Susan Getgood

The most valuable tool for your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing is a clear understanding of the RESULTS. And it MUST be a connected system – you need to know which marketing programs delivered your sales and which ones flopped. It does you absolutely no good if the systems are disconnected. If your marketing team can tell you which programs delivered leads, but can’t connect to sales revenue and profitability, you do not have what you need. If your web marketing team can tell you how many visitors requested your free trial, but you can’t link the request to an eventual sale, or lost sale, you do not have what you need. If you have great sales reports that show the geographical spread of your sales, or user size or whatever other metric you like, but you don’t know the source of the lead, you do not have what you need. And quite frankly, many small to mid sized companies have exactly that. They don’t have what they need.

How does this happen? In my experience, and I don’t claim to have the only possible experience here, this is what happens.

In the early days of the company, it’s all about making those critical first sales. The company may not even have a marketing function, and if it does, odds are it is pretty tactical in the early days even if there is a strong marketing person on board. There is just too much to do.

Then one day somebody says, let’s put on a show. No seriously, Andy Hardy notwithstanding (if you don’t know who that is, ask your parent or grandparent, or look it up on the web, search word Mickey Rooney), pretty soon everyone realizes the company needs some sort of contact management system. So they go out and buy a decent contact manager like GoldMine or Act. So far so good right? WRONG.

In my opinion, this is where the hidden data mistake starts.

The system works pretty well, and sales people become more productive. Marketing is able to get some customer and prospect data out of the system, so they have a better idea of the lead flow. Everyone’s happy.

So, the company takes the fateful step. It decides to use the same database for customer support. But the database needs a few extra things, so the support needs are tacked onto the sales database. Sometimes using custom programming, and definitely stretching the capabilities of the contact management system. Soon enough the whole thing gets bloated with fields and keys and whatnot for every possible permutation of prospect and customer. Eventually, the system ends up meeting no one’s needs particularly well and definitely making everyone miserable.

If all this happened really quickly, there would be no harm done. You’d say, mistake made, let’s move on. Unfortunately, from beginning to the day the company realizes that all its data is stuck in an over-taxed contact manager typically takes a couple years. By which time so much operational data and corporate history is stored in the system, the thought of replacing it with something else is overwhelming. Even though no one is really getting what they need.

So what’s the alternative?

Here’s the scenario I’d like to see. The very minute someone says, let’s get a contact manager, step back and analyze your company’s current and future sales, marketing, support and operational data needs. Do the hard work of identifying the processes your business will need as it grows. If you can, make the investment in a CRM system that will meet your needs immediately. If you can’t make the strategic investment right away, put it in the plan. And do it as soon as you can find the cash.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Managing your relationships with them is too important to be left to chance. Or stuck in an outdated contact management system.

Next up: lead ratings, and how they both power, and empower, your sales and marketing.

Great article on Marketing Profs about lead nurturing —  Lead Nurturing: Ripening the Right Bananas, by Brian Carroll. Carroll discusses an approach to leads that I have long advocated: Suspects and prospects must be nurtured in marketing until they are ready for a sales person to close them. I truly believe every company should take this approach, from day one if possible, and having a cooperating sales and marketing team is what makes it really work.

The other two things that really  make lead nurturing hum are Lead Ratings and Metrics. More on that next week.

In my last few columns, I have talked a lot about blogging and its potential as a marketing and communications tool. For the next few weeks, I am going to turn to a much more “traditional” set of marketing topics, aimed mostly at small to mid size companies in their early stage/start-up, or spin-outs of larger companies with brand new, possibly revolutionary products.

The main theme of our discussion is how the marketing decisions you’ll make today define your future possibilities and will eventually drive, for good or ill, the decisions the company makes two … five… and if it is lucky, 10 years from now.

The positive abstract of this is: 10 marketing decisions you can make today, and make your future. The negative (think Ebenezer Scrooge) is: the 10 things you’ll wish you did two or three years from now. You decide 🙂

Our first topic: Integrated Sales and Marketing strategy focused on Sales Opportunities. Marketing is more than just generating leads and Sales is more than just getting a purchase order. Yet there is a tendency to reduce them to these functions, with marketing’s box at the front of the sales cycle, followed by some hand-off point, where it becomes a sales lead and thus the province of the Sales Department. Eventually no matter how close the two teams were when it was just one marketing guy and one sales gal, the two departments develop into fiefdoms with little or no MEANINGFUL communication about the task at hand. This dynamic is hard to change once it gets a stranglehold on your teams, so prevent it. How? Here’s my prescription

1. Make dead sure that Sales and Marketing are EQUAL functions in your organization, and that everybody supports this from the CEO on down. Yes, of course, in the early days, Sales will be more critical than the longer term view represented by Marketing. If you don’t get the sales, there is no long term 🙂

   However, even as the sales are rolling in, your brand is being defined and not simply by what YOU say and do – customers, prospects, the general public, etc. all influence the brand. So, don’t wait too long before you take charge of your brand’s future. That’s the Marketing job. 

   What happens if you don’t have balance? If the Sales perspective is the sole perspective, your business strategy becomes a series of reactive, 6-month sales plans. And the reverse, if you focus too much on brand and long term strategy, and not enough on sales, you probably won’t have as many sales. In the early days, this could mean the success or failure of your business.

   You need both functions, in balance.
   

2. Insist that your Sales head and your Marketing head work as a team to develop the business plan. Make certain that this does not end up with one function driving the plan and informing the other of what it intends. See warning above about lack of balance between the two functions. Develop an integrated sales and marketing plan with input from BOTH organizations, and not just at the top level.
   
3. Develop a mantra that informs everyone that Business Opportunities belong to and are the responsibility of EVERYONE in the company. Everyone is a lead generator, evangelist, sales person, customer service representative; it’s just that each of us has our specialties and specific day to-to responsibilities for which we are compensated.   
   
4. Resist resist resist the temptation: when business is good, and the orders and leads are flowing in, it is very easy to let the Sales Department degenerate into an order taking machine and to allow the Marketing Department to morph into a lead generation/sales support organization. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN. You need the maintain a high quality sales organization that is capable of feeding itself and closing business… even when it becomes harder as you move through the product lifecycle. You must have a marketing organization that is capable of thinking long term about the future needs of future and untapped markets as well as feeding the current machine.

I cannot guarantee that your business will be successful if you do this – there’s a lot more to it than just having a well oiled sales and marketing machine. However, I truly believe that you create a far stronger foundation for success with integrated and balanced sales and marketing teams that work as colleagues, instead of viewing each other as competitors.