Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 76—April 17th, 2007)

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Integrating Marketing and Sales: Serving Your
Number One Client

By Rick Kean

The issue of marketing measurement and accountability is the hot topic these days whenever you see articles, newsletters, white papers, conferences and seminars on business-to-business marketing—yet nobody seems to have the answer we can all agree on. In the business-to-business environment, real accountability can only happen when Marketing and Sales are in sync, and made to recognize that they’re both parts of a single, continuous process.

Marketing and Sales reach true integration when they both work together to create a chain of absolute measurement and accountability. This is so because each part of the business process of marketing and selling a product or service can then be tracked and analyzed. This integration also allows identification of how and where each department, activity and person involved in the process adds (or subtracts) value. As a result, we can quantify which activities generate how much revenue, and how and where they do it. That’s accountability.

So even though Marketing and Sales often seem to be at each other’s throats, they can be integrated; when this happens, the result can be pure magic.

Some Fundamental Truths About Qualifying and Valuing Potential Prospects

Here are a few truths about the marketing and sales process that can help us better demonstrate how these functions can be integrated:

• Marketing without measurement is a cost, not an investment: A cost is an expense that cannot be directly tied to a revenue stream. Many marketers have created a world without measurement and accountability, with a fuzzy relationship between what we spend on marketing that has made marketing programs in many companies a cost item that can be cut arbitrarily. By contrast, an investment is an expense that produces income. Marketing can only be an investment if it can be measured, and if income can be linked to the marketing expense that generated the income;

• Selling is a process: In a B2B environment, Marketing has the responsibility of attracting potential prospects, and preparing these prospects to be sold. The selling process may be broken down into stages, and prospects within those stages can be qualified, depending on the probability they will purchase;

• What’s your lifetime customer value? The probability a customer will purchase, multiplied by the average lifetime value of a customer, yields the probable revenue stream created by the marketing process. If a sales prospect is suspected of having a low need for your product or service, the probability that prospect will ever become a customer is very low. Marketing and Sales need to have systems in place to identify and sort out these prospects, and to focus instead on working with prospects who can become customers;

• Marketing’s role extends through the entire selling process: If a prospect takes some sort of positive action as a result of the marketing process, most commonly by responding to ads and mailings, Sales qualifies the prospect by assessing the prospect’s perceived needs against the value of your product or service to determine the quality of the match, and then takes the steps necessary to educate the customer on that value, which is also partly the responsibility of Marketing. This qualification and education process increases the odds the prospect will become a customer and forms the basis for determining the Marketing department’s contribution to the revenue stream. The same is true in cases where existing customers increase their purchases as a result of marketing promotions targeted to existing customers

Marketing Creates an Environment for Sales

In an ideal world, marketers not only generate sales leads for the company’s sales team, they create and define opportunities that put salespeople in a situation where they can make the sale. This is done not only by developing and executing the initial ad, mailing, or other initial marketing activity, but throughout the process of communication and dealing with the prospect. 

It’s supposed to work like this: Marketing sets the stage, creates a positive perception, and generates the lead through the marketing program, but ultimately it takes the sales team to get the order.

Likewise, a sales team talks value, numbers, and provides promises of delivery, but it relies on marketing to build a clear understanding of the company, its reputation and its place in the market. Marketing establishes the right environment for sales.

Getting Marketing and Sales on the Same Page

Several things have to happen for Marketing and Sales to get on the same page:

• Marketing managers must tap their sales teams for information: The sales force must be an information source for Marketing, and must define the selling problems for each particular type of customer or potential customer. Marketers, in turn, need to actively solicit information from the salespeople, and give that information the weight it deserves when making decisions on the marketing program;
  
• Marketers must be active throughout the entire sales cycle: The Marketing department must become involved in the selling process, and must dramatically and effectively communicate product and service benefits (value) to the prospect to help prospects become informed potential customers. Getting Marketing involved in the core of the sales process expands Marketing’s mission, and lets the Sales department gain a fuller appreciation of what Marketing does. It also gives Marketing a better understanding of the challenges faced by Sales;
  
• Information-sharing is a good thing: Marketing and Sales must both share information throughout the marketing and selling process. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems make this easier to accomplish, and by having everyone use the same data, full accountability becomes possible. And that information makes it easier to establish lifetime customer value, which makes it easier for everyone to see which marketing activity is actually responsible for a given sale;
  
• Measurement doesn’t stop at counting sales leads: Way too many marketing teams focus on just the first two steps in the sales process—awareness and consideration—yet do nothing for the preference and purchase phases of the marketing process. They take comfort in the belief that their job is primarily to influence success, not to drive it. So it’s entirely possible, at least in their own minds, to claim success for a marketing program without seeing a direct net increase in sales;
  
• Chasing “awareness” makes Marketing irrelevant to Sales: As marketing becomes less about top-line revenue (i.e., sales) and more about “brand” or “awareness,” linkage to the sales team’s need to actually drive revenue breaks down. And then a huge inefficiency starts to occur as sales, left without any real support on the preference and purchase phases, creates their own marketing services organization, often referred to as “field marketing.” The time has come for B2B marketers to show they can build programs that drive a sales number as well as an awareness number;
  
• Getting it done makes marketers instrumental: If we want to elevate our status from corporate bullhorn to driver of our company’s go-to-market strategies and tactics, we need to focus on two core goals: 1.) Feeding the sales machine today, and 2.) Driving the strategic push to define what’s next. In other words, we need to be doers, not dreamers;
  
• Marketing sees that customers are treated well: Marketing has to assume some responsibility for customer satisfaction, which is a critical part of the customer’s lifetime value. Marketing’s role must extend throughout the selling process and into the full-term of the relationship with the customer. Marketing can’t just be part of the front end.

It’s becoming widely accepted that the most effective measure of marketing ROI is its impact on sales. Marketing should be viewed as an enabler, not part of the power struggle.  Because Sales, not marketing, is rightly or wrongly perceived as the function responsible for generating revenue, in any company where Marketing ceases to become an enabler and focuses more on power struggles with Sales, Marketing will lose.  And as a marketer, you can significantly increase your job security by aligning with and supporting the sales organization.

For marketing managers and those on the agency side who serve them, delivering results matters. So does thinking strategically, being persuasive, politically adroit, and having a significantly broader organizational awareness. So, you can forget the theoretical marketing mumbo-jumbo espoused by consultants and the writers of marketing textbooks. Supporting Sales is Marketing’s real job, and, as a marketing professional, your company’s sales staff is your number one client.

Rick Kean, CBC, is Managing Director of the Business Marketing Institute, the Web-based skills building center for business-to-business marketers and marketing communicators. He can be reached at rkean@businessmarketinginstitute.com or at 312-371-5663.