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sales and marketing
“Do the right thing before figuring out how to do it right.” – Shane Jackson
You can know all the techniques for fishing, but be on a lake with no fish. You can know all the approaches to marketing or sales success, but not be focusing on a market that is big enough or a customer problem that is not solved in some other way.
In order to build alignment between sales and marketing, the first step is aligning the leaders of these functions. And alignment takes communication and compromise towards a shared vision. This can be a challenge to achieve in the best-run organizations and even more challenging when the culture or norms of the groups have caused friction and fractions.
Jonathan Raymond, author of Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For and founder of the consulting firm, Refound, has a few lessons to share.
“Between managers and their employees, there is an implied agreement that the manager will give feedback. That same agreement does not necessarily exist between peers in an organization,” he began. “Either it is the cultural norm of the company, which is rare, or that trust has to be built.” Here are six ways to build relationships with other managers or executives across your company.
“You could go to the co-manager and say ‘we work together a lot and as cross-functional teams we share resources. You see me and my team clearly and probably have feedback and I’d like to hear it,’” Raymond suggested. If there is a specific project or initiative on which you could use feedback, you could use this as a starting place, but don’t stop there. Offer to provide your own insights.
You could continue by saying “Similarly, I see things from time to time and could provide you insights. Can we support each other in this?” Raymond offered that “If the answer is ‘yes,’ then when the time comes you can mention the agreement by saying ‘remember when we talked about giving each other feedback?’” This agreement helps you create space for feedback. “Like so much of management,” Raymond continued, “much is accomplished in the set-up, prep, and planning. Establishing ground rules and shared expectations are is the key.”
“If the relationship has been damaged and needs to be repaired before cultural listening and feedback can occur, you need to reset the relationship,” said Raymond. Perhaps there are frayed emotions or hurt feelings. Perhaps there is a history of distrust to overcome. The rest is “accomplished best with vulnerability and transparently apologizing for past bad behavior,” suggested Raymond. “You can’t have a productive conversation until you are two humans in a room together. If either of you is seeing only past scars or an obstacle to be overcome, you won’t be successful.”
“You can’t solve a human relationship with technology. No among of email, chat, texts, or Slack messages will give you context, tone, and body language. You need to speak to the person face to face, if possible. So many people put off these kinds of meetings only to find how powerful they can be. One leader told me he had been putting of a contentious conversation for two years, but he finally made the trip to go see a colleague with whom he didn’t get along. After a 2-hour meeting, which he described as the best of his career, he and the other person got the issue resolved. They realized there were much more a like than they thought. We have airplanes and phones for a reason (other than checking our email). Sometimes the only answer is conversation.”
In his book, he describes a metaphor of a ladder through which you can provide feedback with authority. This can be applied in co-management relationships, especially those in need of repair or in early days of being established. “When bringing up a delicate issue or feedback, smaller is better,” he advises. “Start the conversation with a simple mention.” In other words, start on the first rung of the ladder. Maybe it is a comment about how a meeting went or a project deliverable. Mention an observation. Often these small mentions don’t require action, they are just to help set expectations. “Less is more,” he continued. “Leave space after the observation for the other person to respond and take their own actions.” Often little things become big things if they are unmentioned. Handling things when they are small, “is an often-overlooked step,” Raymond observed.
Not every person or leader is the same and these differences in preferences and communication can lead to big misunderstandings and tension. “When working with peers who might share your leadership style archetype or have a very different one, self-awareness is critical and it is useful to have a common language that you can use to identify points of conflict or collaboration.” You can use tools like Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinders, Insights Discovery, Kolbe, or the frameworks in Good Authority to give you a common vocabulary or ask those who know you best for their insights. “Your team already knows your archetype and tendencies. You can either get in on the joke or not,” Raymond quipped. “Self-awareness is important to a healthy dialogue and for getting feedback.”
But beware of downsides. “The biggest factor working with someone your own style is projection,” he warned. “You tend to be hypercritical of the things that you yourself do. Beware of that reaction when you observe others’ weaknesses.” Every style has strengths and weaknesses. And the “challenge with each of the archetypes is a flavor of micromanagement. Each style wants to have control and it is demonstrated in different ways.” Watch for this tendency in yourself first. Remember that what you “learned in childhood or developed in our professional careers to manage reality was rewarded,” he explained. And we can tend to keep with it, “even if it doesn’t work in the organization or isn’t serving us.”
“If you are with an organization that has more cache or publicity in the company, it is important to proactively reach out to other functions to acknowledge their contributions, ask what would make their jobs easier, to lend expertise in the spirit of generosity, and to elevate others,” Raymond suggested. “Nothing beats going down the hall to talk to people.” In some organizations, this is the sales organization that is seen bringing in new business and in others, it is the marketing organization that is seem building brand and garnering industry attention. You can build a lot of goodwill by simply acknowledging the work and contribution of others in a way that suits their style preferences.
The customer should be the center-point of any alignment conversations as every role in the company should be aimed at creating better customer experiences and engendering loyalty. Create opportunities for shared listening with customers. It is critical to ask questions without knowing the answers. “Sometimes market research can feel like leading the witness,” Raymond observed. “Listening for what you want to hear and generating confirmation bias. You have to remain open to being surprised to be truly curious.” This openness can translate into some surprising insights, not just about the products or services, but about the company itself.
Raymond often asks his clients to reflect on product feedback in this way: “How is the feedback you are getting about the product exactly what we need to change about the culture?” For instance, are your customers saying you are slow and lost your edge with your product roadmap? “Chances are your decision making is slow and you have gotten more conservative in your bureaucracy,” he offered. “If customers complain that they can’t get answers, your employees probably have the same complaint,” as customer experience often mirrors employee experience. “If you want your customers to think of you like the innovation leader, then how is that demonstrated in your culture? What is innovative about your workplaces or internal culture?” he asked. What does customer feedback about products or services say about the culture and cross-functional alignment of your company? What needs to be changed? Use these conversations as a catalyst for courageous conversation and a foundation for teamwork.
This article was originally posted on Forbes.com
The landscape for merger and acquisitions, and spin-off and divestiture is heating up in virtually every sector and that brings the brand to the forefront of many executives’ minds. Aligning sales and marketing and keep the customer at the center of the enterprise can be a challenge in static environments, but it is even more challenging in the midst of a rebrand when the very moniker to which you refer to the company and who employees work for is changing. Here is some practical advice on how to make sure your rebrand is leveraged for maximum growth and cooperative productivity.
