But I think there’s a ‘ground-up’ approach that can be more effective, simpler – and certainly more fulfilling – than waiting for some seismic organisational change to happen.

Every campaign can be aligned with sales at a more practical level to create the kind of programme we can all be proud of.

You often hear marketers complaining that ‘we hand leads over to sales and nothing happens with them’. Assuming that these are good opportunities in the right organisations, the difference can come down to how well engaged sales were with the campaign. Does the number/quality of leads match up to what sales need to hit their targets? Do they know how the leads were generated and qualified? Do they know what content converted these leads? Do they have the relevant materials to help them run meetings or follow up with the leads?

It’s also important from the perspective of your prospects. Does the handover to your sales team feel like a natural continuation of the journey that your marketing campaign took them on? Does the sales meeting or call live up to the promises that your marketing made in terms of the value they would get from taking this next step?

The six steps to getting your sales team fully on board

1.     Make sure that marketing is pitching what sales are selling – and vice versa

There’s often tension between marketing’s desire to campaign around strategic business issues and big ‘solutions’ that shift the audience’s perception of a company’s offerings, and sales’ need to be out pitching things that they know people can buy, the company can deliver and they are comfortable selling. In reality, both sides can learn from each other and there is usually a happy medium where elements of the campaign can be pitching the big vision and providing sales with materials to be more comfortable in strategic conversations, while also creating ‘point’ sales opportunities around specific products/solutions. But unless you work with sales upfront to agree this ‘happy medium’, don’t expect sales to be effortlessly engaged by the ‘opportunities’ that your campaigns deliver.

It’s about mixing an ‘outside-in’ approach (aligning campaigns to audience needs) with the best elements of the traditional ‘inside-out’ approach (running campaigns around what your business is best at and where you have a track record).

2.     Use the sales team as a source of messaging and content

Marketing often turns to product teams, customers or even external analysts for input when creating content and messaging plans. But running sessions with sales can also be highly productive – both in terms of ideas for content and messages, and also in ensuring that sales feel part of the campaign from the start. Here are some good questions to ask your salespeople:

• Who is your best customer? What makes them unique?
• Can you talk through some recent deals that you’ve won? How did they come in as a prospect? Why did we win?
• And some deals that you’ve lost – why did we lose? Who/what did they go with instead?
• What alternatives do prospects have? What solutions do they typically have in place, what are the consequences of doing nothing, what’s the competitive landscape?
• Are there any specific elements of the overall solution that you use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to open up wider deals?
• What kind of questions/issues are buyers typically struggling with in the first sales meetings?
• What do you typically talk through in your first sales meetings?
• If you were approaching someone ‘cold’ and making the case about why they should meet you, what would you say?
• Are there any resources/presentations that you think work best as leave-behinds/prompts that move people along the sales process?

3.     Properly define what makes a ‘lead’ relevant to sales and how many they need

It’s not just about handing over BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to sales. Sales may actually want something completely different – a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future.

Try to:

• Uncover potential opportunities within named accounts that sales weren’t actively working;
• Build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers;
• Nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long-term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team.

Marketers also need to be confident setting the right targets, which involves asking some tough questions (it’s surprising how many sales teams may not readily know the answers!). What’s the business target? How many deals are needed? What’s the typical conversion rate (and what will the conversion rate be for the type of lead defined above)?

4.     Understand what resources sales are really using

We need to understand what assets and resources sales will find most useful both to generate their own meetings and use during/after the meetings that are booked.

We researched ten salespeople from one of our clients and these waere their top four requests:

• More proactive content about where the company is going in the future – a video or one sheet summary;
• Fewer, more targeted presentations with standard templates;
• Information on competitors and how they are better (supported with examples);
• More case studies and creative examples.

5.     Brief sales on the campaign plan, calls to action and content.

And keep briefing them as the rollout happens. Include links to relevant campaigns/content with leads that are handed over so they can see the materials that prospects have already received. Also, supply ideas of presentations they can use for their next steps.

On a recent European campaign we even included a tool that helped Sales search for relevant content or tools according to the kind of meeting they were going to.

6.     And, of course, your sales and account teams are also a channel to market

Leverage the social media profile of the sales team; they can pull through blogs and SlideShare presentations to their LinkedIn profiles, and you can prompt them with ideas of content/views to share on twitter or in LinkedIn groups. If sales are fully engaged with a campaign, they’ll also be taking the proposition direct to their best prospects. One of the big wins of your campaign could be how well educated sales are on the proposition and audience issues it solves.

