In the category of "why are so many things in the sales profession messed up", a new survey by Blueroads and Sirius Decisions has found that most executives running channel programs in large companies need to focus more on helping their partners sell?!

It seems most channel executives have been spending their time and money on things like partner portals and have just realized that maybe it is time to focus on actually generating leads that their partners can close. I doubt this is much of a surprise for their partners! Of the channel executives who did focus on sales effectiveness 62% reported...an increase in revenue...

Reading between the lines, it's my opinion that channel executives are not fighting the tough fights in their own companies to get the resources they need to actually help generate business for their partners. Hopefully this report will help to change that. The channel team has often been treated as the "poor cousins" in many sales organizations I have seen. I hope they will stand up for themselves more in 2009 and help their partners drive some big revenue gains. With the way the economy looks partners surely need it!

Here's a few extracts from the report:

Top channel executives do not focus enough resources on driving sales effectiveness, suggest the results of a new survey released today by Blueroads and Sirius Decisions. In fact, 80 percent of the channel investments by the vendors that were surveyed are focused around tactical issues such as training, partner portals, and partner communication tools – all activities that automate partners, but fail to help them drive top-line revenue growth.

The Channel Survey: 2009 Priorities, which polled an audience of over 1000 high ranking vendor channel leaders, also indicates that vendors are seeking to drive revenues, but didn’t always know how, and resorted to brute force tactics including channel partner recruitment in their existing markets rather than focusing on programs that increase the productivity and yield of their current resellers and partners. The survey covered a variety of channel-dependent industries--including software, telecommunications, computer hardware, and information services--on their channel plans, investments, and expectations.

“Too many channel chiefs are engaged in low-risk, low-return activities,” said Charles Watson, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Blueroads. “Too few are ready to drive fundamental changes that help them achieve greater equality with direct sales and enable increased visibility, empowerment and accountability in the channel.”

Nearly sixty percent of respondents recognize they need to spend more on sales effectiveness programs in 2009. However, their intended actions don’t necessarily support that goal. For example, training and partner content portals were among the top technology investments, yet these are often simply easy-to-implement infrastructure investments with limited return.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gee, how much more bad news do we need?

I think it's great for news stations and newspapers. I know I can't help looking at the Wall Street Journal site five times day to see how much the Dow Jones is down but I also know that is NOT helping me sell more.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of us sales people are feeling pretty worried/scared right now.

"Is my company going to cut some jobs soon?" "Don't companies often lay off their sales people first?" Most of us know cutting sales people during a downturn is a big mistake (and we don't even know if this is a real downturn yet). Companies that don't market during a recession are in a really weak position when things start to improve. But even though CEOs know this they often still cut sales people because they feel compelled to cut costs in the short term and don't care about two years hence - basically because they need to save their jobs.

But the longer I spend in the “sales industry” the clearer it is to me that highly-skilled sales people are in short supply. I believe this will continue to be the case even if we go into fairly deep recession. Every company I talk to seems to want more sales people and even if some companies start cutting back and not hiring sales people, sales talent will always be in demand.

Hence, if you are committed to being a professional sales person and want to stay with it as your career, I predict you will have no problem finding a job even if things get “dark” with the economy. But how about making your journey through the tough economy easy - or at least easier?

Too much of the time sales people “fly totally solo”. This fits the cliché of the sales person as the “lone wolf” hunting for meat. But does this cliché really make sense when you need all the help you can get to sell in a market where buyers have less budget to spend? I don’t think so.

Consider the other sales people in the world. They likely feel just as concerned as you about the future. Why not reach out to them and start building support structures for yourself? How about starting to connect with other sales people to partner up on business development and knowledge sharing? Form your own "sales team".

If you are a sales person, you have a complicated and challenging job. Trying to do it all alone, especially in a downturn, is a huge burden. Why not share the load with others? Why not build yourself a team to help you sell (a lot) even during tough times. Even wolves work together when necessary.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s 9 a.m. Monday morning. Do you know what’s happening with your leads?

Your ultimate goal is to use the information gleaned from lead follow-up results to determine which lead generation sources or lead nurturing approaches are resulting in the most closed sales and revenue for your salespeople. The only way to know is to learn what happened to the leads you passed on to your sales team or channel partners.