Margaret Molloy is the chief marketing officer of Siegel + Gale, the global firm headquartered in New York City whose clients include rebranded CVSHealth, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, Novartis, DaVita Inc, Radial, and Hightail. They are the strategists and designers behind iconic brands like SAP, 3M, Cummins, United Airlines, AARP, the IRS, Penske, KeyBank, Pfizer, Allstate, Rotary International, the Grammys, the YMCA, and many more. When talking about rebranding she was quick to note that “a rebrand can be a catalyst to reform a business, presenting an opportunity to sharpen a company’s story and signal and direction to the market.” Rebrands don’t happen every day. “It is a watershed moment,” she said. “Rebranding is a great chance to reframe company positioning, product architecture, and product portfolio. It gives companies a chance to revisit and rethink products and go-to markets, allowing companies to articulate a new frame.”
It also allows companies to reset the dynamic between sales and marketing. “A rebrand is often spurred by mergers, spinoffs, a change in leadership, or updated company ambitions, giving sales and marketing the chance to get a fresh start,” Molloy added. “It’s a new chapter that provides a clean slate to produce a new level of engagement and alignment.”
Advice You Can Use: Think of a rebrand as a chance think big. What she called a “precious opportunity” that “should not be wasted.” Take advantage of that not only in your corporate strategies, but in your cross-functional partnerships across the organization.
“One of the biggest mistakes a brand can make is shortchanging the employee engagement portion of their rebrand roll-out,” Molloy noted. It is easy to become absorbed by the strategy, research and design, and overlook employee activation. “To change a brand requires a commitment from the top to include the organization.” And that extends down and through the organization. Rachelle Kuramoto from Watchword Brand, a boutique agency in Atlanta, said it well when she noted that "every person, whether they be a customer or employee, has both rational and emotional drivers of their work and branding is personal. If they resist the new brand and aren't behind the message, they are not going to do their best work." In order to align early and often, Kuramoto suggests that “everyone should have objectives tied to the successful roll-out and what it looks like for their function. If you have asked for input during the discovery and research phase, employees are more likely to see their feedback in the plans and alignment is easier."
Advice You Can Use: Before the budget is exhausted on other things, be sure to have a robust plan for employee engagement and communication. Tie metrics across the company to the successful brand roll-out.
“Employees are at the forefront of a brand,” Molloy continued, “and this is brought into high relief during ‘moments of truth’ for the customer. For example, when a customer walks into a store or calls up a service line, it’s during this interaction when the customer experiences the brand.” Even digital native companies without showrooms or sales, still have customers interacting with the work product of their employees. “This is why dedicating enough time and resources to employee engagement is such a necessity. Keep it open, keep it clear, and keep it simple in order to eliminate any potential barriers of communication,” she said. “Dedicating enough time and resources to employee engagement is a must.”
Advice You Can Use: Think about the “moments of truth” and customer interactions that are critical for you to establish your new brands and work backward from those into your processes to ensure a great experience every time.
“Sales is an important subpopulation of employees. It is vital to understand the psychology of salespeople, their incentives, and the dynamics of the sales organization, as they are a constituency that tends to be practical,” she offered. “At the risk of generalizing, sales professionals are motivated by personal performance and have a good filter for anything that will help them sell more, faster.” Not all functions within the company work on the same horizons. Executives and brand leaders might be looking at long-term views and investments, while others with quotas to fulfill tend to be focused on this month, quarter, or year. “As a result, salespeople can be viewed as skeptical and transactional. This inherent tension is inevitable, but not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, when an understanding is found between brand and sales it can lead to a harmonious working relationship that facilitates alignment.”
Advice You Can Use: Leverage the practical and actionable tendencies of your sales team to help you filter and prioritize what is most critical in the time of transition. And provide turn-key solutions, sales enablement tools, and easy-to-deploy communications to make it easy for everyone to stay on message.
“Some brands make the mistake of waiting until everything is pristine and perfect to announce their intentions to a wider audience,” Molloy observed. Similar to the big reveal at the end of the episode of a home improvement television show, those designing new brands can often keep the stakeholders out of the house until the work is complete. Instead, she advised that “communication should be early and consistent. Otherwise, employees are left in a vacuum where imagination and presumption reign, filling the space with negative assumptions that can impact morale.” This can take the form of listening sessions, updates on the brand work or stakeholder interviews, or opportunities for people to provide input. You can still plan a big brand reveal party, but make sure that you minimize surprises to maximize long-term impact.
Advice You Can Use: Don’t fear transparency. Use feedback sessions and preview to get feedback and to socialize change.
“An important consideration during a rebranding, especially in a B2B business, is competitor response,” she said. Competitors use the opportunity to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or FUD), possibly going as far as making attempts to lure key customers or high-caliber sales talent away. “The loss of this sales talent can be a great cost to a company both financially and culturally, reinforcing the need for employee engagement programs that could mitigate the risk.” This is where sales leadership matters. Molloy encourages companies to make sure “sales leaders have a voice at the table in strategic conversations around brand and play a key role in every phase of the rebrand rollout.”
Advice You Can Use: In every good rebranding engagement, there is a discovery process where employees and other stakeholders are interviewed. Molloy has observed that some brands “dismiss the inclusion of sales during the discovery phase of branding engagement. However, the most pragmatic insight is oftentimes articulated the best by sales due to their day-to-day relationship with customers.” Involve them.
"Sales and marketing alignment isn't one thing,” Kuramoto observed. “It has many pieces and each piece is held by a person who has trusted relationships with others in the company and with external stakeholders. To maintain and strengthen alignment during a rebrand is to bring every relationship through the process." Even if the strategic catalyst which prompted the rebrand is positive and exciting to employees and customers, that doesn’t make the change easy. It can be threatening and confusing. And that emotion comes like waves through the planning and implementation of the brand and beyond. “Roll-outs of brands are not complete without a monitoring and optimization process,” Kuramoto suggested. “The work of branding, like sales and marketing alignment, is never done."
