Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all. I enjoyed - - PDF document

Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all. I enjoyed meeting several of you at last night’s reception. I’m the founder of a marketing agency and I’m also the host of The Marketing Book Podcast where each week I publish an interview with the author of a new marketing

• r sales book. I’ve been doing it for four and a half years, and last week I published

episode 226. 1

The podcast has exceeded 1 million downloads, has listeners in 150 countries and has been named by LinkedIn as one of “10 Podcasts That Will Make You A Better Marketer,” by Forbes as one of “11 Podcasts That Will Keep You In The Know.” The one thing I didn’t realize when I started the podcast that I wish someone had warned me about, which of course I didn’t realize, is that you actually have to read each book before each interview. The biggest trade off of course is that has really cut into my scotch drinking. So Hailey is a listener of the podcast and a while back she contacted me about joining you here for this meeting. It was one of the strangest conversations I ever had. She said she was from PSNI and I was really confused. 2

I had two questions: 1) why would the Police Service of North Ireland want me to speak to them and 2) why are they meeting in Arizona? But it didn’t stop there. 3

When I asked her what she wanted me to talk about she said “S&M.” Again, I asked for clarification and what she meant was sales and marketing, specifically the benefit of closer alignment of the two. Hailey, you were very patient and I really appreciate that. 4

As a listener to The Marketing Book Podcast Hailey was aware that I have featured a lot of books about sales, in part because the most successful marketers have a deep understanding of sales and that’s even more important now than three years ago. She also knows that the alignment of sales and marketing is one of my favorite topics and in part drives my selection of which books to feature on the show. 5

So are there any baseball fans here? What teams? Does anyone know who these two players are? [Mike Trout and Bryce Harper] Why are they significant? [they just signed the highest baseball contracts in history, $426 million and $330 million. Trout stayed with the Angels and Harper went from the Nationals to the Phillies] Why did they get such big contracts? [because they can help teams win] Why is being part of a winning team important? 6

Whether you work in sales or marketing, we all want to be on a winning team. We all want our companies to enjoy faster growth and greater profitability. We all want to be the sales or marketing professional that every CEO wants to hire (or can’t afford to lose). What are the benefits to you of being on a winning business team? [job security, higher pay, recognition/esteem, promotions, ownership possibilities, desirability from other companies, etc] 7

8

From a sales and marketing standpoint, the biggest problem is the changing way that buyers research and make their purchases. They want to do their own research and avoid interacting with the seller until as late as possible. And they don’t follow a linear, logical buying process. 9

When I was a kid and my dad wanted to buy a car, where was the first place he would go to get information? The car dealership. 10

Why did he have to go to the car dealership? This is what Daniel Pink in his book To Sell is Human refers to as “information asymmetry.” The buyer wanted information and the seller had it. And the seller used that information as leverage to guide (or strong arm) the buyer toward a purchase. We are now in an era of Information Symmetry 11

Fast forward to a couple of years ago when my wife wanted to buy a car – where was the absolute last place she went to get information? Where do you suppose she got her information? Your customers are no different. 12

Many of you may have heard of the landmark study a few years back from CEB/Gartner about how in a B2B buying situation, the buyers are AT MINIMUM 57% through their purchase process before first reaching out to the seller. Forrester puts that number as high as 90%. It varies by industry and product, of course. 13

In the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer by Debbie Qaqish two charts are included which show the transformation of the typical buying process as it relates to interacting with a sales person. 14

Here’s what it looked like when my dad was buying a car. 15

And here’s what it looked like when my wife was buying a car. 16

Jamie Shanks, author of SPEAR Selling: The ultimate Account-Based Sales guide for the modern digital sales professional states that ““Your buyer has evolved more in the last ten years than in the previous hundred years.” 17

And with less control from the salesperson, the customer’s journey has become increasingly erratic. Here’s how Forrester has expressed it. 18

So here’s the cold hard truth. There is no longer a clear handoff from marketing to sales. Marketing and sales must now work together throughout the entire customer life cycle. In the past, marketing was able to hand off a lead to sales who would, in essence, take the buyer across the finish line. 19

From a sales funnel standpoint, marketing and sales could divide and conquer the buyer journey. That’s no longer the case for reasons I outlined earlier. 20

Now, rather than a clean handoff, companies are having to take a more customer- focused approach (not that there’s anything wrong with that). This flywheel approach never ends either, because most customers can make repeat purchases and/or can announce to the world about their experience with your company. 21

And as it relates to this new buyer journey, in the book Smash The Funnel: The Cyclonic Buyer Journey – A New Map for Sustainable, Repeatable, Predictable Revenue Generation the authors Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman explain that the new buyer journey is a collection of eight cyclones, with the buyer going in and out of different cyclones, in different directions, while sometimes skipping entire cyclones. To better visualize your buyer’s journey, think of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. 22

The eight cyclones are:

• 1. Pre-awareness
• 2. Awareness
• 3. Education
• 4. Consideration
• 5. Evaluation
• 6. Rationalization
• 7. Decision
• 8. Ongoing Delivery