First off, please understand that if you are supplying your salespeople with truly qualified, sales-ready leads, they will follow up. If they see the sales leads you send them as opportunities to close sales and make their quotas and earn their commissions and bonuses, they jump right on the leads.

However, even if your salespeople, reps, dealers or distributors are following up, it is sometimes a challenge to get them to report back on what happened to the lead.

Instead of requiring sales to do extra paperwork, the best way to determine what happened to the leads is to query the CRM system that the salespeople use and see for yourself if the leads were followed up and what the sales results were.

Of course this requires that your company have a CRM system which its salespeople use to manage their opportunities and customers. And you also must enter the leads into the CRM system in the first place.

Unfortunately, when you sell through channel partners such as independent reps, distributors and resellers, the option to leverage a CRM system usually isn’t available. So here are some additional ideas to encourage lead follow-up and reporting back on follow-up activity and results from your companies channel partners.

A “mystery lead” program
Follow-up the mystery lead, get an incentive! Randomly select a lead in every sales territory each month and designate it as the “mystery lead.” Then tell sales that if they report back on that specific lead they earn a prize or incentive.

What’s hot right now for incentives?
Common incentives are gift cards or pre-loaded credit cards, a night at a resort hotel, dinner at a top restaurant, or the latest electronic gadget. You can get creative and have fun with it too. One of my clients gives away a free house cleaning or a car detailing.

The value of the incentive is dependent on how much you are willing to spend to close the loop on lead follow-up. It also depends on the value your salespeople put on the time required to do the necessary paperwork, and how many potential winners there may be.

I recommend that every salesperson have a chance to win for a lead followed up in their territory every month, rather than pulling only one salesperson’s name out of a pool of potential winners.

Points for follow-up program
Your salespeople, reps, dealers or distributors earn a certain number of points for every lead they report back on. You can give additional points for ongoing status reports and bonus points for reports on leads that resulted in closed sales. Then these points can be redeemed for merchandise such as logo-wear, desk accessories, iPods, digital picture frames or even laptops or a smart phones. One client even includes housecleaning services and car detailing in the list of things their resellers can choose from.

Tie lead follow reporting to the size of their paycheck.
This approach works well for some companies. If they report back on the lead before the sale closes, closing the loop, they get a higher commission on that sale (the carrot). Or if they don’t report back on 80% of the leads they were given within a 90 day period, they don’t qualify for their quarterly bonus (the stick).

So whether you do it yourself by querying the CRM system, or use a carrot or stick approach to getting feedback on lead follow-up results from the folks in sales, you can get more of the information you need to determine how best to target your lead generation investments and resources for the maximum bang for your buck.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a marketing company for several years, with a team that was truly exceptional. Alex, Andrea, Nicole, and others were people whom I took great pride in, and they in turn clearly took great pride in the work they were doing.

One of my favorite exercises that I would do from time to time would be to call them all together for an emergency meeting, and announce that a major competitor had gone after one of our key clients. We had to switch quickly into defense mode, and search for ways to wow the customer and win their support.

Of course, everyone on my team knew after the first time we did this that no such attack was actually underway. But it was still a valuable exercise, allowing us to identify ways to super-please our clients, before the threat ever loomed. Frankly, I think it was one of the most valuable processes I have ever developed.

And I still have that exercise in mind whenever I speak with a prospective customer, and ask them why they are leaving their current supplier. I want to know what threat ruined that relationship. And what still surprises me is that, in almost every single case, there was no competitor swooping in to destroy a previously happy relationship. The damage had come from within. Clients were generally leaving suppliers because those suppliers simply were not keeping them happy. There was insufficient effort. A lack of passion. An absence of fanaticism.

How about your clients? If I were to call them up today and ask what they thought of you, would they rave? Would they recommend you? Would they tell me that they don't even want to hear about any other suppliers, because they're so happy with you? Or would they be all too happy to hear about my company, and what we can do for them?

And to be more specific, if they did point out things they didn't like about you, do you know what those things would be? Do you know where the trouble points are? Unless you actually asked your clients these questions recently, I'm guessing that you would be surprised by the answers they give. Most businesses spend too much time selling what they sell instead of asking what their clients want.

So don't wait for the exercise to become reality. Take your top clients out to dinner. Ask tough questions. Learn. Change. Win. Because if you don't ask questions, someone else will. And your client will answer. Because they're hungry and they appreciate the attention.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have to admit that I like the message that Sales 2.0 is sending. This site "gets it." It sees the huge ties that bind sales and customer service together. It encourages companies to make sure they deliver great customer service. It knows that it costs five times more to bring in a new customer than it does to sell additional services to a client you already have.

