Plan Your Company's Sales & Marketing for 2017 and Beyond

Editor's Notes

1. For a B2B marketer, you can break out growth as the following. Keeping this in mind, can you see how crucial marketing activities are to sales success & ultimately to moving the needle on growth? In today’s world you cannot build a world class remarkable business without a growth strategy that includes empowering & equipping marketers on your team to get the job done. This relationship between sales and marketing is the KEY to scale & predictable growth. Business leaders today being tasked with producing high growth
2. The reality of today’s world is that strong marketing & sales alignment makes a material impact for businesses that harness it’s power.
3. First, let’s talk about how we got here in the first place. I’m going to take you back to 1965: Sonny & Cher release ‘I got you Babe,’ it’s the height of the Beatles Mania in America and Mary Poppins won 5 oscars. The internet didn’t exist… What was going on in marketing & sales? Newspapers, billboards, radio, and even direct mail ruled the scene.
4. Who has heard of Blue Ribbon Sports This is a letter from a sporting goods company in Oregon to a high school running coach. Blue Ribbon sports. The note is written to a prospective buyer of shoes, which Blue Ribbon have a specialty in. The marketing in this letter is pretty flawless: [Introspective opening] Capture readers attention [Social Positioning] Two famous marathon runners [Testimonials] Pretty great testimonial at the end Amazing closing line – You are no longer uninformed This letter was written by a guy named Phil Knight and Blue Ribbon sports was a small shoe company that would grow up to become Nike. This letter is a favorite of HubSpot’s. If you came to visit our office, you would see it written across a lot of our whiteboards. It’s because Phil faced the same challenge that all of us marketers face, shrinking the pool of people who are uninformed about what our company does, the problem we solve, the need we address. As modern marketers, however, the medium has changed by which we shrink that pool. Content creation, social media, email marketing, lead nurturing, even our websites are all examples of how we use inbound tactics to reduce the amount of uninformed people that exist. Like Phil we seek to target the right audience and educate them. Does anyone know what Blue Ribbon Sports became? Just an 8 billion dollar company named Nike, and I would say, they got there largely by creating and distributing powerful content.
5. Today Nike is a $30 billion dollar company and I would say they got there largely by creating and distributing powerful content. Nike was pioneers in their approach to marketing. Here for example, we have a “jogging” booklet. It was so powerful so valuable that it quite literally introduced the word “jogging” to America. This booklet didn’t specifically reference the Nike shoe ONCE. This is an incredibly powerful example of great content. So, even back in 1965 content-focused tactics worked. And, of course, tactics like this paved the way for another word to be introduced decades later… INBOUND.
6. Now, let’s come back to 2017. The world is a very different place… The tactics we have in our tool box have changed quite a bit since Phil’s days. We now have tools and methods at our disposal that would have made Phil Knight the marketer, who walked around track meets handing out letters, salivate. Social media marketing, blog, search, smart content, automation, and email. We have worls more leverage worlds more power than Phil and as a result we’re being asked to do more than just marketing.
7. When we think about reverse engineering that growth, these are the three most common issues that naturally affect growth.
8. In today’s world, buyers are getting really good at blocking marketers out.
9. Where marketers were previously engaged in an inherently interruptive playbook one that relied on cold calling, outbound interactions, spam, etc. We’ve shifted to a playbook that is more focused on attraction. Where we use channels like blogging, social media, etc. to create value for our potential buyers so they make the decision to engage with us.
10. Adopting inbound and focusing on these efforts can lead to enormous success.
11. Marketers have never been in so much control over their funnel. The fact that 60% of the sales cycle is over BEFORE a prospect talks to your salesperson proves the fact that marketers have a huge responsibility over the success of a company.
12. Remember that with 3.5 billion google searches a DAY online, your content that you create is an opportunity to get FOUND online by your target market searching for answers to their problems. Therefore, businesses need to think through how do I create content assets that provides value to my buyer persona and in turn provides value to my company by resulting in lead generation?
13. Trend lines for businesses that do Inbound is always the same.
14. The second main issue here is not having enough conversions
15. As a business we are always looking for more: more traffic, more leads, more customers, we never seem to be able to grow these metrics fast enough or big enough. When we think about our plan of attack often times we think of the entire crowd, the entire audience as one. One marketing experience for our entire audience …
16. The truth is that each of the prospective buyers we are targeting want to have their own experience and want their interaction with their brand to reflect their individuality in experience
17. So we’ve covered the first two challenges, now let’s address revenue.
18. So, we’ve covered the way that people need to be marketed to has changed and that’s great but that’s not the end of the buyer’s journey. At this point, the buyer still has all the power. This likely isn’t news to any of you as we’re all modern *buyers*
19. But, a legacy sales process is centered around the way that people sell rather than the way that people buy.
20. But more of the same emails, calls, doesn’t equate to better results. You can’t just automate bad sales & marketing.
21. We’ve discussed how buyer’s do not want to feel like they are part of a crowd. They don’t want to be just another name on the list.
