Direct Marketing and Sales: Part of One Process

In Sales 2.0 companies, marketing and sales are seamlessly interconnected and part of the same process.  In the mid-1980’s, I recruited a talented former sales-executive-turned-direct-marketing expert into OracleDirect, the telephone and Internet sales division of Oracle Corporation to help us generate a steady stream of qualified leads.   This guru, Howard Sewell, went on to build an award-winning, full-service direct marketing agency called Connect Direct, Inc. that helps technology and other B2B companies develop and execute demand generation programs.  Howard is also a great writer and my blogging mentor. Check out his latest blog post on Inside Sales Effectiveness, featuring an interview with Phone Works President, Sally Duby. Howard’s blog, Direct Connections, is full of great ideas and is fun to read.  For example, you can learn (and laugh) a lot when Howard reviews actual demand generation campaigns and skewers them – ahem, I mean, offers corrective criticism.

Avoiding the Blame Game Between Sales and Marketing

Recently, I attended a presentation by newScale on “Getting Sales & Marketing to Work Together”, organized by the Business Marketing Association of Northern California (BMA). I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic in the context of writing a book on Sales 2.0, to be published by John Wiley & Sons this December, which explores the evolution of the sales function as customer requirements and economic conditions change and the old way of selling becomes less effective.  Sales and marketing alignment is one of the fundamental prerequisites of achieving Sales 2.0 success.

What struck me right away about the presentation? newScale’s EVP and Head of Sales, David Satterwhite, and VP of Marketing, Mark Hamilton presented the material together.  Their partnership commitment is so strong that they not only co-develop integrated programs and practices, but also show up and explain them to audiences as a team.   This was a true demonstration of these executives’ dedication to collaboration, elusive in many a company, which earned them a 2008 Second Annual Return on Integration (ROI) award for sales and marketing excellence from Sirius Decisions.

In their presentation, “Building and Profiting from Sales and Marketing Alignment”, David and Mark discussed why alignment is so important yet so difficult and then emphasized how they make it work at newScale.

David Satterwhite and Mark Hamilton, sales and marketing executives at newScale, are shining examples of sales and marketing communication and collaboration at the top level.

• They make it a priority.
  Both believe alignment has a critically positive impact on both top and bottom line results and frees them to focus on making their numbers.  They also stressed that it is a prerequisite to a healthy and productive company culture.
  David and Mark maintain their commitment to alignment by considering each other members of their management teams, attending the others’ management meetings, and holding weekly one-on-one meetings or phone calls.  They treat the annual marketing plan as a customer proposal, with sales being the customer, and share staffing and headcount planning.
• They develop shared rules of the road.
  This includes assuming a positive rather than adversarial intent on the part of the other department, which they model at the highest level, and recognizing that they have a shared ultimate metric of success – revenue growth – on which compensation in both sales and marketing is based.
  David underlined the importance of upbeat psychology in business as well as personal relationships.  By coaching his sales team to give marketing staff the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong and helping them resolve conflicts through trust, he avoids hours of management “therapy” and keeps his group focused on sales effectiveness and efficiency.
• They leverage each other’s strengths.
  David contributes his sales instincts for what produces revenue, understands what motivates his customers to buy and his sales team to sell and has highly-developed skills negotiating and winning deals. Mark is expert at operations, systems, and processes, distilling and analyzing complex concepts, seeding and growing markets.
• They collaborate on designing and implementing sales tools and technologies.
  Price lists, closed loop lead processes, weekly sales tips, win/loss programs, and continual surveys of marketing program effectiveness are some of the tools that have passed the sales “sniff test”.  Because they are designed by both sales and marketing, they actually get used.
  Mark described how difficult it typically is to get sales people to report on lost deals.  Sales people like to celebrate successes, not dwell on failures.  By revealing deals not won, sales people may feel that they are bringing attention to their weaknesses in sales process or skills. However, when Mark’s group started uncovering sales opportunities by calling “lost” customers who were not happy with their chosen solution and delivering newly qualified leads, he won the sales group over.
  Mark also recognized an opportunity to improve lead qualification and pipeline building using products from Genius.com, but he wouldn’t dream of signing up to try to them without running the idea by the manager of David’s Deal Development team.   Genius’s products truly support a Sales 2.0 collaboration between marketing and sales by allowing reps in both departments to track and act on important data on potential customers (e.g., who is responding to e-mail messages, what web pages are they looking at right now and for how long).  By including the sales team in the evaluation and decision-making process, Mark succeeded in bringing a valuable sales tool into the company that is enthusiastically embraced by the lead qualifiers.

How well do sales and marketing align in your company? Tell us what works (or what doesn’t work) for you!

For more information on getting sales and marketing to work together, download a free copy of the Phone Works article on Marketing and Sales Interdependency.