Hmmm, with figures like that, you'd think that more companies "got it." But you don't need to spend much time waiting on hold for "customer service" departments, or desperately searching "Contact Us" pages to find even one phone number, to realize that far too few companies get it at all.

I remember seeing some great research years ago, showing that four broad factors influence which stores or businesses we choose to visit. Those factors are: 1) the specific situation surrounding this actual purchase; 2) the general environment in which we’re shopping, stretching from our own “chemistry” that will determine our tastes and styles, to the overall economy in which we’re shopping; 3) the presentation and promotions from competing stores or services; and 4) each store’s own presentation and promotions.

Admittedly, those are very broad factors. But they drive home one very important point. Of the four factors that influence us, each business only has any influence at all on the last one — its own presentation and promotions. That means that companies had better be really good at understanding those other factors, and at making sure their own presentation and promotions respond to them as impressively as possible.

That’s not hard to get. But, incredibly, far too many companies spend far too much time figuring out what they want to say, instead of paying attention to what their customers want. Customers want to know they’re important, and appreciated, and cared for. They want to know companies see them and listen to them and respond to them. They want to know that companies “get it.”

But many companies simply don’t. And, sadly, there are more things that those companies probably simply won't get. They won't get your business. Or my business. Or the business of others who like to be treated with respect and gratitude for the dollars they leave behind.

How about you? Operating a business or not-for-profit? Maybe "just" operating a family? Try smiling and saying thank-you with every interaction. Try listening hard to feedback, and correcting any things that bug people. Try "service with a smile" that actually does have a smile. You might be surprised at the smiles that pop up in return. And the rewards that come with them.

Don't think of it as customer service. Think of it as sales. Because that's exactly what it is.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are like most sales executives, it's easy for you to name your best salespeople. Great salespeople drive great sales results, but a great sales department is more than just having a few big hitters. Great sales organizations are built on well-tuned and aligned sales management systems. Whether you have a small or large sales force, you need superior sales operations support to be successful.

Sales operations are a set of functional activities that support the sales organization. In small companies, these functions are often shared among individuals. Larger sales forces need a dedicated department to provide professional and continuous sales operations support. For mega sales entities, sales operations becomes a major resource, often with its own vice president directing the efforts of sales operations specialists. Sales operations functions fall into six groupings:

Measurement and reporting: Keeping score is a fundamental sales operations task. Sales managers needs sales reports, budgets and sales projections. More advanced programs can create sales dashboards to provide continuous tracking of results, which need to be shown to every level of field management. Web-based reporting simplifies this task.

Talent assets: Hiring and keeping the best people requires well-defined systems to recruit, train and develop top sales talent. More complex sales forces need career path management and succession planning.

Accountability management: Assigning sales ownership and rewarding results ensures accountability of efforts. Accountability management includes systems for quota allocation and management, sales crediting, territory/account assignment and changes, and sales compensation.

Communication: Creating successful customer messages requires engaged partnership with product management. Business development efforts such as sales campaigns and trade shows help create leads for sellers.

Provisioning: Using technology to its fullest potential provides the sales force with at a finger's touch access to sales force automation, customer relationship management, mobile communications, customer service solutions, expense management and issue reporting.

Strategy planning and deployment: Ensuring sales force alignment between customer needs and product divisions' ambitions requires serious investments. Multi-dimensional buyer segment analysis creates opportunities to re-examine sales channels, organization structure, job design, headcount allocation and annual forecasting.

To congratulate a great sales department, acknowledge and reward the great sellers, but celebrate the behind-the-scene sales operations solutions that make it all possible.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

Here is an article by David Cichelli, Senior VP of The Alexander Group, that appears in Sales & Marketing Management, Sales Operations Celebrated:

If you are like most sales executives, it's easy for you to name your best salespeople. Great salespeople drive great sales results, but a great sales department is more than just having a few big hitters. Great sales organizations are built on well-tuned and aligned sales management systems. Whether you have a small or large sales force, you need superior sales operations support to be successful.

