The Convergence of Sales and Marketing

I've been through a lot of sales training and usually within the first hour the subject of sales versus marketing is always a topic. Why do I bring this up? Because the friction between sales and marketing is such an obvious topic that the general failure of this relationship needs to be dealt with before sales people can deal with their own issues. The center of the controversy is the definition of what constitutes a sales lead. Marketing believes that a name, email and phone is a lead and sales doesn't believe that someone who signed up for a free iPod is a legitimate lead. Marketing has MBOs on lead counts and sales gets paid commissions for closed sales. So, what is the definition of a lead and who's right?

Ultimately, the value of leads can only be measured one way, how many converted to customers and in what timeframe? There are two timeframes that need to be measured, first how long were they owned by marketing and second, once accepted by sales as an opportunity, how long did the sales cycle last. Marketing needs to look at all lead generation as a two phase process, phase one is gathering large groups of people who initially respond to a marketing program and are captured into the internal marketing database and second, those people in the current re-marketing or lead nurturing process. There are a number of awesome tools that snap into existing CRMs that I will discuss later.

So, who should sales be talking to? Simply, those people from marketing who have raised their hand to buy. What?? Do people really volunteer to buy or enter a buying cycle? Ultimately, yes they do. Once a person or organization has determined the problem they want to solve, they want to find at least three vendors to flesh out a solution, go through a proof stage and, if their needs can be met and they believe they can solve their problem, make a purchase decision. The good news for us sales folks is that they need us during this process and expect us to participate.

Clearly this is an over-simplification of the buying process (great sales people don't sell they enable the buying process). It does delineate roles and reponsilibilities. So, now how do we measure marketing and sales? Hang in there for the answer when I write about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Sales 2.0 - What Happened?

After years of telling myself that I need to start capturing what I'm learning myself and from other smart people, I begin this blog on Sales 2.0. As far back as 8 years ago I noticed a number of landslide changes in the buying process. Notice that I didn't sales "sales process." We can try to shoe horn in any sales process or methodology, but if it doesn't match how our prospects make buying decisions, we're out of alignment and we are destined to fail. I have a number of observations that I've been thinking about for several years.

1. Where once sales people were the holders of the secret knowledge and prospects needed us for education, prospects can now go to multiple web sites and get near perfect knowledge.
2. Buyers have placed more shields around themselves to avoid talking to sales people. They use voice mail to block calls and prefer most communications via email so that they can better control their daily schedules and have documentation about vendor conversations.
3. Since we offer white papers, free downloads and webinars for their name and an email, we think we are generating leads and push them to sales people. What has happened is that prospects have become visible earlier and are beginning an education process for projects 6 to 12 months in the future. Once we treat these as current, active leads, we have lost credibility and trained our early stage prospects to avoid us in the future.
4. Google and other search engines have replaced trade magazines as the primary way to find solutions to perceived problems.
5. Traditional cold calling is a failed strategy. If they don't know you, you're being immediately round filed regardless of how clever your voice mail message.
6. You need to select and invest heavily into your CRM system. It takes a team of people to make a software or SaaS sale and your CRM is your central point of account and prospect information. There are many great systems, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Maximizer, Siebel and many others. Which ever one you select, you need a top down mandate to capture all customer interactions including sales and support incidents into a single system.

Unfortunately, although I wrote an internal paper on these changes in marketing and sales when I started at Keynote Systems 7 years ago, I wasn't smart enough to begin compiling best practices and write a book. Over the next several weeks, I am going to attempt to discuss the strategies and ideas I believe can help transition you towards success in this new world. If you have any ideas or reactions, please comment!