In summary, for every external campaign there’s an equivalent internal programme to engage sales that is just as important. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if sales aren’t engaged or equipped to follow them up then it can easily come to nothing.

It’s also fair to say that the debate was pretty unstructured (increasingly so as the dinner progressed…) which makes the task of writing a summary quite challenging. But I’ve tried to start the ball rolling by grouping some of the highlights from the evening into four main themes. If you were with us at the dinner, feel free to add a comment with your key points below…

But first, a two-sentence summary…

The world (especially technology) is changing faster than our ability to understand it; countries as well as companies need to get better at spotting and seizing the opportunities that are out there. For suppliers to the public sector, this will require radical change towards taking ‘speculative’ business-led propositions to autonomous areas (like health or police) where solutions will be replicable (and the days of massive central government contracts are numbered).

Challenges and opportunities for suppliers to the public sector

The challenges are more numerous than the opportunities, or certainly in central government. The headline shift is that suppliers have the opportunity to be bolder in creating propositions to solve specific challenges. Consultants need to stop asking “what keeps you up at night?” and software vendors need to stop saying “we have the best tool on the market – how many licenses do you want to buy?” Instead, suppliers should come with specific propositions that solve well-documented business challenges – the kind of thing that we’ve described before as a ‘provocation proposition’.

But that’s not the whole story. Broadly speaking, there are 3 audiences that suppliers will need very different messages for (and should probably be communicating with pretty constantly to build up momentum for an opportunity). There are the strategic thinkers and CIOs who are looking for bold, business-led commercial propositions, but purchasing and procurement teams are often still thinking in 10 year cycles, and then there are the ministers (of varying quality) who need the vote-winning angle alongside seeing the relevance to stated policies.

So who do you take these business-led propositions to? Generally, the opportunities are outside central government – in health, police, education, local government. Forward looking leaders in organisations in these sectors are going to be most receptive to the more speculative supplier approaches.

There’s also a view that now’s the time to be preparing your approaches to these organisations. Why? Because they’ll need to be making radical changes in 2012 and will be planning these towards the end of 2011. This year, they’ve managed to make small changes and sacrifices to achieve 10% budget reductions. But when they start planning after the summer, they’ll realise that making an additional 10% cut on top of this will mean doing some things in a radically different way (the BBC has just covered views of the implications for the police – the first shots in an ongoing battle). It’s essential for suppliers to tie into budget planning after the summer with ideas in support of the structural re-thinks that will be happening.

John’s view is that the greatest opportunity (as yet not properly understood by suppliers) lies with the mutualisation agenda, which may begin with the formation of locally-based services and organisations, but which could grow with consolidation into big business.

Procurement and commercial models

There’s no point pretending though that all buyers and suppliers will be able to take up some of the opportunities available (or that there are enough opportunities for all).

In terms of procurement, there was a nod to the fact that some of the biggest suppliers find it to their advantage when procurement drags on (the major bid budgets involved keep a lot of competition out of the process). The discussion also covered some of the challenges with the EU procurement process – and the fact that there are ways of speeding up the process if buyers and suppliers find the right ways of framing the purchase.

On the commercial side, supplier margins will continue to be squeezed – with offshoring services and the SaaS model cutting prices and entry/exit costs, even the bespoke software and services that are needed at the top of the stack will feel the pinch. It’s not that there won’t continue to be a need for high end services and bespoke software at the top end – it’s just that there will be a knock-on effect from lowering costs at the bottom end.

For software, the old license model is dead and it will all move to pay as you go (some procurement may still be a bit behind the curve in looking cost of ownership over 5 or 10 years, but not for long). The more commoditised side of the services market is already following suit, and the large Indian outsourcers (who have already been proven by government) will be adopting them as part of their armoury of tactics. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can disguise an old model and still compete against these new entrants!

One thought this raises is how much both traditional software and particularly services providers realise that changing buying behaviour and commercial models will demand a re-think of their marketing models. Looking for smaller, potentially shorter term contracts, would suggest a marketing model more like Salesforce.com than SAP (or even Accenture – as they move to a pay by performance or by demand model, services businesses could learn from the SaaS model). As margins go down, maintaining the personal touch and 121 relationships with potential buyers will become even harder commercially.

But when John rattled off a list of countries around the world that are watching the UK to see how our initiatives perform, it was clear that there are potentially global prizes to be won by suppliers who can get over these hurdles and make a success of the opportunities in the UK.

