Tools

SAAS Sessions: Aligning Marketing and Sales with Jeff Davis [Podcast]

SAAS Sessions: Aligning Marketing and Sales with Jeff Davis (click here to listen to podcast episode)

Jeff Davis, an international speaker and founder of JD2 Consulting Group, specializes in B2B sales and marketing alignment, pulling from more than 15 years of experience in sales, marketing, and business development.

Your Marketing and Sales team should be married and not have a one night stand
— Jeff Davis

He is like a marriage counselor where he’s counseling the marketing and sales team to have a great marriage and share a special bond.

In this episode, we talked about aligning your Sales and Marketing for maximum ROI.

We also discussed the reasons B2B companies are finding it difficult and costly to achieve sustainable revenue growth. What could be the missing piece of the puzzle?

Are you aligning your #marketing and #sales activities? If not, then you definitely should.

Also, I would love to know if you think Marketers and Salespeople should have a great marriage or not? 😁

The 5 Basic Layers of a Good Growth-Focused Revenue Tech Stack

With all the new B2B tech coming at companies today, it’s hard not to fall victim to the “shiny new objective” syndrome. It’s also sometimes even harder to push back on demands to “Fix it Now!” by not just throwing tech at it. The problem you run into is that implementing new tech is not addressing the real problem – people. I’ve said many times, alignment is not a tech issue, it’s a people issue. Thus, continuing to adopt new tech without addressing the people part of the problem is not a sustainable approach.

With that said, let’s talk about what types of tech are necessary to have a Revenue Stack (Sales + Marketing tech) that helps you sell more effectively by empowering the sales and marketing teams. I think its more important for us to focus on the categories of tools we need before diving into trying to determine the best vendor to use. Taking this approach allows the company to clearly understand where technology gaps exists. I think doing this type of tech audit before making purchasing decisions also will help to eliminate unforeseen duplication in technology which many times creates more confusion; making the selling process even more cumbersome.

Below is a great depiction of the current revenue stack landscape from Nancy Nardin. As you can see the options seems limitless and they are growing. This is what is causing the “shiny new object” syndrome many B2B companies are suffering from.

Full interactive version - https://smartsellingtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Nancy-Nardins-2017-SalesTech-Landscape-2.2-1.pdf — *Full interactive version –* *https://smartsellingtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Nancy-Nardins-2017-SalesTech-Landscape-2.2-1.pdf*

WHAT MAKES A GOOD REVENUE STACK?

I’ve had many conversations with experts in the field of sales and marketing tech and below are the categories that I’ve seen are necessary to have an effective Revenue Stack. My intent with this list to help sales and marketing leaders be thoughtful when proposing new technology to “fix” the alignment issue.

Data – Clean data is the basis of any stack as without it we make poor decisions on outdated and incorrect information. We must also take into account that on average 6.8 decision makers are involved in the decision process. Add the fact, that several members of that team my change roles or responsibilities within the sales cycle making it more difficult to create consensus. The more proactive the team can be at getting ahead of those changes, the better.
CRM – This system might be the most valuable tool that a company can use to conduct business if used properly. Customer relationships matter most and a CRM can help you keep track of those relationships as well as every touchpoint you have had with a customer. This helps paint a clear picture of what’s going on and also reveals opportunities that you may have otherwise over looked.
Marketing Automation – Beyond helping to save time and money, it’s been proven to increase revenue and ROI. In addition, it allows the marketing team to focus more on an effective strategy rather than ensuring repetitive tasks are completed on time.
Onboarding/Training – Bringing in new sales representatives can be expensive and the time it takes them to ramp up to full-productivity is a significant amount of lost revenue. It has also been shown that 87% of training content is forgotten within weeks. This demonstrates the need for ongoing, dynamic training. This can be achieved with tech-enabled on-boarding tools that not only allow sales reps to take advantage of on-demand training, but help them be able to reference back to things they make have forgotten to get them up and running faster and provide them with a tune-up when they need it – without the need for a formal training session and time out of the field.
Account-based Marketing (ABM) – ABM has proven over time to provide significant ROI because it enables collaboration across the organization to meet the unique goals of the client. In the past, due to cost and complexity, ABM was left to large enterprises to focus on a few highly-valuable accounts. Now with new marketing tech and tools, organizations of all sizes can take advantage of this highly effective strategy to personalize outreach to targeted accounts.