Advice You Can Use: Put success measures in place, across the company, and set up a monitoring process. Remember that change is a process and takes time (and that the brand marketers in the company have had many more months to warm up the idea of change than other employees or customers they serve). Communicate and over communicate (and then communicate again).
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
Chief Marketing Officer Denise Karkos joined what is now TD Ameritrade in 2006 and has seen a lot of changes in her tenure there. The bank is a fixture in the world of investing, with over 360 branches and numerous recognitions over its 40-year history. In 2016, it bought Scottrade, “which doubled the size of our sales force and blended two cultures,” Karkos explained. This created new opportunities and challenges for aligning sales and marketing and refining her own leadership in the process.
Starting with Employee Engagement
Since the acquisition, she has "been working to create the best playbooks knowing that in some cases Scottrade had more experience, branches, and tenure to apply,” Karkos offered. “We want to make the combination the best it can be.” This required a large emphasis on listening and communication to ensure the right practices endure and that everyone is aware of the new direction.
“Never underestimate the importance of internal communications,” Karkos advised. “We have 11,000 associates. It can be overwhelming, but is very important to make sure that they all know the strategy and what we are trying to do.” This applies to what happens in the branches with product offerings for local clients, and in the larger marketplace as she builds the brand.
“One of the things that has been important is for us to preview commercials with our associates, to celebrate successes, and even sharing our digital campaigns,” she continued. “I like to share our world with our internal audiences. The advertising is fun, so we invite associates to the set of our commercials and even invite them to be in the spots.” This has led to business-impacting innovation.
“We were working on a commercial for our customers and decided to do some testing with our front-line employees,” she said. “I flew out to our call center and listened to phone calls and we did focus groups with associates.” They watched the rough-cut ad and a dialogue emerged. “One associate said that when he talks to traders the conversations are like therapy sessions. The investor is nervous.” They want to make the right choice and there are a lot of things to consider, which are often outside the domain or professional experience of the client. “They want to know if their decisions are sound,” she recalled. The associate "went on to say that his approach is to invite the client with an invitation: ‘Buddy, let’s talk it out.’” Light bulbs went off around the room and that line made it into the revised ad. “It was important to use the voice of actual conversations. Taking the time to listen to the words customers use," she offered. "In a world when people are uneasy and there is distrust, straight talk goes a long way,” Karkos concluded.
Listening Deeply to Customers
“We do a ton of qualitative and quantitative research to gain insights from consumers,” Karkos explained. “One of the themes that came up time and time again is that the old-school notion of ‘leaving a legacy’ is a superficial insight. It’s more about the emotional insight underneath that. It is about providing safety and security for their family. They want their kids to be okay.” Digging deeper into this theme created a new opportunity to connect with customers on an emotional level.
“We ran a spot around Father’s Day last year where we wrote new lyrics for the Harry Chapin classic ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ to reflect contemporary fatherhood,” Karkos said. “It was a tear-jerker. We previewed the commercial at a sales meeting to 300 of our retail associates and when I looked over the crowd and saw a bunch of tears.” They knew they had something of impact. “Our associates were sending it to their customers knowing that it would appreciate it and be touched by it as well,” Karkos added. Just the kind of viral behavior you want in an advertising campaign.
Over the subsequent months, we started getting stories back from the field. Memories of their own fathers. Stories about their sons. We received videos that they had shot themselves. It prompted a different conversation. With our associates and with their customers.”
“I am held accountable to revenue and profitability and although that ad campaign wasn’t our most profitable investment, I would do it again because of the impact it had internally.” The ad went on to be recognized as a 2017 Clio Music Shortlisted entry for use of music in a short form film.
Aligning Across Functions
“In order to make our customers successful, we need to make our associates successful,” Karkos continued. To understand "a day in their life” and let that influence investment, policies, and processes.
“Right now, it is cumbersome for them to know what ads and offers are in the market.” Due to the expansion of the business and legacy technologies, associates had to reference multiple systems. “We are in the process of developing and rolling out a customer relationship management system that allows a single sign-on and a complete look at the customer journey. This should be a game changer and make their job easier.” It is important to look at the marketing (and sales) technology stack holistically to see the impact on processes across the organization. “You want to innovate with clients,” Karkos added, “but you can’t put the burden on the back of salespeople. We measure share of wallet, but there are steps in the process before share of wallet that need visibility.”
And alignment doesn’t stop there. “We not only have to align with sales as there are other parts of the organization with whom we need to partner. For instance, finance,” Karkos offered.
“Our industry has a necessary evil called ‘offers.’ These are the promotions you see that offer free trades or cash incentives for opening up accounts,” she explained. “We market into a competitive space and we have to be responsive to what is being seen in the market. We have a budget for promotions and in highly-contested markets would often find ourselves out of budget and at a disadvantage.” This was unacceptable in the growth ambitions of the group.
Karkos was able to work with the finance team to “revisit the treatment of these offers to allow us more flexibility. This is the kind of alignment you only get when you are focused on the same growth and profitability goals.”
Demonstrating Leadership
Although Karkos has been in the CMO role for five years, she has reported to the CEO for less than two. This reporting structure and expanded scope have changed the role. “This position in the organization has caused me to focus not just on the ROI of the marketing mix and emerging trends in the industry, but also to drive for better investment decision making overall,” she observed. “Sometimes that means investments in marketing when we are confident that would lead to growth. Other times it is investments in sales or technology with analogous metrics.”
Advocating beyond functional boundaries for the good of the business is an important shift in the maturation of marketing leaders. “There is growth we can get in the industry and we need to make smart investments,” Karkos explains. “I have learned to step back and think more strategically about how I show up in those conversations. Not just representing marketing, but representing the business overall.”
This article was originally published on Forbes.
“No company in its right mind tries to sell to everyone” – Philip Kotler
For more from Jennifer Davis on sales and marketing, read "How to Market "Marketing": A Primer For Business People Who Market."
Data breaches and privacy vulnerabilities splash across the headlines each week and cost businesses millions and some of the blame may lie in the misalignment of sales and marketing.
These announcements unseat executives, obliterate market value, shake the confidence of customers, necessitate awkward Senate hearings, and damage the brand for the long term. All of us can think of companies that have been adversely affected by this violation of trust, and the impact is significant across industries.
