Help Sales Understand Marketing

In the recently (December 2012) Aberdeeen Report "Sales Performance Management 2012" , author Peter Ostrow has two recommendations to improve your sales performance.

Why bother?

Improved Sales Performance leads to more of your reps making quota, shorter sales cycles and bigger average deals. Sounds good to me.

Ostrow's first recommendation is to base sales compensation on team activities , the second is to

"Cross train sellers into other customer facing roles such as Marketing"

So what are your plans to help sales better understand Marketing?

My suggestion would be continue your work on jointly agreements on Culture, Language and People.

How about running more joint meetings, now if you need an external speaker why not ask....

Is your Marketing killing your Revenue?

You've read how the new buyers journey is impacting on their decision making process.

Often suspects will research and validate what they need to know before approaching potential suppliers. Before approaching you!

Marketing's response to this new paradigm is content, more content, lots of content. A never ending avalanche of content.

And, you hold off giving that lead to sales and feed that baby more content.

The problem is your content is probably no better and just the same as your competitors.

Your webinars, white papers, seminars look the same.

Too much content will deluge your prospects.

Marketing think better content makes the difference,

Revenue focussed sales people know that better conversations make the difference.

Let your sales team off the leash.

Give them information to have better conversations, not more content.

Marketing Directors: Do you have access to the Sales Forecast?

Can you tell me how the company revenue targets are doing YTD?

How many of the sales guys made quota last month?

How many will make their numbers this quarter?

Do you know these numbers? Do you have access?

In their Latest July 2011 Report on Sales Forecasting, Aberdeen Group state that 89% of Best In Class Companies share the sales forecast across the company. Less than 6 out of 10 of Laggard companies do.

So what, you might say.

The same report details a 17% year over year increase in Best In Class Companies team attainment of sales quota, Laggards are showing a decrease of 6.9%!

Get access to the sales forecast!

Demand access

Help your sales guys make their numbers.

What my Blog really looks like?

The Wordle Cloud from the last six months entry.

What am I talking about?

'Taster' Seminar, London 21st June, Sales and Marketing Alignment Seminar

On June 21st I will be delivering another 'taster' workshop on Sales and Marketing Alignment.

Why should you bother spending a morning with me?

Well, if you want to improve the customer buying experience, understand your buyer's journey and be able to understand when they are moving to their next stage, then please join me in Ealing on Tuesday June 21st.

More information here

This is an exclusive event for Sales and Marketing Directors only.

The Movie Intro...

Who needs a Special Relationship when you can have something far more powerful: Alignment.

Dateline London.

I am writing this during President Obama's state visit to the UK. Lots of pomp and circumstance, 41 gun salutes and posh banquets. Both the Queen and the President have used that term “Special Relationship" to describe something that's supposed to exist. Of course it's tosh, something just to appeal to the vanity in the Old Country. Earlier in the day the Prime Minister and the President had referred to an essential relationship, better, but still sugar coating.

What we have here is a failure to be realistic.

When the USA and UK's interests are the same then it makes sense to be aligned, not essential and certainly not special.

So it is in business when sales and marketing share the same interests and goals they will naturally be more aligned. Try telling one of your sales reps that you think she is special. Maybe not.

Alignment means no finger pointing when things go wrong. Working on your Culture, Language and People.

Alignment means common ownership of the pipeline and forecast. Goodbye to silos, hello to openness.

The end result meaning that you can improve the customer buying experience and generate more profitable revenue, more predictably.

Who needs a Special Relationship when you can have something far more powerful: Alignment.