After reading my previous post, some of you may be wondering how in the world you will ever get anybody from another department to agree that marketing is their job too. I want to discuss first and foremost how to accomplish the best collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Marketing and sales stand to gain the most from working with each other. As a marketer, you are responsible for lead generation; in many organizations, that’s where the responsibility of marketing ends and sales takes over. There is, however, a great deal more that marketing can do to help along the sales process, to collect data regarding lead quality and sales quality, and to maximize ROI (yes, in the end every single suggestion comes down to a way maximize ROI).

As a matter of fact, the most successful organizations are the ones where marketing plays a dual role in terms of its relationship to sales: support and evaluation. While it may seem partially contradictory to assign the role of support and evaluation of a certain arm of a business to the same other limb, it actually makes perfect sense. If your job is to support and evaluate a process or organization, you have two distinct benefits working in your favor:

1. Since you, as marketing, are playing a supporting role for the sales team, you will be intimately familiar with the needs, problems, strengths, and weaknesses of the latter. This will put you in a better position to supply the sorts of materials and resources the sales team needs, as well as to evaluate their performance.
2. Since your goal is to support sales activities, you will be self-evaluating when you evaluate the performance of the sales team. Exercises in self-evaluation are essential to improvement.

On a very general level, the goals of integrating sales and marketing activities can be described as follows:

• Improve lead qualification, and therefore forecasting abilities
• Allow marketing to find out in close-to-real-time what problems and objectives customers are facing. Sales staff often work onsite with customers and have the best visibility into customer problems, for example how a new regulation is affecting a customer, or what product improvement would make your product go from useful to essential in the customer’s eyes. This should be one of your main strategies for creating on-target value propositions, and adjusting those value propositions as customer needs change.
• Allow sales staff to become an efficient mouthpiece for the company’s marketing strategy; make sure sales reflects the message you are trying to send as a marketer
• Allow marketing to evaluate their campaigns, processes, and sales efficiency.

Word to the wise, giving your sales team a very clear and complete understanding of why you are collecting such data is essential. Explain that this data will help take the burden of forecasting off the sales team in large part, and that rather than a way of “keeping tabs” on them, this is a way for the marketing department to evaluate itself and the status of profit expectations company-wide.

Read More…

• Back to Basics Marketing
• Marketing as Company Wide Responsibility
• You Are Here Mobilization: Reaching Outside the Marketing Department
• Advanced Lead Qualification: Sales and Marketing Work Together
• Sales’ Feedback into Marketing: Profiling Prospects and Their Problems
• “Inside Marketing”: Marketing to Your Own Sales Organization
• Developing Unique, Customer-Focused Value Propositions
• How to Train an Entry-Level Marketing Employee
• When Return on Investment Doesn’t Paint a Full Picture
• Defining and Presenting Value Propositions in a Competitive Market
• Logos and Promotional Product Designs for “Difficult” Subjects
• Defining and Refining Value Propositions for Luxury Items
• Evaluating Return-On-Investment (ROI) for Tradeshow Activities
• Management Mistake in Small Business: No Investment during Trying Times

Today I would like to focus on the first rule of robust, healthy marketing strategies and campaigns: marketing is a company-wide responsibility and process. Too often, marketing is relegated to one department, and that department gets demands thrown at it left and right. People demand new collateral constantly, and everybody outside the marketing department has an urgent request for the marketing folks. Why does this happen? A few reasons:

• More often than not, the people in the marketing department are not the most knowledgeable people in the company when it comes to the product. Not to say that the marketing department should not be deeply knowledgeable about the product—it should—but there is no way your marketing communications specialist will know as much about a product as the people in R&D who designed it. Those people in R&D who hold the greatest wealth of knowledge often consider marketing, or interfacing with marketing, or doing anything for marketing as not part of their job or simply as a nuisance. So, when the marketing communications specialist does her best job to pull together a product brochure, she often lacks the input of the person who knows the most. This is problematic because it can lead to displeasure amongst the non-marketing staff upon reading marketing material, forcing rewrites and making the job of the people in marketing a great deal harder; in technical industries, the problem extends out to the tech-savvy customer who recognizes fluff or lack of technical clarity in a brochure when she sees it.
• In many cases, the marketing department is not directly in touch with the most current or pressing customer needs or expectations, so sales teams rarely get what they need from marketing on the first try. Making both  the rest of the company and the customer happy means deeply involving your sales team in the company’s marketing strategy; they are the ones that can best tell you what value proposition will hit home with the customer.
• Sometimes, marketing staff work off specs and internal product descriptions to create collateral. If marketing staff don’t get hands-on experience with the product, the collateral may not accurately reflect the reality of the product, or might miss something that really makes the product a stand-out.
• In certain cases, marketing staff lack a big-picture view of what the company goals are, and perhaps of what a company’s long-term strategy entails. This can be particularly true in a company that has many divisions or a company that undergoes regular mergers or acquisitions. Involving business development staff or other staff responsible for planting the seeds of long-term growth is essential to good marketing practices, and keeps you ahead of the curve.

By involving all parts of an organization directly in marketing tasks, the best ROI on marketing collateral is achieved. Getting the best version of a value proposition, the most precise information regarding product features or capabilities, and the message most in line with long-term strategies and recent developments will increase the effectiveness of all collateral. I will discuss in detail how to get buy-in and participation from various parts of your organization for marketing tasks in future posts, starting with sales.

Read More…

• Back to Basics Marketing
• You Are Here Marketing as Company Wide Responsibility
• Mobilization: Reaching Outside the Marketing Department
• Advanced Lead Qualification: Sales and Marketing Work Together
• Sales’ Feedback into Marketing: Profiling Prospects and Their Problems
• “Inside Marketing”: Marketing to Your Own Sales Organization
• Developing Unique, Customer-Focused Value Propositions
• How to Train an Entry-Level Marketing Employee
• When Return on Investment Doesn’t Paint a Full Picture
• Defining and Presenting Value Propositions in a Competitive Market
• Logos and Promotional Product Designs for “Difficult” Subjects
• Defining and Refining Value Propositions for Luxury Items
• Evaluating Return-On-Investment (ROI) for Tradeshow Activities
• Management Mistake in Small Business: No Investment during Trying Times