According to the 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study by Ponemon, sponsored by IBM IBM +0.46%, the average cost of a data breach in the US is $7.91 million in direct and indirect expenses and another $4.2 million was the average loss of business following a breach. But even for smaller incidents, each stolen record costs the business $233, which is up 4.8% since last year. It doesn’t take many compromised records to have that figure add up.
And perhaps more shocking, the average global probability of a material breach in the next 24 months is 27.9%. That means, nearly a third of companies will have a data breach next year, which means that nearly a third of customers could be victims of data vulnerabilities.
As you might imagine, the faster the data breach can be detected, the lower the cost and brand impact. Companies that identified a breach in less than 100 days saved more than $1 million than their peers that took the average of 197 days. But better yet, companies can avoid costly breaches by evaluating their systems and processes and preventing problems from ever occurring.
How does this relate to sales and marketing misalignment? The Data Breach Study attributes 27% of breaches to “human error” and 25% to “system glitches.” These combine to cause most data vulnerabilities. Because the systems used by sales and marketing contain some of the richest customer data and largest user populations with access to data they represent a significant business risk hiding in plain sight.
Here are four areas in which you can assess your risk of a breach and some best practices to address each:
1. Beware of Separate MarTech and SalesTech Stacks
If you hang around a modern marketing organization you will hear terms bantered around frequently: CMS, marketing automation, sales enablement platforms, e-commerce, customer relationship management or sales force automation tools. These are often abbreviated “MarTech” (as in Marketing Technology) or SalesTech (Sales Technology). And it is not uncommon to have these systems in organizational silos without integration, data synchronization, or a common view of the customer. “Multiple applications, in many cases, have duplicate data to accomplish the same objective,” commented Joan Netzel, CPA and professional board member, former group vice president and internal auditor for SunTrust Banks and former CFO of the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority. “One key risk is that the data is not accurate from system to system, which poses a problem with reporting and decision making.” This has implications on the customer experience, management effectiveness, compliance with GDPR and other regulations, and the ability of the organization to fully leverage relationships, but it holds another risk: it can make your systems more susceptible to data vulnerabilities. Companies are quick to overlook the data breaches that happen every day when territory salespeople leave the company and take contacts and contract details of clients with them on their personal devices.
Actions you can take: Look closely at the integration or duplication of systems between sales and marketing and the access rights to each. Often misalignments in annual objectives and management styles can manifest in system proliferation, each with a different set of access controls. And don’t forget the hidden sales systems that exist in employee’s email inboxes, contact directories on their phones, shared drives, or on spreadsheets, outside the formal CRM systems.
2. Beware of System Proliferation
It is not uncommon in large companies or companies that have grown through acquisition to have a number of competing systems all in simultaneous operation. One company may have dozens of separate CRM instances or point solutions in the sales and marketing space, across multiple vendors and hosting models. With this disarray in their system ecosystem, vulnerabilities around data usage and access are often hidden in the mix.
Plus, the features of these robust and expensive platforms go under-utilized. As author and consultant David Taber wrote for CIO Magazine “no amount of ‘best in breed’ features will make a difference if their data is an uncoordinated mess.”
Furthermore, systems tend to multiply when governance is not strong. In organizations of all sizes, shadow IT organizations (or “hidden factories”) can build and implement solutions in the organization without explicit organizational approval. This is becoming increasingly easier in a world of cloud computing or when applications are offered in Software as a Service (SaaS) business models, where anyone with budget authority can implement solutions, without the technical expertise previously required for on-premises installations. This ease of database provisioning and application deployment in the cloud has real benefits to the enterprise, of course, but it can exacerbate organizational dysfunction. And the ubiquity of API-style connections between tools makes sharing sensitive data with third-parties easier than ever before.
Actions you can take: Building on the investigation above, conduct a full inventory of the systems used at your company that store or share customer data of any type. Review the data policies of your vendors. You will likely be shocked by how many systems are in use and can put a plan into place to streamline and consolidate as required.
3. Beware of System of Record and Data Ownership Ambiguity
“Decisions around technology platforms need a holistic approach,” continued Netzel. Never is this truer than when companies are determining their systems of record: the computer system or application which will serve as the company’s authoritative data source for customer data. Not the pet system of one department or the other, but for the enterprise as a whole. “The customer demographic data regarding sales and products, need to be in sync with the system of record and a reconciliation of that data in separate systems needs to be designed and performed periodically,” Netzel advised. It is critical that each system has a “data owner who is responsible for determining who has access to the data and for how long,” explained Donna Gallaher, an IT and cybersecurity advisor who holds active CISSP, C|CISO, and CIPP/E certifications. “That data owner should be tracking exceptions and ensuring that access is removed when no longer needed, even though IT or the security team implements the controls.”
Actions you can take: Go to your ecosystem inventory and ensure that every system has a unique and defined purpose and a data owner that has defined processes for access controls. Once you know how many systems you use and which you intend to serve as the system of record, you can decide which should be phased out of operation, which could not only lead to reduced risk, but reduced costs as well.
4. Beware of Ill-Defined Security Policies
It is not uncommon for companies to have an employee manual or other documents which outline behavior expectations of their employees, but many companies do not have a written security policy that covers topics beyond acceptable use, to include password and encryption standards, data retention standards, access management procedures and other critical elements. “A key element of a security program is the maturity of a company’s employee and contractor onboarding and offboarding process,” Gallaher offered. “Access rights should be defined for each job role, and there should be procedures in place for granting and removing access to all required systems.” This requires another system of record to be defined for employee data. “Typically, either Active Directory [email and network access system] or the HRIS [human resources information system] is the system of record with one system feeding data into the other,” she continued. “It is important for companies to determine which is the system of record and who owns the data, and to design the rest of the processes for granting and removing access rights around that system of record and data owner.”
Actions to take: Gallaher suggests that “everyone should have security responsibilities in their job description” and understand what systems and tools they need for their role and how to secure the data in those systems according to the policy.
In summary, “the most important thing is to decide on your system of record and to assign a data owner,” Gallaher offered. However, data vulnerabilities and risk assessment can not be delegated. The responsibility must be shared across the enterprise. “It is common for businesses to try to shift risk to the IT or security organization,” Gallaher added, “but the business always owns the risk.” No matter who works on the systems or administers policy, the business ultimately owns the impact. Sales and marketing must align, with other groups and interests of the business, to ensure the systems they use every day, to communicate with customers or track the sales pipeline, don’t end up costing the business a breach.
