Sales & marketing alignment

A recent Hubspot blog highlighted the extent of the non-alignment between sales & marketing efforts:

According to a Corporate Executive Board study, 87% of the terms Sales and Marketing use to describe each other are negative. Sales calls Marketing arts-and-crafts and irrelevant, and Marketing calls Sales simple-minded and incompetent. Don't you think it's high time we stopped all this childish name-calling?

Now CMFG is made up of marketing specialists but even we have to put our hands up and say often in the companies we work for, it is as much the marketing team not understanding the selling process as the sales team not understanding the buying process.

Huthwaite shows us though that the selling process and the buying process are essentially the same thing, so if both sides are doing the job properly, then everything should be aligned, but they rarely are. The answer is a clear Service level Agreement SLA between the two teams that bring together the long and short term objectives of both parties. More importantly it ensures the hard stuff is done right by both sides because it is agreed in advance. Sales follows up on the leads provided diligently and marketing is clear and transparent the extent to which those leads are “warm” Shared hard objectives at the top is often the best way to kick this off.

Who takes the marketing decisions?

Jeremy Lee in his excellent recent article in Campaign really let fly at the Cabinet Office’s “dead hand of the civil-service” involvement in the creation of a new ad agency roster. It is a must read for any agency thinking of tendering not only for central government work but for local government work as well  http://tinyurl.com/bmdsgqj

CMFG has had similar experiences in the past, to the point that an invitation to pitch for a public sector tender is more often refused than accepted. Past gripes on previous tenders have included; reading an 80 page brief and not being able to establish what the objective of the brief was, presenting to a room of 10 people and then being informed that none of the decision makers involved were actually present, having to explain that actually most agency costs are time based not print based, being questioned by a team where no individual had a marketing background and my personal favourite, being informed that we hadn't won a pitch due to a factor that hadn’t been mentioned in the brief or face to face meetings up to that point.

It’s part of a bigger issue that CMFG sees where unqualified individuals are taking major marketing related decisions. IT experts make the decision on IT systems, finance experts take finance decisions and marketing professionals should have the final say in marketing procurement process.

Video is a key part of content

Video is having its moment. Rapidly falling production costs and increasing acceptance of online video in everyday life means it has reached a tipping point. And that means we are likely to see it become a main content format for B2B in 2013. It isn’t going to be a uniform adoption across all sectors but for businesses with complex products or services or products where a demonstration really helps to sell, video just makes sense.

Any B2B marketing agency who knows what they are doing is constantly looking at ways to effectively engage with prospects during the early stages of the buying cycle. In these phases, the prospect is unlikely to be actively considering options around actual purchase so their attention has to be earned. This often means looking to provide information of immediate value to the prospect, normally around their industry sector or their skill area. They’re short of time and you have plenty to say and you need to make it interesting, so video is a natural solution.

If video isn’t already a part of your lead nurturing process, it might be time to ask your marketing agency why not.

A lead generation SLA?

HubSpot recently argued in a paper titled “The complete guide to unifying your sales & marketing efforts” that there should in fact within companies be a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the sales and marketing department. Though initially this sounds like a throwaway comment by the author, the more this idea is considered the more sense it makes.

Where we see step-change success with our clients, is where there is real transparency and cooperation between the sales and marketing teams with both focussed on the same end game. Though this success is often forged as much by the personalities of the individuals involved as the working processes within the business.  It’s not that each sides knows the others job inside out but that they both value each other’s contribution and both have a shared understanding of the overall lead nurturing process. That shared understanding of the lead nurturing process means they share a common valuation of the leads they are developing, a common time scale and most importantly a shared process to nurture the lead towards the sale.

So possibly B2B marketing agencies when looking at developing customer acquisition campaigns should look to focus as much effort on ensuring an SLA is in place between the sales and marketing teams, as they do in developing compelling creative.

Marketing automation, will it be a success?

Ten to fifteen ago, a new panacea to all B2B marketers’ problems was sweeping the country. It was “CRM Systems”. You couldn’t get through a meeting without a Marketing Director letting you know it was going to change everything within their business. Except it didn’t. Gartner put the failure rate of these multi-million pound endeavours at a modest 50% while Butler Group assessed failure rates at around 70%. With hindsight there were a number of reasons for this incredibly high failure rate but one that stood out was the lack of customer focus most of them had. They were often led by the CIO and seen as extensions of internal enterprise systems, the benefit to the customer or the marketing effectiveness was hardly discussed.

Fast forward to the present day and we are now hearing about the unstoppable progress of marketing automation. Will it work for B2B companies? Will it answer all their demand generation requirements? Well probably, if it is done right. The key to success isn’t assessing what the automation solution can do and implementing that regardless. It’s about focussing on how it will help marketing deepen relationships and nurture leads and only implementing automation when it is clearly providing a benefit to the customer or prospect. If marketing leads the implementation of marketing automation within the business then there is a high chance of success, if it is led from somewhere else within the business, B2B marketing departments could have another crushing disappointment on their hands.