STOP BEFORE TALKING TO TECH VENDORS

There is a ton of new sales and marketing tech available. And, there is more coming! However, we have to stop before introducing new tech just because it exists. The more cost-effective method that will lead to better long-term outcomes is to take a step back and look at where the gaps exist in what we currently have and then find tech that helps us fill in those gaps. In addition, leaders must be cognizant of how to communicate with the sales and marketing team the reason the new tech is being introduce and how it empowers them to achieve their goals more efficiently or effectively.

Our friends over at Vendor Neutral have a free tool that short cuts your salestech selection process. You’ll get a customized report instantly, showing the technology to consider based on your unique needs. Powerful stuff. We encourage you to click here if you’re looking for a tool that can help you with your salestech buying decisions

AI Gives Sales and Marketing Leaders X-Ray Vision Into Pipeline Activity

There’s an old saying in geometry circles: every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. It’s true; all squares have the basic elements of a rectangle: four sides, four right angles. To be a square, though, all four sides must be of equal length; a rectangle only cares about equal length on its parallel sides.

What does this have to do with sales and marketing? All sales is marketing, but not all marketing is sales. When the two sides realize this point, it changes the fundamental nature of how sales and marketing work in a business.

In a B2B world, marketing effectively lays the groundwork for sales. It generates new leads into the system and works to establish the best conditions for sales to engage.

Sales, meanwhile, delivers the decisive step in the overall revenue generation process. Sales relates the company’s value proposition to the prospective buyers, handles objections, demonstrates the economic benefit and ultimately makes the final arrangements for the delivery of a product or service.

The two functions are inextricably linked, and yet are separate and distinct. Marketing’s failures are a direct handicap to sales, while sales’ failures make marketing’s efforts a poor allocation of time and resources.

What is Sales’ Contribution? What is Marketing’s Contribution?

Some sales seem to occur without the marketing team having made a single contribution. It can be said for instance that in general a deal that was sourced and closed by an account executive without any involvement of the marketing team, can be attributed to Sales.

Conversely, certain deals are signed when the majority of the value was created by the marketing team. A highly qualified opportunity can require very little effort from sales to close.

In this light, marketing contribution is the incremental revenue generated by marketing activities. It can be measured intuitively: what would total sales had been had there been no marketing activity at all?

Sales contribution, is the exact opposite: what would sales have been had there been no sales activity?

By recognizing these two sources of contribution, marketing and sales, business leaders can better understand the factors that make up a good utilization of marketing resources and the sales activities that lead to the highest revenue.

Marketing should effectively tell the sales force where, how and when a lead needs to be worked on so it has the best chance of success. This includes determining lead/product fit but also the interest level and the revenue potential of those leads. Marketing is effectively the gauge by which sales effectiveness is measured; if the leads are all poor quality, there’s a problem in lead generation, and the process needs to be revamped. If leads and opportunities are all of high quality and bookings are not growing, there’s a sales problem and the relevant processes, skills and activities need to be re-examined.

So, How Can AI Help?

With AI, sales leaders can have a 360-degree view of their entire revenue generation process and see the exact value created by lead generation, prospecting and sales activities.

From a lead perspective, AI can provide insight into several key attributes such as:

● The quality of a given lead, based on hundreds of different factors

● The precise dollar value of a lead, as opposed to a historical average

● The expected level of effort required to convert a lead into an actual opportunity

From a sales rep perspective, AI can also gauge the overall quality and contribution of the people involved; factors like work ethic, team mood, product knowledge and closing ability.