Wider government challenges/strategies

There was some interesting discussion about how technology is changing the way that government interacts with the people. One example was in terms of how pressure groups can emerge that force government to respond.

Social media is obviously a significant factor here – creating forums for groups that might not otherwise have reached critical mass and allowing them to influence policy-making. One consequence could be that more single-issue politicians may be elected, or at least that each politician may have to justify their position on certain issues.

And views on trends in the world in general…

John started the evening with a call to arms – the old models of everything (from government, to technology, to business, education, travel…) are disappearing, and leading IT suppliers are among those best placed to embrace the change – if they want to. Try to resist it, and you likely won’t be around in 10 years time.

Asked where the next revolution in technology will come from, John’s views highlighted both the small (nanotechnology) and the massively large (million connection distributed computing networks).

And where the evening started with discussion around the pace of change, it ended on a similar note. Will technology come to the rescue of the planet? John’s answer was partly positive – that technology opens a lot of new possibilities for us (for example, leading edge use on show in South Korean health service), and in fact that the greatest challenges provoke the combination of new and existing technology into solutions to major problems. But he also had a word of warning that the speed of innovation is way outstripping our ability to comprehend the possibilities on offer – something we will have to overcome or find ways to manage if we want to make the best use possible of the innovations that are coming down the pipeline.

It’s also been oft repeated that the best marketing is about communicating the right messages at the right time.  So maybe we can bring these together into one grand unified theory of marketing-sales success? Wishful thinking maybe, but McKinsey this month published the results of their research into the buying habits of 1,200 decision makers in long- and short-sale cycles across the US and Europe. This insight into b2b sales draws a powerful conclusion: the top two turn-offs (comprising over half of those surveyed) that sales people could do were to have inadequate knowledge of their product/service and to try to communicate with them too often.

Timing + message. QED.

Fortunately, these two faux-pas are perfectly possible to remedy. But in the theme of this post, it’s not just sales that should learn this lesson but marketing too. And we bear this evidence out frequently – the most successful communications are the ones that tie a significant aspect of the product/service to a timely need of the audience. When this happens, the audience doesn’t see it as ‘marketing’ – it’s just a valuable part of their business day.

I’ll delve into another area where marketing can learn from sales in a future post, but maybe you have some experiences on this area already that you’d like to share?

Online identity fraudsters can apparently gather the information they need to steal your identity in 2-3 hours – something that used to take them days. By visiting your Facebook or LinkedIn page, company site, Flickr account and searching the online government archives, fraudsters can now get everything they need to mock up convincing passports, bank statements, utility bills – basically any document that they need to get credit.

When you stop to think about what’s online about you when the information is culled from all sources – your photos, CV, personal information, mother’s maiden name – you start to think differently about how you use the web.

If you, or any of your team, are thinking about starting blogs or exploiting social networking sites either for marketing purposes or personal use, Tom made some great points about protecting yourself online. 

Start by using Google, or better still ZoomInfo or Wink, to search for yourself and see what’s already out there. His major two hints for keeping safe? Never put your personal mobile number or home address on anything. 

There’s a lot more useful info on Tom’s blog and Garlik’s site. I’m off to Google myself…

But what if you’re not sure you’ve got a strong case to start with? Here’s a checklist to make sure you’ve thought through all the angles before you go in for the meeting with the CFO. (If you didn’t get it yesterday, here’s a download summarising other useful stats and links to online B2B marketing budget resources. Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet)

