Marketing and sales teams are the lifeblood of organizations, but they're frequently at odds with each other. The CEO either plays referee or tries to determine which function is more broken. The result is an all too familiar one: replace sales and marketing leadership. Unfortunately, that's often the wrong course of action to take.
I’d like to share a story about a company, let’s call it ABC. With about 50 employees, ABC develops construction tools to manage large capital projects like building hospitals and libraries. ABC's customers love the savings they get from using its products, and ABC feels it's doing the right stuff. It markets via a website, blog, webinars, email campaigns and press releases — its sales people do a lot of sales calls, too.
Even though ABC's sales team is making over 40 calls a day, the reps aren't getting to talk "live" to many people. Email and webinar campaigns are hit or miss. The prospects they do get into the pipeline often disengage during the sales cycle. Most CEOs consider this a classic case of marketing and sales failing. It's an instinctive reaction to make a change.
What has ABC’s CEO scratching his head? It's that disengaged prospects often come back six months to 12 months later ready to buy. They're armed with a specific set of questions, performance metrics and a price they’re willing to pay.
ABC’s experience is becoming the new normal. It illustrates how the way we conduct business is changing. Four statistics add some context around this social transformation that B-to-B companies are experiencing:
- Ninety-nine percent of buyers’ time is spent researching their intended purchase, whereas 1 percent of their time is actually spent making the purchase.
- Seventy-five percent of the process that B-to-B buyers go through to make a purchase is completed before they even consider talking to a salesperson.
- Less than 50 percent of B-to-B sales teams achieve quota because effectively engaging with qualified prospects is a major challenge.
- Only 3 percent of sales interactions are considered worthwhile by prospects.
If you want to grow, you have no choice but to redefine how you go to market. To help guide your transformation, here are six laws on how to market and sell in this social age:
1. Discover the invisible. With over 75 percent of the B-to-B buying cycle invisible to vendors, most companies mistakenly assume that the first contact is the beginning of the buying cycle. It's not.
- Action: Embark on an in-depth analysis of buyers’ journeys for each of your target markets.
2. Forget value propositions. Most value propositions are inside-out broadcasts of what a company thinks its value is. Buyers purchase outcomes, not hubris. Understand the desired outcome the buyer is looking for and you have your messaging.
- Action: Ditch messaging trees and change all company communications to be outcome oriented. The first law will tell you what the outcomes are.
3. Align outward. How buyers want to engage should define your company's processes, competencies, metrics and technology infrastructure.
- Action: Instead of worrying about organization charts, redefine every role in terms of how it should engage and enable buyers.
4. Abolish marketing and sales. The model of marketing driving mindshare to produce leads is dead. Buyers want a consistent lifetime experience and research has shown they value that more than the product they're buying.
- Action: Buyer expectations should dictate the sales model. Combine sales and marketing into a single team measured on enabling, advocating and building enduring relationships.
5. There are no customers, only buyers. When a company makes a purchase it hasn't changed, yet vendors insist on treating customers differently. In the social era, all customers are buyers, but not all buyers are customers.
- Action: Change your internal dialog around customers. Just because someone made a purchase doesn’t mean they'll keep buying. Treat them like you need to earn their business every day.
6. Value is a stream, not an event. Expectations of value extend beyond what's being purchased and mean different things to different buyers. Furthermore, that definition changes over time.
- Action: Determine how buyers define value over time, then align processes and deliverables to fulfill those expectations. The result is an army of customer evangelists.
Companies that embark on the buyer's journey redefine sales and marketing by aligning outward to their prospects’ and customers’ processes and expectations. The results earned make the business case an easy one — shorter sales cycles, increased pipeline velocity and decreased cost of sales.
Christine Crandell is president of New Business Strategies. She writes regularly about sales, marketing and social business issues, and is a blogger for Forbes.