Sales operations are a set of functional activities that support the sales organization. In small companies, these functions are often shared among individuals. Larger sales forces need a dedicated department to provide professional and continuous sales operations support. For mega sales entities, sales operations becomes a major resource, often with its own vice president directing the efforts of sales operations specialists.

Sales operations functions fall into six groupings:

Measurement and reporting: Keeping score is a fundamental sales operations task. Sales managers needs sales reports, budgets and sales projections. More advanced programs can create sales dashboards to provide continuous tracking of results, which need to be shown to every level of field management. Web-based reporting simplifies this task.

Talent assets: Hiring and keeping the best people requires well-defined systems to recruit, train and develop top sales talent. More complex sales forces need career path management and succession planning.

Accountability management: Assigning sales ownership and rewarding results ensures accountability of efforts. Accountability management includes systems for quota allocation and management, sales crediting, territory/account assignment and changes, and sales compensation.

Communication: Creating successful customer messages requires engaged partnership with product management. Business development efforts such as sales campaigns and trade shows help create leads for sellers.

Provisioning: Using technology to its fullest potential provides the sales force with at a finger's touch access to sales force automation, customer relationship management, mobile communications, customer service solutions, expense management and issue reporting.

Strategy planning and deployment: Ensuring sales force alignment between customer needs and product divisions' ambitions requires serious investments. Multi-dimensional buyer segment analysis creates opportunities to re-examine sales channels, organization structure, job design, headcount allocation and annual forecasting.

To congratulate a great sales department, acknowledge and reward the great sellers, but celebrate the behind-the-scene sales operations solutions that make it all possible.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Joga Bonita", "Play Beautiful", is the Nike slogan for the current World Cup in Germany.  Since I am a bit of a nut about football (soccer) and sales I have inevitably drawn some insights for sales teams from watching the World Cup (well, I am up to about 20 hours of TV watching so far).

The commentators were pointing out how much the Brazilian players were smiling throughout their games, as if they truly are enjoying every minute of playing, even though they are under immense pressure to win.  So here we have a world-beating team smiling throughout the process of making some very tough goals (sorry about the pun).

This is not the average demeanor that I encounter when speaking to sales people across the world.  I hear mostly from sales people who feel beaten up and under-appreciated by their managers.  I hear about colleagues who do not support them and do not appreciate sales as a truly skilled profession. 

There just does not seem to be a lot of smiling going on in the average sales department.

My personal take is that sales teams are not that different to football teams.  If people are having a great time working towards their goals together, they are likely to produce great results.

Maybe sales managers and colleagues everywhere need to watch Ronaldinho closely?

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Carroll

The best mindset, strategy and tactics – and the most astute sales and marketing individuals – are for naught without the collaboration of everyone involved. The unrealized potential can be likened to the batteries in a flashlight. If the batteries aren’t inserted in the right direction or are otherwise out of proper contact, their latent power is unusable.

Likewise, the harmonious interaction of sales and marketing is crucial. If they are askew and going in dissimilar directions, sales and marketing will not empower a successful complex sale or sales lead strategy. Bottom-line sales performance reflects just how well sales and marketing are working together.

I liked the collaboration tips in Sherri Leopard's article, "Five Steps to Connect Marketing to Sales, and Sales to Financial Results" in MarketingProfs.com (requires subscription).

I've summarized Leopard’s tips with my thoughts below:

Sales and Marketing must collaborate on defining leads and marketing objectives.
What gets measured gets done. Connect sales and marketing metrics together.
Focus on the data points you REALLY need to measure in your CRM.
Is your value proposition clear? Does your sales team have sales-ready messaging?
Create content that's relevant for each stage of the buying cycle.
Simply put, what matters most is having everyone on the same page, integrated and respecting one another. If you can't do that, your brilliant lead generation plans and tactics won't matter.

June 21, 2006 | Permalink

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You couldn't be more right on. I've been the marketing arm for a few online service firms for the past 5 years or so, working directly with sales.

The key for the marketing side is to ask a lot of questions, and stay proactive inside your sales teams heads. Then give them what they need to close.

Good advice here for all.

Posted by: Jim Kukral | Jun 21, 2006 11:54:35 AM

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"I don't have time to play politics. My job is to serve my customers"

This is a classic statement from a sales person and an obviously well intentioned one also.  But I beg to differ with this approach.

Research has shown that one of the top things that customers want from sales people is to feel that the sales person controls the resources of their company.  The customer wants to talk to a person who will get things done on their behalf. 