This article originally ran in Forbes on August 20, 2018.
I saw the new Mission: Impossible movie yesterday and was struck by how often Ethan Hunt, the hero played by Tom Cruise, stopped to see, empathize, and protect his team mates and the innocent bystanders of his action shenanigans. Seeing them as people, not as obstacles on his parkour course chasing bad guys.
It was a good reinforcement of some ideas from a book (recommended to me by Jennifer Daniels) called The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute. In it, they provocatively call the objectifying of people as an act of violence itself, as thoughts precede behavior.
What does this have to do with sales and marketing alignment? Well, everything.
I have been writing for Forbes on the topic of alignment and customer-centricity, showcasing insights from different marketing, sales, and business leaders across the country, from brands big and small. I still have a lot to share (stay tuned for some great upcoming pieces), but even in these early weeks of my research I am struck with how often the problem that manifests as misalignment is one of perspective.
Harkening back to high school geometry, here is the step-by-step proof:
We can only solve problems we can see.
In frustration or impatience, we see each other as the problem.
When we see each other as the problem, we stop seeing the real problem.
As we don't see the problem as it truly is, we can never really solve it.
In a lesson today, Dr. Mark Brewer, reminded us that in relationships you can’t think “you are the problem” or “I am the problem,” you have to think “it’s you and me against the problem.”
When we see each other through the lens (or should I say the monocle) of the problem, we no longer see the person. They are the problem. They are objectified. They are a caricature without the complexities inherent in humanity. We see them and the issue in 2D. Over-simplified. And as a result, our minds are tuned to seek and find hardship. We are often chasing evidence of how we’ve been wronged. None of which is useful to problem solving.
In contrast, when we see the problem through the lenses of more than one expert (as you can when you are on the same side of the table, instead of opposite sides), the problem can be fully explored in 3D. The people remain people (not obstacles to overcome) and our minds are tuned to solutions and finding common ground.
We see what we seek.
This does not mean that sometimes our colleagues are not very good at their jobs or that some people are difficult to work alongside. There are times when people do have ill intensions or have broken our trust. Sometimes role changes or people moves are required to get to solution and this can be achieved with sensitivity and respect. But in any case, confronting reality, both the good and the bad, together leads to better outcomes in my experience.
I heard of an example recently where a high-performing executive at a prominent company decided to take a side step into a supporting role in recognition that the business needed something beyond what he could give. This highly admirable act demonstrates not only self-awareness and servant leadership, but also the commitment to face the truth and follow that truth to whatever conclusions are best for the business.
This kind of openness and frank communication can re-center the organization on the “why” of your business or project, what success looks like, and what is required to move forward.
Ray Padron recently shared a quote from Gail Hyatt which posed that “people lose their way, when they lose their why.” So true.
And ironically, the best way to find your “why” is to start with your “who.” After all, you can’t be obsessed about your customers, if you don’t know who they are. You can’t set priorities or align your time and resources to high-impact projects, if you don’t know who you are serving. You can't own your business, if you are seeking others to blame. And we can’t determine or achieve the “why” of our business without the people “who” are our colleagues, team mates, stakeholders, and co-collaborators.
Our mission, should we accept it, is to see people as people and to find a way together.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
In my latest Forbes article, I interviewed Martyn Etherington from Teradata. Read the full article here.
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Martyn Etherington knows what it takes to drive change from the office of the CMO and has plenty of lessons for new chief marketing officers. In fact, he himself is practicing being new. Six short months ago he joined Teradata, a data analytics company, drawing upon his extensive executive marketing experiences at IBM (Sequent Computer Systems), Danaher (Tektronix), Mitel Networks, and Cisco Systems
Being new on the executive team, the need to align sales and marketing, a perennial priority, is even more sharply in focus. “Sales and marketing can be like the Montagues and Capulets from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet,” Etherington joked. Even at the best run companies, alignment is hard won.
Etherington’s priorities these first few months he believes have set the foundation for the alignment that will be needed for transformation and hold some lessons for any CMO starting with a new company.
Goal Setting – tied to revenue and relationships
“The relationship between sales and marketing can also be, at times, as Winston Churchill described the U.S. and U.K., ‘two nations separated by a common language,’” he continued. “The key is shared language and goals,” not just perceptions. “We have one shared goal and that is ‘Growth’,” he summarized.
Etherington emphasizes that marketing should have intimacy with the business and that compensation should be tied to their sales peers’ goals. “I want them to know where are we regarding revenue, quarter to date, year to date,” he explains. “Are we growing quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Are we growing at or above market? Are we taking share? How does our collective sales funnel look?” For this, he looks at the size, shape, velocity, and quality of the overall pipeline and then asks “How can we help improve the funnel?” to keep the focus on action. As he has found “without these KPIs, without this insight and intimacy of our business, we are stumbling in the dark.”
Every organization would like to get better at attribution, but Etherington is “less concerned with perfect attribution, or optics. I would much rather spend time determining our impact on the funnel and top-line growth,” he said. It starts and ends with setting good Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a desire to “do good, not just look good.”
“Other than my boss, my number one priority was the partnership with my sales peer Eric Tom, our chief revenue officer,” Etherington offers. And those relationships extend through the sales organization and across between leaders in sales and marketing.
Etherington suggests that a good way to begin these conversations in your first few days on the job is to ask sales peers the following question: “If we were to nuke marketing, what would happen to our business?” This can solicit a range of responses, all useful for building a relationship and getting on the same page as to the priorities.
“Sometimes you get the answer ‘nothing would happen.’ Others attribute a portion of their sales results to marketing,” Etherington recalls. He has found that based on his B2B marketing experience, “organizations believe that, ideally, that they should get 20-30 percent of their funnel from marketing.” Some industries vary depending on the complexities of their offerings, sales cycle and whether they have a direct or indirect or blended go-to-market strategy, but no matter how much reliance there is on marketing to build the pipeline, it is important to create positive dependencies between marketing and sales that ties back to those shared goals and the relationships that are being fostered between the functions.
