Rick Volz
On her Sales Ops Blog, Marci Reynolds recently summarized the results of Miller-Heiman’s Sales Best Practices Study. She highlighted four findings that differentiated world class sales organizations from “average” sales organizations.
1. Alignment: In world class sales organizations, the selling business activities and metrics were clearly aligned with the business goals and toward achieving revenue objectives. They focused their selling resources on the customers and prospects that had the highest likelihood of converting. World class sales organizations did not panic or implement excessive discounting strategies.
2. Executive Engagement: In 94% of world class sales organizations, senior executives were actively involved in the execution of the sales strategy. They often engaged directly with senior executives at their clients’ locations, to assist and support the sales process. This tactic helped strengthen customer relationships and increased the executives’ understanding of customer needs.
3. Sales Manager Coaching: Managers in world class sales organizations, spend significantly more time coaching their team members. They also identified the unique practices of their top salespeople and shared these best practices with all team members.
4. Customer Focused: 97% of world class sales organizations have intimate knowledge of why their customers buy from them and 90% have a solid understanding of their customers’ needs. They leverage this information to adapt and align their selling strategies and activities.
My question is, “Where is marketing in enabling such a world class sales organization?” Consider:
- Alignment: Definitions and metrics for defining how to measure the contributions of marketing need to be in place and communicated throughout the organization. Marketing can play a significant role in demand creation, market place opportunity identification and prioritization, territory planning, product development, etc. Marketing’s responsibilities should be in line with what is expected of it from sales and management.
- Executive Engagement: The Chief Marketing Officer should play a vital role in developing a growth engine for the company. With a rich data capability, most accountable CMOs are stepping up to deliver intelligence at the front-end and the back-end of the sales process.
- Manager Coaching: Marketing should spend more time engaged in various aspects of the business to insure that it is providing the capabilities to support the world class sales organization. From traditional marketing functions of awareness marketing, leader generation and nurturing, to sales planning and product development — marketing should be communicating with and contributing to other organization functions.
- Customer Focused: A marketing organization not focused on the customer would seem to be an oxymoron. Customer focused is the very essence of what a marketing organization should be — understanding customers, communicating with customers, promoting customers, etc.
“Sales and Marketing” are often coined together in phrases and discussions, yet too often there is a disconnect with the value that marketing can and should provide to sales. Let’s get on the same page; maybe it starts with the elements that make up a world class sales AND marketing organization.
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 .
{ 1 trackback }