But in reality the sales person is rarely the owner or CEO of the firm and they cannot dictate what gets done.  This is where "politics" begins.  The sales person often has to fight for scarce resources within their firm on behalf of their customer (engineering support, special pricing etc.)

It seems like a lot of sales people get frustrated with this process very quickly and feel that fighting for these resources is not part of their job.  They often settle for sub-optimal results internally which they then deliver on to their customer (not what the customer wants).

What I find most interesting about this is that sales people of all people in a company should actually be the best equipped to "play politics".  Most of the tools and techniques sales people use to sell customers can actually be applied internally and be very effective (for example, understanding stakeholders and their motivations).

So my thought for sales people is to change your mindset.  Think of dealing internally not as "politics", a frustrating waste of energy, but as "inside selling", part of your process to close more deals and give customers what they want...

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

In the point-counterpoint article, Truce! Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing (MarketingProfs, needs a subscription), the two debating authors work for Ciena; Bill Koss is vice-president of global alliance partners, and Bill Rozier is vice president of global marketing.

Together, theses two gentlemen have built a progressive marketing and sales system that seems to have eliminated much of the typical animosity between sales and marketing. This article, discusses how that happened. But, first, Bill Babcock, the CEO of Babcock & Jenkins, a direct and relationship marketing agency gives a little background information. Here are several excerpts:

Bill Babcock: Most companies we know of have a serious problem: Sales hates marketing, and marketing despises sales. Marketing is having great success generating leads and uncovering opportunity. But sales has no respect for what marketing accomplishes. They take leads grudgingly and when the leads turn into real opportunities they claim those opportunities were already on their radar.

There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between these teams—they have separate goals, separate cultures, and different fears and motivations.

Sales folks make quota or they are gone. They spend their day dealing with rejection and sweating their numbers. Marketing people never feel this constant pressure. When they skip in with a fistful of prospects and say, "I've just made your job easy—go sell to all these hot leads," the sales force wants to kill them.

On the other hand, sales has no detectable foresight. They undercut marketing even when they are getting leads that will make their quota next quarter or next year. Marketing initiates marketing conversations that turn to sales conversations, and when they do, sales gives them NO credit—no matter how overwhelming the accountability evidence might be. Sales cares only about what is happening this quarter and what marketing did for sales today. But marketing has to look further into the future.

We see our clients struggle to bring these teams together. I've always believed that it can be done, but it's a painful partnership. It's like the Brits and the Yanks teaming up in World War II. They didn't necessarily like each other and they didn't hang out together and sing Kumbaya, but they knew the competition was deadly and they were doomed if they didn't work together, so they got the job done.

That seems like the best you can hope for.

Ciena looks to be an exception. From the outside, it seems that you and your teams have solved some of these problems. Is that true, or am I just seeing the public face?

The discussion that follows in this article is very informative and well worth the read. Here is just a very brief sample of some of the comments:

Bill Koss (Sales): I think one of the reasons I get along so well with Rozier and his team is that I love leads. I believe in leads. I want a lead-generating machine.

Still, the wrong kind of lead is a huge waste of time for our sales team, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. That leads sales management to reject leads wholesale—I know many of my peers at other companies don't share my fondness for leads.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): we can get customers to "raise their hand" and to "want" to talk to a salesperson. The days of handing off "T-shirt grabbers" at tradeshows as a lead are over, and I'm not completely sure the sales team understands that change has taken place.

Despite all that, your perception that we have managed to declare a truce is basically correct. There's a cultural chasm between our two teams, but we've found plenty of ways to bridge it.

First and foremost, we take our field direction from sales. I think that's a huge change here. And for their part, sales helps us with some of the heavy lifting of field-marketing programs.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): Great sales people make us better at marketing because they teach us how to carry on a dialog with customers that's more appropriate and actionable. What we need to do is continually get closer to the sales force. Create a strong bond between us. Work together. Focus on objectives we can both succeed at. I see the value in that and so do our senior executives.

Bill Babcock: The sales force wants to talk to the most senior decision makers who are ready to buy in the next quarter and have budget established. They expect you to go find those kinds of opportunities—but they don't exist in useful quantities. If you get every lead that meets those criteria for a complex and expensive product, the sales force will either already know all about the opportunity or it's too late to get on the short list.

