"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships."
Michael Jordon
Every business exists because it generates money. Financial
performance is a relatively straight forward thing to calculate and is
a result of operating performance. Operating performance, among other
things, is a derivative of human performance. And one of the keys of
human performance is the ability to work together efficiently.
However,
there are two key business functions that have historically not worked
well together: sales and marketing. If marketing and sales cannot work
together, than the company's strategy will be inconsistent and
execution will be flawed.
The Power of Integrated Sales
One
of the potential reasons that sales and marketing do not work well
together is that management can sometimes blur the line between the two
functions. Sales and marketing are very closely related, but they are
different.
In many situations, sales is
frequently reactive. Marketing is usually proactive. Sales reacts to
the individual customer. Marketing takes the 30,000-foot view.
Marketing's role is to match the company's capabilities with the
customer wants. How often have you heard about (or experienced) a sales
person who promises things to the customer that the company can't
deliver?
Producing special offerings for special
customers can be done, but at what cost? Should you impose a minimum
order? What other limitations should be placed on this "offering" to
limit your risk? Yet, do you risk removing the value for customer by
placing these limitations on this special request? Running a business
based only on the wants of the customers will kill your company. In
that environment, you are looking only at short-term goals. This manner
of thinking will provide you with little or no substantive gain towards
accomplishing the bigger company goals.
Still,
you don't want to ignore your customers either. Therefore, integrating
your sales and marketing efforts is critical to your company's success
and will lead to efficiencies that pay for themselves. In today's
business landscape, sales and marketing must pull together at every
level from the central concepts of the strategy to the minute details
of execution.
Getting There from Here
We
have taken a careful, methodical approach to researching how companies
can better integrate their sales and marketing efforts. Through this
process, we have discovered several methods, some more successful than
others, each promising to increase motivation, efficiencies, and
ultimately to enhance the bottom line. Based on our research, we
believe--if an organization really wants to affect change-- the following
three steps are critical to successful integration:
- Objectively assess how well sales and marketing are integrated
currently.
You cannot possibly know where to go if you don't know where you are.
It is important that this is done as objectively as possible,
understanding that it is sometimes difficult to see the forest through
the trees. If you ask the right questions and answer them as honestly
as possible, you will learn a lot about the health of your
organization.
- Discover how consistently your message is being communicated.
This is one of the first areas that begins to drive marketing and sales
apart. The sales team is trying to close the deal anyway possible,
message and rules be damned; marketing is working on crafting a
specific package, regardless of the present environment. Ensuring that
sales and marketing are together and "on message" should be a key area
of focus if you want to integrate your teams.
- Assess the selling process.
One of the most important aspects of the selling process--and an area
that is frequently neglected--is setting quantitative goals. Without the
proper goals, neither sales nor marketing will be able to work towards
a common objective. It will all be left to the interpretation of the
individual, and that will never lead to improved teamwork. Other areas,
such as pipeline management, are key to helping both sales and
marketing work together.
These
three areas are critical to improving your revenue. The trick, of
course, is knowing the right questions to ask and then to objectively
use this information to improve your situation. The benefits to this approach is that you will be making improvements to EXISTING resources. By
capitalizing on your company's intrinsic value, you can reduce costs AND increase revenue, affecting the bottom
line much more quickly than extending product lines or chasing after proliferating market opportunities.
Discover your marketing elements.
