.

Passing the Baton Without Missing a Step- Sales Enablement, Part 3

 

This is the third of three posts that are discussing the role that marketing plays in helping the sales team sell - what is usually called sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed what sales enablement is and why it is an important issue for most B2B companies. The second post discussed one of marketing's primary sales enablement responsibilities - providing the content resources that will help sales reps advance sales opportunities.

In this post, I'll explain why effective sales enablement also requires marketers to provide information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without a loss of momentum. In essence, marketing and sales need to work together like the runners in a relay race. Here's what I mean.

As I wrote in my last post, business buyers don't distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. We now know that most buyers are performing research on their own before they are willing to meet with a salesperson. So by the time a potential buyer meets with your sales rep, the buyer will probably have visited your website and accessed several of the content resources you offer.

These self-educated buyers have little patience for "starting over" with a salesperson. They expect their sales rep to come into the initial meeting with a basic working knowledge of their business and industry. Just as important, today's buyers also expect their sales rep to know what has already transpired in the relationship. They want the sales rep to step in and provide new insights that build on what has already occurred and help advance the decision-making process.

To make the transition from marketing to sales without losing forward momentum, marketers must do more than simply provide contact information when they pass a lead to sales. An effective lead hand-off should include significantly more information, such as the buyer persona assigned to the lead, a description of the content plan for the relevant buyer persona, and a list of the content resources developed for that buyer persona.

An effective lead hand-off will also be accompanied by an activity history detailing the prior contacts between the lead and the selling company. The activity history should include the following kinds of information:

• Outbound marketing offers sent to the lead
• Outbound marketing offers the lead has responded to
• Website pages viewed by the lead
• Content resources accessed by the lead
• Summaries of any person-to-person communications between the lead and representatives of the selling company
• The prospect's lead score

Delivering this information isn't as overwhelming as it might first appear. Marketing should have developed a content plan and content resources for each buyer persona for each stage of the buying process. So, this information should already be available. Your marketing automation software should be able to capture most of the lead's activity history and transfer that information to your CRM system when the lead is passed from marketing to sales.

Don't misunderstand me. This type of lead hand-off does require additional work, but it will also provide significant benefits to the sales team and the company.

• It reduces the amount of time that sales reps must spend on lead research.
• It eliminates the need for sales reps to guess about what content resources to use.
• It reduces the need for sales reps to create or customize content.
• It improves the ability of sales reps to continue prospect relationships without losing momentum.
• It helps improve sales pipeline velocity.

The changing dynamics of B2B demand generation require a coordinated effort by marketing and sales. That's why sales enablement remains one of marketing's most important responsibilities.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Four Key Ingredients in the Marketing/Sales Integration Recipe

In November of last year, I published a post here titled It's Time to Integrate Marketing and Sales. It's now the second most popular post at this blog, and it also created quite a stir at LinkedIn. In the Sales and Marketing Alignment group alone, the post had prompted 99 comments as of yesterday.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of comments that supported the basic idea of integrating marketing and sales. The comments also revealed, however, that there are widely different views about what the "integration" of marketing and sales really means. To maximize the potential of integrating marketing and sales, company leaders must have a clear and detailed picture of what the end result should look like.

In my view, there are four key ingredients in the recipe for marketing and sales integration.

A Unified Go-to-Market Strategy and Plan

An integrated marketing/sales function must be based on a comprehensive go-to-market strategy and plan that has been jointly developed by marketing and sales. For integration purposes, the most important components of the go-to-market strategy/plan are:

• The value propositions that describe how your products and/or services create value for customers
• A definition (description) of the kinds of organizations that constitute your company's target market (an ideal customer profile)
• Profiles (personas) of the types of individuals who make or influence the decision to purchase the kinds of products or services that your company offers
• A description of the messages and content resources that will be used to communicate your value propositions to potential buyers
• A description of the lead stages that your company will use to categorize prospects and the criteria you company will use to qualify prospects. This will include a definition of what constitutes a "sales-ready" lead.