You have to grow those opportunities, not just harvest the tiny number that just happen to already be there. Your focus really needs to be on feeding a cultivation engine.

The key to effective cultivation is a very simple and easy way to move leads around and see what's happening to them. Otherwise, any lead that is not quite ready falls to the bottom of your sales force automation system and dies, when all it really needed was to go back into active cultivation.

If you have a CRM system in place, you can generally accomplish this with some minor effort. If not, or if your sales force consists mostly of resellers or partners, then a Lead Management System like the one we built for Ciena is necessary. You need an easy way to get leads into the right hands automatically, a way for them to report on whether they have accepted or rejected the lead, and, if they accepted the lead, what the disposition eventually was—won, lost, or not really a lead.

And there needs to be a way to evaluate rejected leads and perhaps turn them over to a different rep.

It takes some time to get the process really cooking, and you need to make sure that the sales force understands what you're doing and why. They have to see some great leads come out of the process. But, yes, it will end the war, or at least they'll stop biting the hand that feeds them.

You folks already have the top-down cooperation—your truce is real. This approach will give you bottom-up cooperation as well, and should make for a world-class operation.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Senior managers & delivery people are from Mars...sales people are from Venus?

Sometimes it seems like sales people and managers (especially senior managers), and some delivery people, are not from the same planet.

Again this week I heard about a situation where an SVP in a company was siding with a delivery person against his sales force.  And the interesting thing about the issue in question was that is was how to sell solutions to a certain group of prospects.  The senior manager felt the sales people should do what the delivery person was suggesting not what they felt was best to move a deal forward.

Without too much disrespect to delivery people all over the world, why is it that you feel you can second-guess sales people but you would never, even for a second, listen to a sales person who told you how to deliver a project?  I have myself encountered this several times in my career.  A programmer or technical architect would tell me to call the prospect more often or tell me I should say "XYZ" to the prospect but I just can't remember a time when I suggested a schema for their database design.

One of the best "counters" I have seen to the advice from one of these "back seat drivers" is to "give them the wheel"...It's really interesting to take one of these people and bring them on a sales call or put them on the phone to make the next follow-up call.  Somehow their perspective is quite different afterwards.

Have you encountered this issue and how have you handled it?

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Poor sales and marketing integration is so common that it risks cliché. I believe the answer to better integration is by taking a more strategic approach to lead generation.

Last night, I stumbled upon Jeremy Porter's notes and observations from DMA's B-to-B Conference session entitled, "Sales and Marketing Integration: How To Make It Happen and Why You Can't Afford Not To." I've paraphrased a few of his thoughts below:

Sales and Marketing need to communicate then collaborate - not just executives but the entire team. Email is worst way to do it. In person or via phone is best.
Marketing must to help the sales team develop better value propositions.
Sales and Marketing must jointly develop a universal lead definition to qualify all leads regardless of source.
Leads should never die as they represent future relationships. Marketing must take control of nurturing leads.
Sales and Marketing must conduct regular sales pipeline review meetings for better integration, accountability and metrics.
Jeremy Porter's Blog: B-TO-B CONFERENCE DAY ONE - SALES & MARKETING INTEGRATION.

September 17, 2005 | Permalink

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» Marketing and Sales, Working Together from Vasey on Marketing
So many organisations miss out on the great things that come out of sales and marketing working together. hey are two sides of the same coin. [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 19, 2005 2:40:39 PM

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This blog is right up our alley. We had an event for the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA) entitled " Bridging the Marketing and Sales Gap - Working Together to Win" in January moderated by Kelly Gay (http://www.KnowledgeStorm.com, CEO) and paneled by John Neeson (http://SiriusDecisions.com, Co-Founder), Rory Holland (http://www.hollandinteractive.com, President), and Coleen Crafton (http://www.mapics.com/, Marketing Director).

I originally wanted to title the event "Come watch sales and marketing dook it out", but we chose to take the high road. During the event the panelists highlighted that coming up with common definitions of what is "quality" in a lead, and what is not is crucial for sales and marketing to respect and work well together. Also, sales must show marketing that they are working the leads hard, and marketing must show sales that they are nurturing leads that are not yet ready to buy. These steps are key to ensuring that your whole sales and marketing organizations are moving towards the same goals of more sales for the entire organization. Thanks - Joe Koufman

Posted by: Joe Koufman | Sep 18, 2005 9:10:17 AM

This is going to sound like an ancient gripe.