A 360-degree view can help you answer those difficult questions that can’t necessarily be solved with the human eye. Questions like:

● What is the true value generated by marketing activities?

● What is the true value generated by the sales development team?

● What is the true value generated by the AE team?

Screen Shot 2018-06-19 at 8.09.41 AM.png

When you know this, you can better optimize your sales and marketing resources, budgets, activities and give credit to the right team for the right reason. Then, you can drill down on the individual level and understand why some perform better than others.

We miss all of the shots we never take, after all, and having a handle on activity levels becomes an excellent gauge into determining if we’re really getting the most out of every minute in play. So while the sales department does have the ultimate outcome of the sales contribution in its hands, it can’t get very far without the marketing contribution. If sales departments aren’t presenting the value proposition correctly or handling objections to the lead’s satisfaction, then it really doesn’t matter how good a job marketing did finding leads; the sales department couldn’t make the final appeal.

Meanwhile, if the marketing contribution isn’t up to par, the sales contribution is immediately hampered, spending its time, effort and resources pursuing people for whom no amount of sales efforts will convince the lead there’s any value to the product or service offering. It’s like trying to sell bowling balls at a fisherman’s convention; sure, some of them may bowl, but why aren’t you selling fishing gear to people who obviously want fishing gear?

In Sales, Uncertainty is a Certainty

Even with the best numbers, calculations about the fit and interest of leads and opportunities are not enough. Calculations about lead potential have uncertainty built right into the name: potential. Yet as is often the case, management with facts in hand tend to produce better results than management without facts. Uncertainty cannot be removed from the system, but it can be addressed, managed and improved incrementally.

AI makes it possible to measure the incremental value generated by every link in the sales and marketing chain. By applying machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), businesses can gather numbers that reflect reality, enabling you to make the right adjustments and get your sales and marketing teams humming in tune.

Therefore, whether you’re in sales or in marketing, base your discussions over actual contribution in numbers, not on gut feelings. Learn what’s working in the sales and marketing process and what isn’t, so that the most effective changes can be made on all sides.

About the Author

Rob Käll is an accomplished entrepreneur with 3 Successful MM exits in 10 Years. His latest startup, Cien, gives sales leaders an immediate edge by using the power of AI to increase the productivity of their teams.

Automatically detecting problems, predicting outcomes and recommending the shortest path to success. A versatile leader that has served as Startup CEO, Corporate Exec and Technical Founder, Rob advocates a scientific approach to sales and marketing alignment. Connect with Rob on Linkedin and Twitter.

Low Conversion Rates? Dig Into Your Revenue Funnel Data For Insights

You’ve got plenty of leads—maybe too many, in fact. You’ve got plenty of potential sales calls and appointments. But when it comes to looking at the numbers—to comparing your conversions against the number of conversions you think you should have—then it becomes a different story.

Welcome to the sales funnel conundrum, when the potential doesn’t match the reality and you start to question what’s going on. Well, in answer to that: There could be a lot of things going on, and it could be that some of them relate to problems in your sales funnel.

The sales funnel is more often than not the place to start, and that’s because it’s a great way to pick apart your process and to find out what you’re doing and where customers are getting stuck. It has definable points, including top, middle, and bottom.

As I’ve stated before, to have a robust sales and marketing alignment strategy you must address three key pillars – DATA, PROCESS, and COMMUNICATION. The graphic below will help you understand what’s happening and how to do a deep dive into your sales process.

Encourage Customer Journeys and Improve the Middle of Your Funnel

Via Salesforce

How To Create a Single View of the Customer Across the Buyer’s Journey

There is no question that most b2b companies are sitting on an immense amount of underutilized customer data. This data is rich in its ability to help us understand our customers better and how they interact with us throughout their buying journey. Having this type of data is however not valuable until we are able to leverage it to create insights. Insights (not data) are what help us make smart and timely business decisions.