Integrated Demand Generation Processes

An integrated marketing/sales function is also based on a set of demand generation processes that collectively span the entire revenue generation cycle. Some of these processes will be performed exclusively by marketing, and others exclusively by sales. However, several critical demand generation processes, such as lead nurturing and lead qualification, will require the involvement of both marketing and sales. What's important here is the recognition that marketing processes and sales processes are components of a single revenue generation system and that they are often connected and interdependent.

Integrated Technology Systems

To maximize the results from marketing/sales integration, marketers and sales professionals must be working from the same data relating to prospects and customers. Therefore, it's important to integrate the information systems and technology tools used by marketing and sales. The most significant integration will typically involve the company's marketing automation/lead management software and its customer relationship management software.

Unified Leadership and Management

A fully integrated marketing/sales function will be led by a single C-level executive. The title of this executive may be Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, or something similar. Whatever title is used, the important point is that one senior executive is responsible for leading all of the company's revenue-generating activities.

Those are my key ingredients for a full integration of marketing and sales. What would you add to or remove from this list?

I'd also like to hear your views about whether fully integrating marketing and sales is always the best course of action. What circumstances make integration critical to success, and what circumstances make another approach the best solution? Please comment to share your views.

Think "Close and Deep" for Effective Demand Generation

During the Cold War, US Army leaders in Europe faced a disconcerting situation. Their mission was to defend NATO members in the event of an attack by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The problem was, US/NATO ground forces were substantially outnumbered. During this period, Soviet army doctrine was to throw wave after wave of forces at defenders until they were overcome. US military leaders were not confident they could win this kind of war of attrition.

To address this problem, the US Army developed a new warfighting doctrine, one that reintroduced the idea of depth to the battlefield. Under the new doctrine, US/NATO armies would extend the battlefield deep on the enemy's side of the front lines and attack rear-echelon forces (fighting deep), while simultaneously engaging front-line forces (fighting close). The objective was to break up the enemy's momentum and deplete enemy forces before they could get into the main fight. The principle of fighting close and deep at the same time remains a basic tenet of US Army operational doctrine.

Some of you may be wondering what military doctrine has to do with B2B demand generation. Quite a bit, actually. Especially for B2B companies with long and complex demand generation cycles. In these circumstances, maximizing demand generation results requires companies to use activities and programs that cover the full depth of the demand generation "battlefield." In other words, high-performing demand generation systems engage potential buyers both close and deep simultaneously.

The diagram below depicts the demand generation playing field and illustrates what I mean by close and deep demand generation engagement.

In military doctrine, close and deep describe the distance from the front lines of the battle. In demand generation, close and deep refer to where prospects are in the buying process and now near or far they are from making a purchase decision. As the diagram shows, personal selling is the primary close demand generation activity, while deep demand generation activities focus primarily on lead acquisition. Lead management activities such as lead nurturing and lead qualification occupy an intermediate tier. The diagram also shows that close activities are designed to produce short-term results, while deep activities produce results over a more extended period of time.

To maximize demand generation performance over time, it's critical to have the right balance of effective close and deep activities. When the balance is right, your demand generation system will perform at a consistent, high level. If you don't optimize close activities (personal selling), the negative consequences will be felt quickly. If you ignore or fail to optimize deep activities, the negative consequences can be just as bad, but it will talke longer for them to become visible.

Should Marketing or Sales Lead Demand Generation?

Over the past few years, two distinct approaches to B2B demand generation have emerged. Both of these models have evolved in response to profound changes in the B2B marketing and sales environment, the most significant of which has been the appearance of empowered buyers.

Business buyers now have access to a wealth of online information, and they are using that information to perform research on their own. As a result, they are much less dependent on sellers than in the past, and they're avoiding interactions with sales reps until later in the buying process. Research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions and others has shown that prospects are often 50% to 60% through the buying process before they engage with a salesperson.