I get into countless situations (especially in larger companies) where the marketing organization is insulated from sales. It's like the artists don't hang with the jocks.

So disappointing. I urge the marketing folks to *ask* the sales people what the customers 1) need, 2) care about, 3) complain about, 4) respond to emotionally.

Sadly this rarely happens. The answers are there, but the effort is not.

Posted by: Phil Dunn | Sep 21, 2005 1:10:17 AM

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After World War II, Toyota Motor Company caught the entire US auto industry off-guard using a system for manufacturing automobiles that later became known as "lean manufacturing". 

One of the key concepts of "lean manufacturing" was to create teams of workers where before only an end-to-end production line had existed.  In the production line each worker would hand off their work product and pass it on to the worker next along the line.  They held responsibility only for their individual automotive part.

A key insight from Toyota was that workers lost sight of the "bigger picture" of how their work fit in to the quality of the final automobile.  Toyota changed to a system of teams working together on complete systems - rather than individual parts.  The end result was not only higher production but much higher quality and more motivated workers.

What's this all got to do with sales and marketing?

One of the key problems with many sales and marketing operations today is that 70-80% of leads are being lost.  Sales and marketing departments are set up like production lines.  The flow of work is from "left to right".  Marketing produces leads and "throws them over the wall" to sales.  Marketing departments do not care enough about the quality of the leads (i.e. how likely are they to become a deal).  Sales departments are unhappy about the "low quality" of the leads being sent to them by marketing.

This “production line” problem does not occur in very small or start-up companies where there are no formal sales and marketing departments.  Everyone works together in a team to close whatever business they can.  They are highly motivated by the need to survive.  As companies grow sales and marketing departments are introduced and the “production line” problem starts to arise.

So how about a world where sales and marketing personnel work together in teams to generate and close business?

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Teamwork is essential in order to maximize ROI from your lead generation programs. Are you sending inquiries or qualified leads over to your sales team? 90% of the companies that I work with (I talk with hundreds each year) lack a clear definition (especially between marketing and sales) of what a sales lead is.

Successful lead generation must go beyond the marketing department. It requires a shared vision that involves all players. It begins with the holistic premise that everyone has something to gain or lose by your lead generation program’s success or failure.

What is a lead?
Companies that aren’t asking this essential question of BOTH their marketing AND sales teams will find that they are producing poor ROI from their lead generation efforts. Miscommunication leads to missed revenue targets, wasted budget dollars and possibly more distrust between marketing and sales.

Here are 6 Steps to help you mutually define a sales lead within your organization. This is referred to as a Universal Lead Definition or ULD.

1. Meet - Get ALL those involved in new customer acquisition in a room or a conference call. You’ll need a leader/facilitator who has "street credibility” because the premise of the meeting is that we're all in this together. Also, it’s best if you can have sponsorship of a top executive. If you have team issues I suggest the book by Patrick M. Lencioni: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.

2. Ask the question - What do you consider a qualified lead? Now shut up and listen. Everybody must play. What are the characteristics of the ideal sales opportunity? Who should we be contacting? Who’s involved in the buying process?

3. Confirm it again - Don't stop with just one meeting. Summarize the notes from your meeting and have another meeting to clarify and make sure everyone is satisfied with the definition? You’ll need a strong consensus.

4. Publish - Publish the ULD everywhere that you can. The terms you use to rank and describe your leads must become part of your organization’s culture and shared language. Everyone must be on the same page.

5. Close-the-loop - Marketing and sales should meet often (maybe bi-weekly) to review the ULD for accuracy. I’ve found it best to do it as part of the regular sales meeting. Ask questions like this... Was X a lead? Did they enter the sales process? Why / Why not? What else would you like to have known about this lead? How can we improve? What should we stop doing? What should we start doing?

6. Edit and republish - The ULD is a living document, so it is not uncommon to see several revisions within the first few months of implementation.

Benefits of Universal Lead Definition

Higher qualified, sales-ready leads

Sales force has less frustration

Increased sales effectiveness

More accurate funnel management

Shorten average sales cycle

Meaningful ROI metrics that are consistent

I'll be sharing more on, How to Precisely Define a “Lead” Before Marketing Begins at the B2B Lead Generation Summit in DC and SF. Hope to see you there!

October 11, 2004 | Permalink

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