Teradata has an enterprise focus and sells direct. The sales are consultative and high touch. In this model, it may be more simple to track attribution to marketing than other go-to-market models, but it still requires vigilance and a focus on the right things. “Transparency is key,” he adds. “You need operational rigor around your own metrics. They need to be real and they need to be metrics that you can manage versus just monitoring.” As I have also found in my career, marketing has lots of things they can measure, but not all things that are measurable are important or lead to action. “We are interested in conversion and ultimately conversion," he continued. "That is more important to us than vanity metrics like touch points. We want to work with our sales peers to drive growth.”
Culture – a mindset change supported by systems
“You can pontificate all you like about alignment, insight, impact and effectiveness, but you have to have a business perspective, an appetite for operational rigor and a culture of continuous improvement to affect change,” Etherington challenged. You have to operationalize the strategic plan, with the right structures and systems in place, to achieve it. He has worked for companies with exacting business operating systems, like Danahar, with red, yellow, and green dashboard indicators and he has taken the opportunity to apply best practices of lean to his team at Teradata for strategy deployment, KPIs, action plans, and “root cause countermeasure” approaches. “We implemented weekly stand-ups and have begun a standard monthly marketing operations review to make sure we are making progress and attaining our KPI planned metrics,” he explained.
Cultures are known to change slowly. “We are at the beginning of a journey,” Etherington said. “We have begun our transformation. We have our strategic objectives in place, aligned with our company goals. We have our KPIs defined and populated, we have supporting action plans and forums for us to inspect and improve.” It’s a start, but there is more to do. “We don’t have all the answers,” he continued. “How much can we say that we contribute to our business? With only our first monthly marketing operations review under our belt, I can say not as much as we ought to be. Now we know where we are, our jumping off point, we have only one way to go!”
Any experienced executive will tell you that change - at the scale of a business transformation and a redefinition of what marketing means to an organization overall - can test the patience of the leadership and the organization. It can lead to organizational fatigue, misalignment, or impatience to rush to answers when the problems are not yet fully understood. Etherington finds that the power to achieve results first begins with a willingness to see the problems, in blaring detail, and face them head-on.
“One of the biggest challenges when moving from activity-based marketing to outcome-based marketing is the transparency, accountability, and responsibilities that come with that approach,” he explains. “We are in the infancy of our marketing effectiveness journey and most of our KPIs are currently in red.” The ambitions of the organizations and the standards set by the team are not yet reflected in the reality of the business. “That is not a comfortable feeling for many people,” he observed. “We are all raised to covet the gold star or turn a red metric into the green.” Everyone wants to do well and wants to do well as quickly as possible.
“One philosophy ingrained in me from my time at Danaher was the notion of ‘living in the red.’ In monthly operations reviews, if your KPI was green, we did not talk about it. It’s good. It’s at plan. What we wanted to discuss was the red KPIs - the variances from plan.” Living in the red means to ask questions like:
The focus needs to be constantly brought back into focus on the things that need attention, action, or course correction. “It could be many months before that KPI would go to green, but it forces you to think differently, adopt a growth mindset and be ok, although not comfortable, being in the red,” Etherington instructed. “The confidence comes as you use the tools and know that with applied discipline eventually, you will achieve sustainable results.” Etherington knows this from experience. “It works," he advocates. "It is proven and has been to a large part a major contributor to my success and some of the companies for which I have worked.” Leaders have to be comfortable being uncomfortable and help their organizations do the same.
Of course, there are a host of strategies and tactics within these organizing principles that the CMO and teams need to implement from the start to be successful in the new role and for years to come. Seeking out data to inform decisions, building a great team and structuring them for success, influencing and being influenced by customers, and building a culture of continuous improvement take judgment and time. Focusing on the shared goals, and the systems and mindsets required to achieve them, even if they are uncomfortable at first, is a great place to start for any new CMO leading an organization to green.
In this latest post on Forbes, I talk about 5 ways to bridge the sales and marketing gap referencing experts from the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, Microsoft, and other leading companies.
Special thanks to Rakhi Voria, Bob Perkins, Shelli Keagle, and Trip Jobe for lending their expertise to this piece.
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Pointing fingers is a familiar and repetitive motion between the sales and marketing groups of many companies. “It is very common to have marketing people complain that sales isn’t following up on leads and salespeople complain about the lead quality and quantity,” explains Bob Perkins, the founder and chairman of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP). According to the organization’s 2017 report “Top Challenges of the Inside Sales Industry,” as a category "Leads" was the number one challenge for both leaders and sales reps alike. It was listed as a larger concern than quota expectations by a factor of 2.5 to 1. “This challenge moved up from previous years and indicates lots of work and change needs to happen to solve this issue,” Perkins observed. “When sales reps are not meeting their quotas consistently, the pressure is high and there are even more visibility and attention on lead quality and quantity.” The same is true across the organization as expectations continue to rise on corporate performance and the importance of sales and marketing is emphasized.
Does this sound familiar? If so, here are five best practices and approaches to bridging the gap between sales and marketing that have worked successfully.
1. Take a Walk
“On the top of my list of best practices is to have marketing listen to live sales calls,” Perkins proposes. “In and of itself, this can cure some of the ills of misalignment and the complaints that sales and marketing have about each other.” How this happens will be different for each company. “You don’t want marketing listening into more calls than the inside sales manager,” Perkins counsels. “But they should listen regularly.” It could be a standing “call week” event set each quarter or it could be tied to a specific marketing campaign that needs monitoring and optimization. In any case, best practice is to sit together and use that time not only as an opportunity not only to hear the prospect call, but to debrief on what went well and what didn’t. “By having a marketing person walk into a sales group, you send a message. That you are open to feedback and want to learn how to make sales successful,” Perkins observed. That short walk across the building can go a long way. If a walk isn’t possible, use video conferencing. Perkins said that among his members, sharing in calls provided a powerful way to get early feedback on campaign effectiveness, rather than waiting for the lagging indicator of pipeline growth.
2. Open Your Meetings
Invite sales to participate in regular marketing staff meetings. Trip Jobe, whose experience in sales and marketing leadership spans senior roles at Oldcastle, Neehah Paper, Kimberly-Clark, and International Paper, had this advice. “When you can have sales or sales leadership involved in a marketing meeting, they typically gain a perspective on the many levels of execution needed to tackle a program.” Better to do this regularly and ahead of the action to get insights that are usable by both teams. “By getting the opportunity to hear the 'sausage making' process, they gain a perspective on many of the details involved in certain marketing programs,” Jobe continued. “Sales can also shed light on what it views as priorities or not.”