One approach to dealing with empowered buyers is to expand the role of marketing in B2B demand generation. Not surprisingly, the strongest early advocates of this model were providers of B2B marketing automation software like Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, and several others. The second approach argues that what is needed is a new sales methodology. The Corporate Executive Board is a strong advocate of this model, and two CEB executives, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, provided a detailed description of this model in their best-selling book, The Challenger Sale.

The marketing-centric model accepts that most potential buyers prefer to access information about business issues and potential solutions on their own, especially in the early stages of the buying process. Instead of fighting this preference, the marketing-centric model seeks to support the "self-directed buyer" as he or she goes through the learning process. The marketing-centric model relies heavily on content marketing principles and techniques (because it assumes that most early-stage interactions need to be content based), and it leverages technology to manage and execute activities such as lead nurturing and lead qualification.

The "new sales methodology" model emphasizes the continued importance of sales reps in the demand generation process. What CEB and others argue is that salespeople should engage with early-stage buyers and use disruptive insights to change how they think about their business. To use CEB's teminology, these disruptive insights enable sales reps to shape emerging demand rather than simply react to established demand. More importantly, these insights provide value that buyers can't get anywhere else and thus make it necessary (or at least very worthwhile) for buyers to engage with the sales rep.

Which of these demand generation models will ultimately prevail? My answer is neither and both. Neither model will completely win because both will (and should) be used.

Many proponents of both models now recognize the value of the other approach. Advocates of the marketing-centric model now acknowledge that human involvement with early-stage buyers can be very valuable, and CEB is expanding its concept of disruptive insights to include marketing content as well as sales messaging.

The bottom line is that neither marketing nor sales should "own" B2B demand generation. Effective demand generation requires marketing and sales to function as an integrated team.

It's Time to Integrate Marketing and Sales

Marketing and sales "alignment" remains a hot topic among B2B marketing and sales professionals. Many people on "both sides of the aisle" now recognize that successfully finding and winning new customers in today's business environment requires a cohesive and coordinated effort by both marketing and sales.

A growing number of marketing and sales thought leaders are beginning to advocate more dramatic changes in the structure and character of the marketing-sales relationship and/or the techniques used to manage marketing and sales activities. Late last year, the Chartered Institute of Marketing in London published a report arguing that most companies should merge their marketing and sales functions.

Adam Needles, the author of Balancing the Demand Equation, argued in an  article for DemandGen Report that marketing and sales need to be more closely aligned against a strategic lead-to-revenue demand process. Commenting on Adam's article, Eric Wittlake wrote in his B2B Digital Marketing blog, "The real implication, although Adam doesn't say it, is that sales and marketing alignment is the wrong objective. Perfectly aligning sales and marketing on either side of the fictitious wall dividing them isn't the answer. Instead, the wall needs to be torn down and sales and marketing need to be integrated through the entire customer experience."

Research firm IDC has also entered the discussion. In addition to research, IDC provides marketing and sales advisory services to technology companies and has produced operational-level scorecards for both marketing and sales for several years. Now, IDC has introduced a Customer Creation Scorecard, which IDC describes as, "Operational KPI's for the Intersection of Sales and Marketing." The new IDC scorecard contains eight key performance indicators, including the combined sales and marketing budget ratio (marketing and sales spending as a percentage of total revenues), the ratio of sales spending to marketing spending, and the marketing investment per total sales headcount.

While IDC doesn't expressly advocate that marketing and sales should be merged, these metrics strongly suggest that managers should treat marketing and sales as components of a single "customer creation" process.

Rich Vansil, IDC's Group Vice President, Executive Advisory Services, has expressed something close to this view. In an article for BtoBOnline, he wrote, "I encourage b2b marketers to think about redefining the footprint of marketing in your organization, and by extension the footprint and impact of the marketing budget. . . Think about the totality of marketing plus sales costs. . . The best opportunity for marketing and sales productivity improvement continues to be at the intersection of these two functions."

