Sales does not use our Marketing Assets

There is hardly any CMO not having complained about this. It is nothing new but in today's economic environment, this can be a serious threat to their career. Marketing programs in college often don't focus on inter-departmental relationships. Yet strong communication and efficiency across departments can have numerous positive outcomes. On the other side, poor or non-existent relations between a sales and marketing team can mean leaving quality assets untapped.Producing assets that are not used is a waste of money. My conservative estimate is that this waste could easily amount to 10% of the marketing investment in people and programs. This is probably not a wise thing to do when CMOs are increasingly held accountable by CEOs about their contribution they make to the business

In my Masterclass “Why do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets” on August 20, 2009 at 11 a.m. US Eastern, 4 p.m. UK, 17:00 CET, I will discuss why this is, and what can be done to increase usage. The slides used for this Masterclass  can now be found here.

You might wonder why a consultant focusing on sales effectiveness cares about this and what recommendations he can make to solve this marketing issue.

I am interested in the question for the the same reason why also CSO's (Chief Sales Officers) should be concerned. Not using marketing assets negatively impacts sales effectiveness. It is not that sales would not need such materials. One reason for not using them is simply because they are not aware of what is available and how it could forward their sales campaign. So they might create something on the fly. If sales people are aware of the assets, they find that these often do not fit with the need of the salesperson for a particular sales call. Salespeople spend time to create or adapt those assets to their needs which is time not spend with the customers. We are speaking about several hours per week.

My personal experience about this misalignment between sales and marketing comes from coaching strategic key account teams. Very often, when I ask the question whether they have considered Marketing as a resource they can leverage for the formulation and execution of their key account plans, I get a a blank stare or I draw a laughter.

As a former head of a solution practice in a boutique consulting firm, it was in my remit to create marketing assets. Through this, I gained some practical experience how to create them so that sales people made use of them. That is also when I started to use the term Marketing Assets instead of Marketing Collateral. This might seems dwelling in semantics.
To me however it is the symptom of a mind set.

If you are interested in a methodologically sound but pragmatic approach to help bridging some of the marketing and sales divide, you can join me

In my Masterclass “Why do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets” on August 20, 2009 at 11 a.m. US Eastern, 4 p.m. UK, 17:00 CET. Readers of this blog can register for free.

Contradicting opinions on who generates leads

There are studies out there telling us that in the web 2.0 world up to 90 % of purchases today start with an internet search.

This searches will end on someones landing page and can be interpreted as a lead generated by unaddressed attraction. As landing pages are usually owned by the marketing department of the respective organization, these leads can therefore be considered to be generated by marketing.

In contrast to this, CSO Insights in their Sales Performance Optimization – 2009 Survey and Analyzes, report that about 52% of the leads salespeople are working on, are self generated by the salespeople. This figure actually has risen over recent years. In 2006 only 40% of the leads were self generated.

How can we reconcile these two views?

One possible explanation for this discrepancy could be that a shift has already occurred how field sales forces are used. They might increasingly be used only for offerings where the customer needs help early on to understand that there is a problem and how it could be solved. It seems plausible that for this scenario, generating leads directly by the sales force might be more effective. The majority of respondents to the CSO Insights study operate in B2B selling environment , whereas it is not so clear whether the studies claiming the percentage of buying cycles started with an internet search are making this distinction between B2C and B2B selling.This could be another reason for the discrepancy of the two trends.

You can read here, enableyoursales why I think the question is relevant.

If Knowledge is a Key Ingredient for Success in Sales…

How is it managed? Is it through CRM systems? You can read my blog post discussing this question also here.

The 3 C’s of Knowledge

For a successful sales campaign, adequate knowledge is needed about:

1. The customer’s/prospect’s situation
2. The competitive landscape
3. The supplier’s capabilities

How do CRM Systems Support These Domains?

Using the above framework, we can make the following observations.

1. Customer Knowledge

One of the primary purposes of CRM systems is to provide data structures allowing tracking every relevant interaction between the companies customer facing people with the customers/prospects, they look after. Thus a body of situational knowledge is created. Consultation of this knowledge is then particularly valuable in the maintenance of a customer relationship.

This body of knowledge is however not sufficient when building or expanding a customer relationship. In this case, the following additional elements are needed:

• Background information about the prospect
• The current situation the prospect is in
• Trigger events causing sales people to want to build the relationship to eventually close a deal.

While CRM systems might provide a structure to capture this information for ready reference, the original source is outside of such systems. What is captured is the knowledge salespeople have gained through research activities such as: General searches on the internet, reading general printed press or specific trade journals and increasingly through the use of specialized systems made available in a Sales 2.0 context. CRM systems support the research activity through specialized systems by providing embedded links to such system. The research can be conducted without leaving the CRM systems context. Some of those specialized systems can also automatically push information into CRM data structures.

2. Competitive Knowledge

For building and consultation of competitive knowledge, CRM systems are used pretty similar to what is described above for customer knowledge. In large companies, there might though also be dedicated people researching the competitive landscape and making it available for ready reference in CRM systems, together with the knowledge built up by sales people themselves from information learned through customer interactions.

3. Capabilities Knowledge

Was one to ask salespeople where they get the information about their companies and product and services capabilities so they know what to say in a particular sales situation, they hardly would answer, that the CRM system is the primary source. Most CRM systems do though hold some capabilities knowledge usually referred to as company literature. The original design idea for this was to enable sales people to easily and efficiently answer fulfill information requests from their customers. There are though two factors that limit the usefulness of such company literature repositories. First, the internet has caused the number of such direct information requests from customers to drop drastically. Second, it is a well known fact that salespeople consider such literature not to be of much use in their campaigns anyway and make thus little to no use of it.