But – companies need to set the table in each cyclone for when their buyers do spin in and out of various cyclones. And for each cyclone, both sales and marketing have a role to play. 23

In this chart you can see the contrast from the earlier slide of marketing owning the top of the funnel and sales owning the bottom. Now it’s a mashup of activity for both teams that needs to be aligned around the customer. Is it worth it? Well, according to a study by SiriusDecision, companies that are able to better align their marketing and sales activities average 19% faster growth and 15% higher profits. 24

In many companies, divisions can exist between sales and marketing. For instance, sales people will complain about poor quality leads generated by

• marketing. Conversely, the marketing people will complain about Sales’ weak follow

up, if at all, of the leads. Sales sometimes thinks of marketing as irrelevant party planners. While marketing can view sales as lazy and incompetent. In a CEB/Gartner survey, sales executives’ top terms for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and perhaps worst of all, “irrelevant.” On the

• ther hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as “simple

minded,” “cowboys,” and flat out “incompetent.” Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative. 25

If you only read one book about aligning your company’s sales and marketing efforts, I recommend Aligned To Achieve: How To Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin. The co-authors were the head of marketing and sales respectively for a B2B software

• company. Both had worked at companies where sales and marketing were not

aligned and at companies where sales and marketing were aligned. The book outlines the journey both took together (as head of marketing and sales, respectively) to successfully align their departments and the business growth and profitability that ensued. Throughout the book, the co-authors stated “Sales can’t do it alone and marketing exists to make sales easier.” 26

One of the best analogies for the relationship between sales and marketing is in the book Shift: 19 Practical Business-Driven Ideas For An Executive In Charge of Marketing But Not Trained For The Task by Sean M. Doyle. 27

“To borrow a NASCAR analogy, the salesperson is the driver. The driver is only going to be as successful as the design of the car, the fuel, the mechanics, a study of the track, competition, tires, metallurgical design, hydration, quality components of parts and external tools bike tracks and refueling tanks, and even meteorological expertise– everything that goes into competitive racing. Marketers are the ones who assemble the team. Sales and marketing can't function without each other.” Welcome to Team Revenue 28

So how can you get sales and marketing on the same sheet of music? It all comes down to goals. Once you have an agreement on goals, the marketing pipeline and sales quota become two ends of the same stick. Here are five steps to achieving "Smarketing," where sales and marketing lay down arms, join forces and achieve greater revenue growth (and become co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize For Sales and Marketing Alignment): 29

30

Marketing and Sales need to agree on the characteristics of a sales ready lead. It will boil down to a combination of “fit” and “interest.” If there is a fit but low interest, marketing needs to nurture the lead. If there is a fit and interest, sales needs to follow up quickly. This is also where the agreement on a buyer persona is crucial. Sadly, only 45% of businesses have established a company-wide definition of a sales- ready lead, according to a survey by MarketingSherpa. 31

Closed-loop reporting. If Marketing is throwing leads to sales and doesn’t find out what happens to the leads, the system is broken. Two critical tools are needed to make this happen: Marketing automation software (e.g. HubSpot, Marketo) CRM (customer relationship management) software (e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot) By reporting in a closed loop, marketing is able to send more information to sales (such as additional lead intelligence), and sales is able to provide feedback and sales activity reports to marketing. Some of the things that marketing should be looking at via closed loop reporting include customers by marketing source and conversion assists. 32

Sort of like a marriage license, sales and marketing need to have a signed service level agreement (SLA). An SLA is a written definition of what marketing and sales agree to do for each other. For instance, marketing would agree to provide a specific number of quality leads within a given time in order for sales to reach their quota. Conversely, sales will agree to a certain speed and depth of lead follow up that makes business sense. 33

Marketing and sales need to have weekly meetings. At these meetings marketing should update sales on campaign activity and plans and product updates. If marketing and sales sit together at work, it boosts communication dramatically. Give it a try, you’ll be surprised how much it helps. 34

This goes back to Marketing and Sales bickering and finger pointing ("marketing's leads suck" and "sales isn't following up on the leads"). Instead, use data that is frequent, public and transparent. Marketing needs to have an always-on dashboard with website traffic and leads. It needs to be reviewed every day. Additionally, the leads should be tracked by source and by campaign. The number of marketing qualified leads should be tracked on the dashboard, too. Similarly, with closed loop reporting, all the sales activity should be visible and analyzed. 35

Getting sales and marketing aligned around increased revenue is not a dream. It is already happening at successful companies that understand that how people buy has changed dramatically which is in turn, changing the roles of sales and marketing and the relationship between the two. Start with these steps and your firm can be on the way to enjoying increased revenues. 36

I hope you found this presentation helpful. If you’re interested in keeping up with the latest ideas to help you succeed in the quickly-changing world of modern marketing and sales, go to your favorite podcast app on your smartphone like Apple Podcasts and subscribe for free to The Marketing Book Podcast. And if I can recommend any marketing or sales books or other resources for whatever situation you find yourself in, just connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat and I’ll try to get you pointed in the right direction. 37