Compared to other major trends in B2B marketing and sales, such as the shift to content marketing, the growing use of inbound marketing, and the implementation of marketing automation technologies, moves to integrate marketing and sales are just barely beginning.

As I noted earlier, most of the focus today is on aligning sales and marketing, and only a few companies have addressed the more controversial issue of marketing-sales integration. This is a touchy political issue, and I don't pretend to know how it will play out. There is still a significant amount of cultural and political baggage that separates marketing and sales, and there are legitimate issues regarding the consequences (intended and unintended) of integrating marketing and sales. In addition, no single approach to marketing and sales integration will be optimum for all B2B companies. What I do know, however, is that we can no longer afford to treat marketing and sales as completely separate functional silos.

Who is Responsible for "Challenger" Lead Generation?

The principles described in The Challenger Sale continue to provoke a great deal of discussion among B2B marketing and sales professionals. In this important book, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson argue that what business buyers really want from their potential vendors - and by extension their sales reps - are fresh insights about how to improve their business. Dixon and Adamson are affiliated with the Corporate Executive Board, and CEB has make challenger selling a focal point of its sales advisory practice.

I've written about The Challenger Sale in previous posts (here, and here, for example), so I won't go into detail again. Essentially, Dixon and Adamson contend that high-performing sales reps challenge the thinking of prospective customers, make the costs of the status quo visible, and teach prospects how to think about problems and opportunities in new ways.

Earlier this month, Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman wrote a post for The Sales Challenger blog in response to some critics who have contended that challenger selling confuses the roles of sales and marketing. These critics say that communicating insights about new capabilities and benefits is the primary job of marketing.

Dixon and Toman point to new CEB research regarding how sales reps are engaging potential customers. According to this research, average salespeople:

• Believe lead generation is the company's responsibility
• Assess opportunities based on the clarity of customer needs
• Use social media indiscriminately

In contrast, the research found that high-performing sales reps:

• Conduct non-traditional due diligence
• Personally own lead generation
• Lead with insights
• Use social media as a channel to deliver insight

Dixon and Toman write, "Put differently, the average rep fills orders by reacting to existing demand; stars sell where customers learn (not just where they buy), shaping demand and teaching customers into the sales funnel. The best sales reps, it turns out, are just as good at marketing as they are at selling."

Dixon and Toman don't appear to believe that sales reps should be completely responsible for lead generation. They point out that the heart of challenger selling is disruptive insights, and they acknowledge that depending on salespeople alone to develop such insights is a "fool's errand." According to the authors, it's marketing's responsibility to "arm" sales reps with the required disruptive insights.

So in a sense, Dixon and Toman are contending that marketing is responsible for identifying and developing the insights, but that sale reps are the primary channel for delivering those insights to potential customers.

With all respect, I disagree.

The reality today, whether we like it or not, is that business buyers are self-educating and avoiding conversations with salespeople until late in the buying process. Other research by CEB has found that the buying process is nearly 60% complete when prospects engage with suppliers, and I've seen similar results from research conducted by SiriusDecisions and others.

As powerful as challenger selling techniques are, they can't be effective if prospects won't talk or meet with you.

More than ever before, effective B2B demand generation requires the combined efforts of both marketing and sales. The real essence of the challenger message is that selling organizations must provide new and valuable insights to potential customers. In today's environment, both sales reps and marketers need to be armed with those insights, and they both must be involved in communicating those insights to potential buyers.

Marketing and Sales Alignment: Putting the Whole Puzzle Together

There's no longer any doubt that a high-performing B2B demand generation system requires a coordinated effort by both marketing and sales. Changes in the attitudes and behaviors of buyers have made it essential for marketing and sales efforts to be tightly integrated.