Capabilities knowledge is probably mostly stored in Sales Portals. These portals are often built from a product marketing perspective. Salespeople are thus left on their own to match the complexity of the customer requirements and the complexity of their companies capabilities to propose a valuable solution to the customer. Furthermore, customers today do not tolerate salespeople being simple conveyers of canned marketing prepared standard value propositions anymore. Salespeople are expected to be able to add value to the interaction. The messaging has to be adapted to the individual customer and to the current context of a sales campaign.

Conclusion

While CRM systems are configured to guide salespeople in what needs to be done in a sales campaign through the implementation of sales processes, they provide no support for the sales people of what is best said to the customer in a particular phase of the process. Sales portals are also no help for this as capabilities knowledge is stored under a different view point there. It becomes thus pretty obvious that sales enablement systems guiding salespeople in what needs to be said in a particular phase of the sales process and allowing furthermore the tailoring of the messaging to the specific customer context can significantly improve the productivity of salespeople, while maintaining image integrity required from a marketing perspective.

Are your Salespeople asking the right questions.......

to add value to the conversation with and informed self driven prospect.

Reading a contribution by Paul McCord to an interesting discussion on sales force ineffectiveness started by Dave Brock over at The Customer Collective, lead me to this question. I think it is a real challenge we have to become aware of and have to have answers to if we want salespeople to be able to continue bringing value to their interactions with such prospects. Bringing this value is key for the salesperson to build credibility and establish a relationship to generate sustainable revenue streams.

Most buying processes, today, start by a search on the net. This allows prospects to form an opinion about a product or service and its potential suppliers without needing the help of the salesperson. Before the Internet, salespeople were the gateway to this information. What is left now is the mistrust and fear from prospects to be manipulated by the sellers. Before they did not have the choice than engage with the salesperson anyway. Today, prospects are given means to form the opinion keeping the salesperson out of the loop until late in the buying process. .

As if this were not enough, new lead generation and lead nurturing tools, mostly operated by the marketing organizations, cause that the initial contact between the prospect and the salesperson is even later in the buying cycle.

When a sales person finally can establish contact with the prospect, this prospect is already very advanced in the decision process. Salespeople just wanting to close a deal, probably will even be happy about this. They run though the risk that they might become obsolete very soon, if all they do is taking the order. The number of purchases customers are able and willing to make via the Internet without direct human intervention from the seller is growing daily.

For purchases where the customer is not willing or able to make the purchasing decision without a salesperson's help, we have to consider modifying the approach of needs analysis as it is taught today.

While a patient, seeing a doctor, will accept that the doctor goes through his/her diagnosis procedure despite the fact that the patient formed an own opinion about his/her state of health, a prospect having formed an opinion about a solution is very unlikely to accept the standard needs analysis procedure from a sales person. Such an analysis would be perceived as a waste of time. Studies done with buyers in the IT sector revealed that they already think salespeople are making the sales cycle too long compared to how they want to buy.

Why is it more difficult for a sales person to use the classical needs analysis scheme with an informed self driven prospect? Prospects rarely see a sales person as a trustworthy authority for where they seek help. Their impression will be reinforced by the fact that chances are high the salesperson will not be able to help immediately. Prospects will ask for help in their decision on a level where the salespersons first must consult with other functions within their organization. Salespeople risk giving the impression of 'just being a conduit without much value added'.

Nevertheless, a salesperson seriously interested in building a relationship instead of closing a deal,has to make sure that the prospect has not formed any wrong perceptions about a certain offering. Purchases done on wrong perceptions will end up in customer dissatisfaction.

Guess who the customer is going to blame if this were to happen, the sales person. “He/she should have told me so that this offering does not fit my needs”. It is an irrational reaction. First the prospects mistrust salespersons and make it difficult for them to fulfill their role of a consultant. When expectations are not met, customers need somebody to blame. Ironically, they accuse the same person, that they before did not let do the job properly. We cannot change the customer. So we have to adapt the behavior of the salespeople.

The remedy, I suggest is to modify the questions we ask informed self driven prospects.

Using confirmation questions could be the way forward to provide value for interaction with such prospects. Why not start with something like “I assume you have set your mind on this solution X to help you improve your business in area Y.” I think few prospects would object being asked this type of question . It acknowledges the fact that the prospect is already far advanced in the decision process. It also signals that the sales person is focused on the customer's business outcome and wants to make sure that the solution meets the prospect's expectations in this respect.

For such an approach to work, we not only need to focus on the questioning technique used by the salesperson. Being able to ask this simple question requires, that the salesperson understands what business problem a particular offering solves.

Ask yourself where the salesperson can get this information within your organization? I would not be surprised if no place could be found where this is readily available. Salespeople, aware of the need for such information, will thus have made up their ideas by themselves. Leaving salespeople alone in this important task, creates the risk of ending up with unsatisfied customers. Sales people might have formed wrong perceptions for themselves and despite good intentions will end up perpetuating their wrong perceptions to their prospects. The customer will thus end up with unmet expectations.

Preparing salespeople to add value to informed and self directed prospects will require new approaches for sales enablement. Teaching people what a product does, how it compares to competition etc. is relevant because salespeople are expected to know more if they want to gain credibility with their prospects .But it is not sufficient. Sales people also and maybe first need to understand what business outcome a customer can expect from buying a certain offering. I consider it a task of marketing to create this understanding.

Successful sales enablement will thus start with marketing expanding their focus and understanding themselves as a service provider to the sales force. After all they were instrumental, with their websites, lead generation and -nurturing systems, creating the new environment salespeople have to live in.