22. The real power in all of this is the power that you get from combining sales & marketing Talk about why sales & marketing aren’t always aligned
23. I know what you’re thinking - all sales reps are Assholes, we’re money motivated, we only care about ourselves, we don’t listen, don’t follow rules, never wait for our turn to talk.
24. If you ask a sales rep what they are making money for, more often than not they won’t reply “because I love money.” Sales reps typically have a goal in mind, maybe they are saving up to buy a new condo, to provide for a family, to plan for their wedding. They have a greater purpose, for the community, for helping others, for providing for those who need it
25. As a sales rep, you might think marketers are sitting around all day doing arts & crafts. They’re just writing pretty words and copy, design and graphics, doing things without REAL bottom line metrics it seems disposable they’re giving out gold starts for good work AWESOME work amazing job great pitch you’re a rockstar.
26. But marketers are MUCH more than that.. We’re data scientists! We care deeply about the bottom line of the business ($$$) we just reverse engineer the machine to understand the metrics we need to hit in order to enable sales to hit their revenue targets!
27. When it comes down to it, we’re suffering from a really bad case of MISCOMMUNICATION and MISCONCEPTION about one another. We *think* isn’t on our side, that they don’t understand our goals and that they don’t see the business the same way don’t look a the business the same way as the other team.
28. This miscommunication can look a little bit like this… Anyone ever hear a sales rep talk like this?
29. Blink once if anyone ever feel this way … or ever said something to this effect? It’s common that marketers feel like they’ve provided sales with a BUNCH of leads but that sales doesn’t work their way through those leads quickly enough to see the results they want.
30. The reality is that having strong marketing & sales alignment has a material impact for businesses that harness its power. Source: Aberdeen group did some research
31. Companies that ignore this evolutionary necessity are hurting themselves. 4% may not seem like a lot but it becomes detrimental when your competitors ARE doing it and increasing their revenue by 20%. Essentially, taking money away from YOU. So the question really becomes how do we align ourselves?
32. The answer is sales and marketing alignment. It’s both the sales and marketing teams working together and being happy about it.
33. So we’ve covered the first two challenges, now let’s address revenue.
34. More so than just talking often, having communication and a feedback loop we need to establish some definitions and some shared language.
35. A lot of salespeople complain about leads because there is no clear definition of what a lead is or they complain about quality of those leads Most companies don’t even agree on what the word “lead” actually “means” is this a site visitor, an email address, someone who has expressed interest in speaking with your team? All leads are not created equal so let’s define them Visitors / Prospects: someone who has come to your site, still hasn’t given you any info/ convertd Leads / Inquiries = they’ve filled out at least a short form name and email they exist in your database MQLs: leads that are deemed worthy to hand off to sales = these people have raised their hand and taken some action (this you NEED to discuss with sales team) that deems them worthy of being handed off to sales - Marketing materials have qualified them as such SAL or SQL: Sales has qualified these people are being worthy of having an actual conversation
36. Once we define those terms, we need to agree upon / make a commitment from both teams to each other. There are plenty of companies where it only goes one way - marketing commits to drive x amount of leads but sales makes no commitment back. Or, sales commits to sales leadership to follow up with leads in X amount of time without commitment of a certain quality of leads from marketing The key here is there needs to be a bi-directional commitment where both parties have agreed upon things and had conversations
37. Once we define those terms, we need to agree upon / make a commitment from both teams to each other There are penty of companies where it only goes one way … Marketing commits to drive X amount of leads, but sales makes no commitment back. Or sales commits to sales leadership to follow up with leads in X amount of time without a commitment of a certain quality of leads from marketing The key is that it needs to be bi directional commitment where both parties have agreed upon things and have had conversations
38. Arrow changed to infinity loop More importantly, though, this is NOT set it and forget it this is ongoing and evolving. Teams may decide on a certain number of leads to deliver or follow up on and then find the team has enough bandwidth for a higher commitment or that their buyers are becoming more educated and sales cycles is shorter so sales can follow up with more leads etc, etc.
39. Before sales or marketing makes any commitments to each other, leadership MUST dictate the copmanies revenue goals and from there determine the # of customers needed to generate the $$$. I.e. $100k → 10 customers. Sales closes rate 50% → 20 leads What will sales get to and when this is an agreement that benefits both sides - sales wins more deals if they follow up faster, marketing gets their leads worked
40. Based on the # of customers needed to close and the average lead to customer close rate, sales knows how many leads they need to generate Now the question may be - are these just any leads we need to generate or leads of a certain quality? $100k in revenue = 10 customers = how many leads do we need to hit that? Biz goal → Sales Goal → Marketing Goal
41. Now that we’ve defined what the sales team needs to be responsible for, what the marketing team needs to be responsible for we need to set up some monthly tracking. I recommend monthly because it gives you a short timeframe to hold yourself accountable
42. This graph shows how long it took sales to follow up with leads Remember that the goal here is to follow up with these leads ASAP so marketing has a right to ask what happened to the leads that didn’t get followed up with? How can we work together to ENABLE sales to follow up as fast and efficiently as possible?