Most of the discussions about marketing and sales alignment have focused on the lead managment process. In this area, alignment primarily means that marketing and sales have agreed on:

• What constitutes a "sales-ready lead"
• How the "hand-off" of leads by marketing to sales will be handled
• How sales will follow up with the leads supplied by marketing
• When leads will be passed by sales back to marketing for additional nurturing
• How new leads acquired by salespeople (through prospecting) will be handled

Having marketing and sales aligned on a well-designed lead management process is important, but that's not the only place where marketing and sales need to be on the same page. In other words, lead management is only one piece of the marketing-sales alignment puzzle.

There are three other critical pieces of the puzzle - value creation, target market definition, and messaging.

Value Creation

Value creation refers to how you create value for customers. It's critical to have marketing and sales aligned on this issue because it's the foundation for your entire demand generation process. To create alignment, marketing and sales should agree on the core value propositions that you will offer to potential buyers. (For a list of questions that can help you define core value propositions, see this earlier post.)

Target Market Definition

Your target market definition includes both the kinds of organizations that will make your best prospects and the identity of the individuals within those organizations who make or influence the decision to purchase your product or service. Marketing uses this definition to design lead generation campaigns and programs. If marketing and sales use a common target market definition, there will be fewer disagreements concerning the quality of leads produced by marketing.

Messaging

Messaging refers to the content you use to "tell your story" to potential buyers. Messaging is embodied in all kinds of communications vehicles, including traditional marketing collateral documents, white papers, e-books, webinars, and sales presentations. There is often a huge disconnect between marketing and sales when it comes to messaging. Various studies have shown that between 50% and 90% of the collateral materials produced by marketing are not used by sales, and the American Marketing Association has reported that salespeople spend 30 hours per month searching for or creating their own sales materials. These problems can be avoided if marketing and sales agree on the major components of your company's messaging.

The Whole Puzzle Matters

Aligning marketing and sales across all four of these issues is not easy given the culture that exists in many companies. But consider how much better your demand generation would perform if you marketers and salespeople had a common view of:

• How you create value for customers
• What kinds of organizations make your best prospects and who the key players are within those organizations
• How to effectively communicate your value to potential buyers
• How to manage leads effectively throughout the buying process

Five Ways to Improve Your Marketing in 2012

Bloggers love lists, and we're told that blog posts with titles like, "Five Secrets to. . ." or "Four Sure-Fire Tactics for. . ." are appealing to readers. Bloggers who write about business also seem to share another characteristic. About now, many feel compelled to make predictions about the new year. When you combine these inclinations, the results are lots of blog posts with titles like, "Six Game-Changing Marketing Trends for 2012,"

I'll leave the prognostications to others, but I will offer a list. I have five recommendations for improving your marketing efforts in 2012.

Before you do anything else, develop a marketing strategy.
You've heard this one before, so I won't repeat all of the reasons that strategy is necessary for success. At its most basic level, marketing strategy is a simple thing for most B2B companies. First, you need to identify all of the significant ways that your product or service can create value for customers and identify the kinds of companies that can obtain the greatest value by purchasing and using your product or service. Second, you need to determine the best ways for communicating your value propositions to potential buyers. This step includes the selection of marketing tactics and channels and the creation of marketing messages. Companies tend to spend most of their time and attention on step two, but step one is even more important. I discussed the "value identification" aspect of marketing strategy in an earlier post titled How to Make Difficult Marketing Questions Easier to Answer.

Shift primary responsibility for lead generation from sales to marketing.
I've explained my rationale for this recommendation in two earlier posts - Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads and Why Marketing Should Take the Lead in Lead Generation. I don't contend that traditional sales prospecting doesn't work at all or that you should completely abandon it. I do contend that traditional sales prospecting is an inefficient use of resources and that you should strive to become less dependent on it.

