At a strategic level, aligning sales and marketing can mean embarking on a major organisational change programme. Sometimes it only happens when there’s a change in personnel at the top. Waiting and hoping for that to happen can be very frustrating for professional marketers ‘stuck’ in a company that doesn’t give them scope to make a difference to business results.

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.

James Gardner, CTO at DWP, is writing an e-book about what the enterprise sales process looks like from the buyer’s point of view. (The chapter on Tricks Vendors Play to get a first foot in the door promises to be particularly interesting…)

A recent extract posted on his blog talks about the tell-tale signs of a ‘gone native Account Director‘ (an Account Director who feels they work for the client organisation rather than their own, is building a true partnership with their customer, and is embarrassed by any overt attempts to sell to the client because they believe the client will bring opportunities to them rather than the other way round).

Now I’m putting words into James’ mouth here, but he seems to be saying that going native is a good thing for an Account Director – and ultimately for the sales operation they work in – because a true partner will end up with more (or better quality) business than they would have done through hard selling.

I would suggest that Marketing needs to think about the same principles too. We know for a fact that the campaigns we run work best when they “don’t feel like marketing” to the end audience – that’s a key principle of course for social media and it’s always been valid in real life too. But it’s very difficult to achieve, and only possible I would argue if you start from

• a real interest in the issues of the marketplace;
• combined with a deep belief that things could be better for that marketplace if they thought more about what you have to offer;
• and an interest/affinity for the people you believe you can help.

Those are the defining beliefs of pretty much all the best marketers I know. Start from anywhere else, and the sales objectives you’re trying to support will be blatantly obvious – to such an extent that they will switch off the audience. So much so that I find myself getting embarrassed when I see examples of marketing that add nothing to a bare sales message, or are obviously trying to promote a course of action that will result in a sale. (I’ll pick out some examples of this from advertising in this month’s Harvard Business Review in an upcoming post.)

Now this isn’t to say that Marketing shouldn’t be about supporting sales objectives – if it isn’t helping to sell today or creating a better sales environment for tomorrow, then it doesn’t have any reason to exist. But the point is that – for the ‘gone-native Marketer’ – successfully driving sales is inextricably tied to the belief that their product/service can make the world a better place, a desire to find opportunities to make this happen, and a deep interest in the people whose world they can improve.

It has been said, (if it hasn’t, then we’ll say it) that the best marketing is about taking the cream of your sales team’s capabilities in one-to-one sales and turning this into a mass-market lead generation machine. This tends to be why the best campaigns involve a close marketing-sales partnership to understand how to position offerings, view the competition, differentiate themselves and drive prospects through the sales funnel.

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?

Locking horns with the CFO or CEO over B2B marketing budgets? Here are 9 ways to argue a strong case.

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.