Sales Dept Must Be Subordinate to the Marketing Function For Leveraged Performance


Sales Dept Must Be Subordinate to the Marketing Function For Leveraged Performance

by Gavriel Shaw

Let´s confess the crippling problem of today's B2B sales and marketing systems.

  • Sales typically engages prospects far too early in the sales cycle.
  • Marketing is under pressure to bring in NEW leads, whilst Sales is pressured to close asap.

This puts pressure on the middle of the sales pipeline process…

…That transitional phase where a lead upgrades to a suspect to a prospect to an opportunity… before the sale is finalised.

Who owns that part of the sales funnel? Sales or Marketing?

Well consider the ideal scenario…

Sales is so busy with final sales meetings — to close the deal, that they don’t have a spare moment to make many calls to prospects earlier in the pipeline…

And Marketing is doing a stellar job of not only bringing in ‘fresh blood’, but building desire, handling objections, and educating the prospect until they are frothing at the mouth begging to have a sales person visit to finalise the details of their particular implementation.

That’s how it SHOULD work.

That is the goal of strategic business development which requires a sales person to close, such as furniture showroom sales, or B2B service solutions.

But various conflicts get in the way, including:

  • Upper management pressure and their chronic misunderstanding of sales and marketing in today’s market place.
  • Sales people’s pride and ego to jump on anything that shows a hint of interest.
  • The lack of sufficient opportunities that have progressed far enough in the pipeline process.
  • Marketing focussing on new lead generation rather than throughput of hot opportunities (often due to being under resourced or pressured for ‘new leads’)

The first few steps towards achieving the ideal goal of Sales being used to close and Marketing being used to fill the pipeline with educated excited hot opportunities involves:

  • Aligning business strategy with marketing strategy
  • Subordinating the sales function to the marketing strategy
  • Understanding marketing as being far broader than ‘lead generation’
  • Restricting the salesforce so they are focused on late sales process closure meetings, rather than early cooler prospect calls.

Here is an edited letter from me to a previous client whilst reviewing their sales and marketing performance.

Morning Brenda,

[...]

For [company] to become a marketing-led business, there must be clarity on process and agreed business strategy — evolving from market insight…

…Including capabilities, brand strategy, customer focus, competitor insight, routes to market used by the competition, pricing strategy, value propositions, etc.

From that vantage point does the tactical marketing and sales activity become more effective and efficient.

I do not think any sales proposal should go out the door without marketing reviewing it.

I would personally not allow any proposal to be sent without pitching on all areas of [company’s areas of expertise], which would draw consultancy and service provisions across the entire [product portfolio].

Given the holistic nature of a strategic marketing function, a comprehensive sales pipeline process is an objective of the marketing function. And one that both Marketing and the Sales Team should be targeted and measured to meet.

I believe in this instance a core problem is that [the company] has not yet defined process for the [service matrix] elements, thus sales not knowing how to sell it as a complete package.

…Which again is something that should come via Marketing, which must therefore be more closely integrated with the entire pitch process to achieve comprehensive productisation.

From our conversation about sales being subordinate to marketing, I think this article gives a good overview.

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/marketing/insight.asp

The hierarchy being:

Corporate strategy > business strategy > marketing strategy > sales strategy.

Where sales is about sticking to the boundaries set by the agreed marketing strategy (based on market insight) which supports the overall business objectives.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that sales reports into marketing, but just that as a function, Sales is by nature more short sighted and tactical, and should therefore fit within the bounds of the broader marketing strategy.

So far this has not been achieved at [company].

Let’s review and explore options in our next conversation.

Learn Strategic Marketing.

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