Increase the number of leads acquired via inbound marketing.
There is little doubt that inbound marketing has become the tactic of choice for lead acquisition. Buyers now control the buying process, and they are performing research and gathering information about products and services on their own, usually via the Web. Therefore, traditional outbound lead acquisition techniques such as direct mail and e-mail don't work as well as they once did. It's just good sense to make yourself easy to find when a prospect begins looking for the kind of solution you provide. Research firm SiriusDecisions says that 80% of new sales leads will come from inbound marketing by 2015. Your objective for 2012 should be to substantially increase the number of leads and the percentage of total leads acquired via inbound marketing.

Develop and implement a sound lead management process.
Consider these facts:  (1) Acquiring new leads is becoming increasingly difficult. (2) 50%-75% of new leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (3) Up to 70% of these lukewarm leads will eventually buy from someone. Put these facts together and one thing is clear - leads are valuable and must be managed with care. An effective lead management process will address several key issues, including lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing and sales alignment. A well-designed lead management process will enable you to maximize the sales you obtain from your pool of leads.

Implement a content marketing program.
Having and using the right kind of content is now essential for B2B marketing success. By "the right kind of content," I mean marketing content that is:

• Primarily educational and non-promotional
• Customized for the types of buyers you sell to
• Customized for where the potential buyer is in his or her buying process

I've discussed these requirements in a white paper titled, Two Powerful Ways to Make Your Marketing More Relevant. If you haven't already seen this paper and would like to get a copy, just send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

That's my list. Do you have other plans to improve your marketing in 2012?

It's Time to Combine Marketing and Sales

Suppose you were hired to design and implement an entirely new demand generation system for a large or mid-sized B2B company.  The board of directors and the CEO have given you a free hand to develop whatever kind of system you believe will produce the best results.  There are no pre-conceived ideas about what tactics should be used or what organizational structure the demand generation system should take.

When I work through this mental exercise, I can identify several things that would be part of my ideal demand generation system.  It would certainly contain a robust lead management process (lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead routing, etc.) that is supported by the right technology tools.  Content marketing would play a prominent role, as would social media.  I would also include processes and tools for demonstrating the value/ROI of my products or services.

However, one of the biggest steps I would take is to combine marketing and sales into one organizational unit.  Not that long ago, having separate marketing and sales departments caused few major difficulties.  The traditional roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales in most B2B companies were distinct, and the people in both departments could perform their jobs fairly effectively without a huge amount of day-to-day interaction and collaboration.  In other words, having marketing and sales in separate management "silos" didn't significantly impair company performance.

Times (and circumstances) have changed, and it's now critical for "marketing" activities and "sales" activities to be closely coordinated.  Buyers expect their potential suppliers to speak with one, consistent voice, and they expect everyone they deal with in an organization to know what interactions have already occurred and what information has been exchanged.

Both marketers and sales professionals now recognize the importance of aligning the efforts of marketing and sales.  This has become a hot topic at marketing and sales conferences, and it's been written about in numerous venues.  Many experts are advocating that marketing and sales should spell out their responsibilities and relationship in a formal service level agreement.  That's a good idea, but why not take the next logical step?

The American architect Louis Sullivan said that "form" should follow "function."  Marketing and sales are interdependent components of a single demand generation process.  Therefore, they should be part of a single organizational unit for management, planning, and budgetary purposes.

In lean management terms, marketing and sales are components of the same value stream.  A value stream is the set of activities that are required to produce value for customers.  Lean management recognizes that it is the output/performance of complete value streams that creates value for customers and profits for a company.  Therefore, mature lean organizations manage their operations by value streams rather than by traditional functional departments.

In the case of marketing and sales, the "customer" is the company itself, and the "product" is revenue dollars.  The sole objective of the demand generation value stream is to produce revenues for the company, and achieving this objective requires an integrated set of marketing and sales activities.  Having "good" marketing and "good" sales is important, but what really matters is the performance of the entire demand generation value stream.  To optimize that performance, it must be treated and managed as a single process.

Combining marketing and sales may be a controversial idea, and it would be difficult to implement in many companies for cultural and "political" reasons.  But the logic is compelling, and just because something is hard to do doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.