And that openness goes both ways. Perkins suggests that in his experience consulting with leading sales organizations “the best companies invite a marketing representative to sit on the weekly inside sales team meetings to share updates on campaigns and feedback from the field. Both learn about the campaigns from the first-hand experience."
However, how you conduct those meetings matter. “My experience is when you can create this two-way dialogue you will more quickly gain alignment,” Jobe advises. “When either sales or marketing is preaching one way, the other side will tend to start tuning out.” Keep it a conversation with opportunities for feedback and you can watch partnership building.
3. Build a Council
Sometimes, physical proximity, the scale, or the leanness of the team prevent regular cross-functional communications. In those cases, you can build representative councils to provide input. Jobe used this approach in several previous companies to create sales councils of several sales reps (3-6 at the most) involving them in 4-6 meetings a year (mostly over the phone, but maybe in person at a national sales meeting or industry convention) and matching them with key marketing leaders. He has used the council to get feedback on product development, but it can extend to other topics like lead generation campaigns, sales effectiveness, or new marketing initiatives. “This does a few things," Jobe observes. "First, it gets sales more involved in the business and their peers know they have an advocate working with marketing. Second, it gives those marketers a few sales reps they really get to know and can use them to set up a market visit.”
4. Visit a Customer
Shelli Keagle, managing director at Canvas Research, a boutique marketing research and strategy firm, says that “the customer is the great equalizer.” Without a deep understanding and empathy with the customer or consumer (or even the channel), both sales and marketing can lose. Jobe added that he is “a big believer in gaining an understanding of your environment, your customers' problems, what do they face every day. Within your company, the more that sales and marketing can understand each other and communicate effectively, the better the combined output will be.” So, send marketers out with field sales reps to visit customers, work trade show events together, and create opportunities for the team to connect with customers together both formally and informally. Facilitate listening sessions at customer gatherings. If face-to-face meetings are impractical or incomplete, conduct and share customer research and verbatims. Videotape customers using the product or talking of their experience with products or with the sales process. Encourage marketing people to build relationships with key accounts. All of these can be important sources of common truth for groups trying to work more effectively together.
5. Scale Your Approach
Rakhi Voria is a senior business manager at Microsoft who has helped to build out a world-class inside sales organization with eight different sales center locations around the world for this leading technology company. “We now have around 1,800 sellers in our organization,” Voria explains. “One thousand of those individuals were hired in the past year alone. Seventy percent of our team was hired externally from over 70 different companies.” This represents a huge scale and velocity for the organization and a great opportunity for shared listening, but at this magnitude, it is prohibitive to rely on informal structures around customer visits or call observation. While sales and marketing leaders in other organizations “have gotten creative about bridging the gap between marketing and sales by having the teams sit under the same umbrella organization or by physically putting marketing managers and salespeople side by side, however at Microsoft, marketing and sales report up through different organizations and marketing managers often aren’t based in inside sales center locations.”
They solved the problem in a different way on a scale that matched the enterprise. “As part of our organizational design planning, we invested in creating resources called Sales Program Leaders who are based in our sales centers and aligned by the solution areas that we sell,” Voria described. These roles are hybrid roles with elements of both marketing and sales. “These individuals meet with sellers daily to gather insights and are able to use these insights to drive improvements across our products and offerings, to remove blockers, and to take corrective actions to ensure achieving business goals.” They also provide feedback on demand response campaigns, corporate account or channel programs, and real-time from conversations with customers and partners.
And the results are reflecting the intention. Here is how Voria describes one success story.
We were recently engaged in a deal with a healthcare customer in Latin America who was struggling with one of our cloud product offerings. This feedback was shared with our marketing and operations team, and within a few months, we were able to offer a new SKU in the market that addressed the concerns directly and packaged the offering in a way that was well-suited for customers in similar situations. It is this kind of feedback loop that makes us better, not only aligning sales and marketing, but also aligning the company to our customers."
These five approaches are some of the best practices used by sales and marketing teams seeing better alignment and better-shared results. These steps are, in themselves, quite simple. Easy, in fact. Maybe not as easy as finger pointing, but a lot more effective. When done with purpose, they can build and maintain the bridge between sales and marketing and perhaps even create onramps for new ideas and approaches.
Disclaimers:
Rakhi Voria is a contributor to Forbes in her advisory capacity on the Business Development Council. Also, I collaborated with Canvas Research on some original investigation into the use of IoT and high-end entertainment products in specialty consumer segments which I presented in the “Integrated Life” seminar at the InfoComm conference produced by Avixa in June 2018.
It's a classic Dilbert cartoon plot line and sadly is very common in so many companies: misalignment between marketing and sales causing waste, confusion, distrust, and poor customer experience.
Whether you are a CEO, head of marketing, or head of sales, find out what misalignment may be costing you and steps you can take to bring the customer back into the center of your business strategy and get sales and marketing working together in active partnership to grow the business.
See a recent presentation that I gave for OnConferences here.
This article was originally published on Forbes.
It’s the chronic, and often fatal, disease of business: sales and marketing misalignment. I, like you, have seen it done well and poorly in my career as marketing leader and CMO. I have also experienced the impact of poor alignment myself, as a consumer and as a customer of B2B goods and services. Although it has been an issue since the creation of the modern enterprise, there are reasons to believe that this chronic disease is getting more deadly.
1. Your Customers Are Changing
An increasing percentage of your customers, even technical buyers in B2B product categories, are wanting to disintermediate your sales team and gather information about products and services online and on their own, according to Forrester. In 2017, the percentage of customers expressing this “don’t call me, I’ll call you” preference was 68%. This represents a 28% increase over the 2015 survey just two years earlier. In fact, only 16% said that they find interacting with a sales rep superior to self-service research.
Mary Shea, Ph.D., principal analyst at Forrester Research , said it even more strongly. “If marketing and sales aren’t aligned and if they don’t collaborate, they will be disintermediated. By buyers themselves who find other ways to get what they need or by more agile competitors," she challenged.
The data would suggest it is already happening. This puts more pressure on marketing to facilitate increasingly sophisticated customers through a funnel (or around a pin-ball machine, to depict it more accurately) without direct engagement with sales.
