Marketing and Sales Best practices are not good enough!

We all strive to use “best practices,” but how did they get to be “best”?  Someone did something better than what was being done before.  So can’t best practices be “bested”?  Of course they can.

Robert Rose recently wrote in On-line Marketing, “Best Practices Produce Mediocre Results.”

His main point is right on, we need to go beyond what has worked, what we have always done, etc.  We need to extend our efforts to achieve more.  It is not such a far-fetched thought — marketers attempt to do it nearly every day by testing messages and offers to beat the “champion.” Isn’t the champion the best practice?   Then why do we continuously try to beat it?  Obviously we believe we can get better results so we keep trying.  The same should be considered of other best practices.

Deploying Today’s Marketing and Sales Best Practices

Consider how your marketing and sales organizations identify new opportunities for customer and market share growth.  Most companies use macro views of the market place, deploy marketing resources to use “best practices” to create awareness and generate leads from marketing activity.  Marketing then turns those leads over to sales to pursue.  Meanwhile, sales has assigned a representative to cover a “territory” and the salesperson begins executing the “best practices” sales methodology to identify, qualify, pursue and close the opportunity.

Beat the Best Practice Champion – Identify and Prioritize Opportunities and Deliver a Playbook

What if you could identify and prioritize the best possible new opportunities among your entire addressable universe of customers and prospects?

What if you knew, by product line, which customers and prospects were most likely to buy?

What if you knew, before attacking a new market, which accounts to align your resources to in order to achieve the biggest impact?

Is this challenging best practices?  I think so.

To begin, integrate your customer data and 3rd party data sources and apply predictive B2B marketing analytics.  Then align the identified opportunities to each salesperson’s territory, arming each of them with their “playbook” of prioritized opportunities, account contacts to speak with, sales messages and offers to communicate, etc.

Using this approach, some B2B companies have seen year-over-year market share growth of 30%, sales productivity increase 50%, and business attrition decrease 40%.

Do these results beat your marketing and sales best practices champion?

Resources:

http://adaptivemarketer.com/2010/04/best-practices-produce-mediocre-results/

About the Author:

Rick Volz is a Business-to-Business Practice Leader for SIGMA Marketing Group, responsible for the thought-leadership and business solutions in the B2B market. Follow Rick on  or connect with him on .

Tagged as: best practices, Sales Optimization