What do you think?  If you had a free hand, would you consider merging marketing and sales in your company?

Use an Importance - Performance Matrix to Get Marketing and Sales Talking

In my last post, I discussed the importance of building a collaborative relationship between marketing and sales.  The first step toward achieving this objective is to establish where your marketing/sales relationship is today, and one useful tool for describing the "current state" of the relationship is an Importance - Performance Matrix like the one shown below.

This matrix is used to capture the opinions of individual marketers and sales personnel about specific marketing and sales activities.  Each activity is evaluated along two dimensions - the importance of the activity and how well the company (marketing and/or sales) is performing the activity.

The vertical axis of the matrix is used to describe the importance of the activity.  Less important activities are placed in the lower portion of the matrix, while more important activities are placed in the upper portion.  The horizontal axis of the matrix is used to describe how well the company is performing the activity.  Activities that the company performs poorly are placed in the left side of the matrix, while activities that the company excels at performing are placed in the right side.

An Importance - Performance Matrix will often reveal wide gaps in the views of marketing and sales personnel and point to the issues you need to focus on in order to improve the marketing/sales relationship.

To illustrate the kind of information that an Importance - Performance Matrix can reveal, I'll use a highly simplified example.  Suppose that we want to capture the opinions of marketing and sales personnel regarding the quality of leads provided by marketing to sales.  Also suppose that our company has four marketers and ten salespeople.  All fourteen people would complete a matrix, and then we would combine the responses in a single matrix.  Individual responses are not personally identified, but we do identify which responses come from sales and which come from marketing.

The results of this hypothetical example are shown below.  As you can see, both marketing and sales personnel view generating quality leads as important, but they differ significantly about how well marketing is performing this activity.

An Importance - Performance Matrix won't tell you how to resolve conflicts between marketing and sales, but it can identify the issues you need to address.

Beyond Alignment to Collaboration

One of the hot topics today in B2B marketing is the need to create better alignment between marketing and sales.  There is a growing recognition that marketing and sales are out of sync in many B2B companies.  They often have widely different views about such fundamental issues as what kinds of companies make the best prospects and what constitutes a sales-ready lead.  One major objective of improving the alignment between marketing and sales is to develop a common view regarding these basic issues.

Creating better alignment between marketing and sales is certainly important, but "alignment" doesn't adequately describe the kind of relationship that's really needed between marketing and sales.  Today, a growing number of B2B companies realize that both marketing and sales activities are components of a single demand generation process.  And to create and sustain a demand generation process that produces significant revenue growth, what's really needed is an active and close collaboration between marketers and salespeople.

Not that long ago, such active and close collaboration wasn't absolutely essential.  In most B2B companies, the roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales were fairly distinct and independent.  Marketing ran campaigns to raise brand awareness and generate sales leads, produced marketing collateral materials, and coordinated the participation in trade shows.  Leads generated by marketing were passed along to sales and were rarely seen by marketing again.  Salespeople had two basic jobs - to generate leads (prospect) and to take those leads (plus those supplied by marketing) and close sales.

This siloed approach to marketing and sales is simply not effective in today's business environment.  Companies are encountering potential buyers long before they are ready to meet with a salesperson.  So, marketing must play a larger role in nurturing prospects until they are ready to have a meaningful conversation with sales.  And when a prospect does talk with a salesperson, he or she expects the sales rep to build on the existing relationship, not start over from scratch.

A collaborative relationship can help make the transition from marketing to sales nearly seamless, but the benefits of collaboration don't stop there.  Salespeople are talking with prospects and customers every day, and they can provide marketers with real-time input about the issues that prospects are actively thinking about.  Marketers can then use this information to develop new marketing content or modify existing content.  On the flip side, marketers can provide salespeople with information about strategic developments and trends that are affecting potential buyers.

The bottom line is that B2B companies need an effective demand generation process in order to drive consistent revenue growth, and an effective demand generation process requires that marketers and salespeople work as a cohesive team.