2. Misalignment Hurts Your Customers
Forty-three percent of B2B marketing decision-makers report that their companies have lost sales as a consequence of not having necessary content at the right time for a specific customer and 77% of the rest have experienced costly delays, according to Forrester (Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel).
This is further complicated by the fact that more people are involved in the decision-making process than before. Committees, panels, and groups are replacing individuals and making it more difficult to identify the influencers and meet all their needs. This is certainly true in B2B sales, but even consumers are sharing their e-commerce or subscription accounts with more people in their household and decision-making processes can fragment at home, too.
Despite this, shockingly, only 24% of organizations calibrate on the definition of target segments or accounts that will apply to both the sales and marketing organizations (per Forrester’s Q1 2018 Marketing Benchmark survey). How can we jointly hit a target, if there is more than one?
This lack of alignment is hurting your customers and impacting your top line.
3. You Are Wasting Money And Time
Sangram Vajre, chief evangelist at Terminus and former head of marketing at Pardot (now owned by SalesForce.com), asked a provocative question: “if only 1% of leads convert to opportunities, does that mean that 99% of marketing is wasted?”
Of course, it’s an unfair question as marketing is often responsible for strategy, channel, brand building, communications, and community engagement which may not directly relate to lead conversion, but if there isn’t cooperation on customer acquisition, where else in value chain might alignment be broken?
“Without shared goals and real-time data sets to drive decisions and investment prioritization, you have to wait for feedback from sales which may be late, anecdotal and with an agenda,” added Shea. “Marketing leaders can, and should, know what content, sales tools and campaigns are driving growth.”
If there is any doubt about what is driving your growth, then undoubtedly you are wasting time and money and that is impacting your bottom line. A bottom line that is getting more attention.
4. Your Boss Cares About It – Deeply
Forty-eight percent of CEOs say that poor alignment and collaboration will be a major marketing challenge over the next 12 months, according to Forrester. And those CEOs are looking hard at CMOs to lead the improvements.
The tenure of chief marketing officers is one of the shortest in the C-suite (per Korn Ferry) and there will be continued pressure and accountability around alignment, especially in times of transformation and change. Vajre agreed that high CMO turnover could be a sign of poor sales and marketing alignment. “If sales fall and budgets are squeezed, everyone pays,” he observed.
Shea concluded that “if you are doing sales and marketing the same way you did 3-5 years ago, you won’t survive.”
Now is the time to take your business’ vital signs and ensure that you have the alignment that you need to sustain and grow, putting your customer in the center of your strategy. As a starting point, look for evidence of customer preference changes in your business, create a common goal set and customer target, use real-time data for decision-making, and regularly report on joint progress.
It was a Throwback Thursday on Facebook, and the picture that popped up was of my daughter’s seventh birthday.
That year, the jewelry and accessory store Charming Charlie’s had opened in a local shopping center and had captured her imagination. I swear she could hear angels singing when she walked into the store that a friend dubbed the “IKEA of jewelry,” for its low prices, overwhelming product selection, and color-coded simplicity.
So that year, my daughter made an unusual request. She wanted to hold her birthday party at Charming Charlie’s. This is not a birthday party location. They have no seating. No party rooms. No catering packages. It is a retail store. I tried to talk her out of it, but when she was persistent, I thought I’d call the local manager and see about possibilities.
The manager was enthusiastic (although not sure how it would all work), and we started planning the event. She set up a small table in a corner of the store to organize. I limited the guest list and invited some girlfriends to be grownup chaperones. We planned a scavenger hunt around the store, a fashion show (where the girls picked accessories after getting different prompts like “fashion designer” or “your mom”), and we took a lot of pictures.
The girls had fun spending their small gift cards before we headed across the parking lot to a restaurant where dessert was served and “Happy Birthday” was sung.
And the whole experience taught me something about retail and GenZ (which is the emerging generation of my children).
• Shopping is an experience. Retail is a place: My daughter did not understand at all why a retail location couldn’t be an amusement park. She was entertained there and liked the shopping experience so much, she wanted to do it with friends and call it a party. To her, Charming Charlie’s represented an experience. I think that is the future of brand retail. Not just to move product in a location (and trust me, the company benefitted from our party being there that day), but to create a lasting experience and build the brand.
• Shopping is personal and expresses the shopper. Retail is impersonal and reflects the brand: Sure, she is a strong-willed 7-year-old, but my daughter thought the store was there to serve her and her friends. The shopping experience she wanted was a social one. And with some creative maneuvering, that is what we achieved. The store, in fact, was not built for her. And certainly not built for her birthday party. But the shopping experience we orchestrated absolutely was.
Today’s options for shopping and product procurement have never been broader. There are stores you can go to, websites you can visit, apps you can browse, styles you can pin, there are stylists you can hire, pop-up stores to discover, showrooms to browse, appointments with designers to make, and programs you can subscribe to. The choices are endless, and we expect more to come once Uber and Lyft drivers or drones start making package deliveries.
This creates opportunities in retail that cross beyond the brick-and-mortar stores to the full range of customer engagement that is possible. This also creates opportunities for the retail stores to become more experiential, more visual, more engaging--the kind of experience that you can’t have online or on social media.
Perhaps it won’t be long before retailers start offering birthday parties, bridal showers, and other milestone events.
This article was published on CMO.com.
Jennifer joins Glenn Gow, CEO of Crimson Marketing, for an interview entitled "Digital Display Advertising in the Data Analytics Age" on their podcast series "Moneyball for Marketing." Jennifer talked about the need to build trust with customers, while partnering with sales and measuring results for maximum impact.
The tension between marketing and sales is common enough that it’s a regular theme in Dilbert cartoons, but it doesn’t have to be! Building a strong partnership from product concept all the way to product launch is critical to a company’s success.
Join the Technology Association of Oregon on June 9th for the next Marketing Leadership Exchange. Jennifer Davis, VP or Marketing and Product Strategy, from Planar will discuss how Planar’s marketing and sales teams work together to create and managed shared goals, tracking, idea generation, and how they go about building a strong partnership.
In addition to the valuable content exchange, the Marketing Leadership Exchange is a great way to network with your peers in a safe environment where the top marketing professional at technology companies can openly discuss business issues.
To register for this event, visit the TAO events page.