As DiscoverOrg so rightly shares in a recent article, there is a b2b “customer data tsunami” coming because of all the increased sales and marketing tech that companies are rapidly adopting. The true benefit of tech is not all the cool bells and whistles – it’s the data it provides. As these technologies help us to create a more seamless customer experience (CX), leaders must recognize the huge underlying opportunity that sits inside the massive amount of increased data points we will have about customers and their interactions with us. One major predictor of success for b2b companies moving forward will be their ability to leverage their customer sales and marketing data.

If we continue to look at data in silos we will continue to not allow ourselves to optimize the revenue generation process. Before investing in more sales or marketing data, we must first learn to leverage the immense amount of data we already have – together. Our ability to win business with the modern buyer is almost solely dependent on our customer data.

Let’s explore how sales and marketing leaders can begin the process of aligning their data to improve the revenue generation process.

“Too many organizations lack synergy in their sales and marketing efforts because they don’t have the data they need to set goals, measure results, and refine their approach. This starts with having one view of the customer but ends with having one view of the results of your strategy.

— Antwoine Flowers, Ph.D.

Define a Single Source of Truth

Is not uncommon for companies to have data stored in different tools owned by different teams. This can cause sales and marketing to have a substantially different view of what is happening in the business. The differing views on data overtime erodes trust between sales and marketing leaders who may feel their counterparts are making the data look how they need it to so they look good. The only way to start building a high-performing Revenue Engine that has a complete view of the buyer’s end-to-end journey is to start looking at a uniform set a data that is consistently being pulled from the same data sources.

Creating this single source of truth is not as easy as unifying and cleansing the data. It really is about making sense of all the different data sources so you are able to develop insights about your customers. One factor about unifying the data that can get complex fairly quickly is establishing a stable identifier across different data sources. You may have several different tools that use unique identifiers for customer interactions, but without a stable identifier, you cannot match your data together. This is where having a strong sales and marketing operations team member can come in very handy.

Some high-level steps to think about as you start the journey to creating a single view of the customer are:

Be sure to connect all your sources of customer data (i.e. email, CRM, web leads, etc.)
Determine a way to create unique and stable identifiers for people and company leads
Cleanse and standardize data to ensure it is reliable
Focus on creating actionable insights for both sales and marketing from your customer data

By investing the time and energy required to create a single view of the customer, leaders will enable sales and marketing to be able to work together better, create more personalized customer experiences, and develop a more efficient revenue generation process.

Focus on Metrics That Matter

Not all data is created equal. As most marketing teams are starting to realize, vanity metrics like clicks and likes are not directly linked to business outcomes. Thus, we must all focus on the metrics that show the highest correlation with converting buyers to customers. The first metric that we should always be focused on is revenue attainment. As calculating marketing ROI becomes more attainable, marketing leaders must take on the responsibility of having a direct impact on building customer pipeline.

Other metrics that are influenced by both sales and marketing and have a strong impact on revenue growth include:

End-to-End conversion rates
Sales cycle length
Average deal size
MQLs to opportunity ratio

By focusing on the same metrics that have the most impact on closing business, leaders can ensure team incentives are aligned and that we are laser focused on doing the things that have the most impact on the business.

Provide Formal, Regular Feedback on Marketing Campaign Results to Sales

Regular feedback on marketing campaigns is a must to ensure we stay agile as a Revenue Engine and can adjust when we see that things are not hitting the milestones that we expected. Not only should sales be included in the early stages of creating marketing campaigns but there should be regular updates to let them know the progress that is being made on our stated goals and objectives. This helps keep both sales and marketing accountable for their contributions to building pipeline and closing new business.

The Journey to a Single Source of Truth

Wrangling all your customer data can be a daunting task – especially if you are a leader that is not an expert on data. It requires working with someone or a vendor that has a strong understanding of how data works and how to make it work for you. Of the 3 Pillars of Alignment Transformation (Data, Process, and Communication), data is the most important as it affects every aspect of how we interact with buyers as they consider choosing us to resolve their business challenges. By Investing in creating a single source of truth you will easily put yourself ahead of your competitors.