1. Have you started with a clean sheet of paper? Have you questioned old or inherited assumptions? Don’t use last year’s budget as a starting point, it will often lead you to make the same mistakes.
2. Have you budgeted on the basis of what you are paying now? Can you get things cheaper through better buying practices? Manage costs through prudent buying, investigate alternatives for spend rather than assuming it will cost the same this year as it did last year.
3. Have you looked hard enough at the people and skills side? Do you have what you need, or are you living with what you have? Have you considered outsourcing rather than increasing headcount or replacing leavers?
4. Have you budgeted programmes rather than lines? Line-based thinking can lead you from where the real issues are with marketing programmes. Sometimes changing creative or changing tactic masks a fundamental problem with the marketing strategy itself. You can also make a much more effective business case for a programme than a single line.
5. Have you cut out costs by standardising production? Adopt marketing agency type-approaches to numbers of authors’ amends you will allow internally. Impose SLAs on yourself and your team to uphold and improve the services you provide to the business.
6. Have you looked at where you can adopt new purchasing and manufacturing techniques within your job or team? Consider a “just in time” approach to content generation for example. Review your processes and look to minimise waste wherever possible?
7. Ask yourself a lot of tough questions – do you absolutely have to do things? Have you challenged received wisdom that certain activities work – are you sure they don’t just make people feel good? Do you have measures from previous years that can back you up?
8. Have you focused your spend on improving what really matters to the business? (Leads generated, a better conversion rate, customer loyalty increase?, larger average £ sale per customer, increased profitability per customer?)
9. Have you projected the revenue stream from your activity forward rather than looking back? Different activity, in a different market or at a different time will give different results. Look forward over the coming year with your assumptions, don’t base this year’s marketing on last year’s revenues.
10. If you have multiple products or services, have you budgeted differently for them depending upon the corporate objectives, aspirations and markets for each?
11. Are you being asked to do too much with too little? Avoid the “marketing always wants more budget” accusation. Be clear and realistic – don’t be pressured into agreeing to achieve myriad objectives with insufficient resources. You will fail to achieve your objectives and undermine the reputation of marketing.
12. Are there other areas of the business that will impact your success? Should you make a case for the marketing spend in these areas too? (Customer care, sales and bid support, internal communications.)
13. Have you pre-identified points throughout the year when you are willing to sit back down the CFO and review your progress and the returns you are generating?

Plus – struggling with where to start or how to put the budget together in the first place? We’ve collated the most useful starting points from our own desk research. Download it here – Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet.

1. Start by completely aligning your proposed marketing plan with the business plan – draw a straight line between what the company wants to achieve and what you are planning to do. Explain in detail exactly how it will contribute. Have the company’s stated strategic plan with you on the day.
2. Measure what matters, not what’s easy – use metrics that the CEO and CFO will genuinely care about. Pipeline, lead generation, increased revenue from existing accounts and new business. You will be measuring a lot of other things too, but these are the numbers they want to understand your contribution to.
3. Use the right language – talk about investment rather than spend. Argue a solid business case. Focus on short term ROMI (sales leads for today) and longer term ROMI (an easier selling environment for tomorrow). Explain for each budget line what you are targeting the return on investment to be and why.
4. Help the CFO achieve his/her ends – suggest that the marketing spend be amortised as the benefit is realised. We’ve also seen a number of companies who account for their marketing spend only when they see the actual benefit from the campaign (typically when the deliverables hit).
5. Use standard sales terminology – map your programmes against the sales funnel, visually if possible, showing how your plans will contribute to driving prospects through that funnel.
6. Get the sales director behind you – if you’re already delivering leads, use this to support your case. If not, make a start on sales-approved programmes and use the sales director to support your case before the meeting.
7. Don’t forget to map against profitability targets as well as revenue targets. Demonstrate how your programmes will increase average sale per customer, keep customers loyal for longer or retain more of them.
8. The CFO can’t argue with what the customer is saying. Poll your customer and prospect base about what they want and expect from you marketing-wise. Take visuals in with you to demonstrate what is needed. See my recent post on how CIOs like to be marketed to as an example of the kind of first-hand information you can use to back up your case.
9. Remember to sell the plan just as hard as you explain it. Enthusiasm is infectious.

• I’m interested primarily in content and information that will help me do my job. If you can help solve the problem I’ve been grappling with in the car on the way in to work then I’ll listen to you.
• The strength of the proposition is not always the key determinant here; more important is the timing of the proposition and how relevant it is to me and my priorities.
• Be prompt and to the point. I want information, but I don’t want to spend too long getting it.
• Demonstrate a personal understanding of my business. Show you appreciate my company’s stated corporate direction and its market challenges.
• Make me feel obliged to respond, make the effort by investing time in helping me.
• If you can’t get me directly, the best way in is through a member of my team or my PA.
• I listen a lot to my ‘customers’ in the business, so you can always reach me through them – maybe they will be first people in the company to recognise the issue we have.
• Engage with me on a business level, don’t talk technical.
• Respect my team. If I ask you to deal with someone else there’s a good reason for it.
• Give me great content – sexy channels like podcasts are good, but I’ll only want the content if it’s useful to me
• I want to network with my peers, and hear their stories. Help facilitate that for me.
• My next step needs to be clear – if you’re asking me to do something (from taking a meeting to requesting a document), it needs to be easy for me to do and pitched to sound as valuable as possible.