One of marketing’s biggest challenges is demonstrating its value to sales so that salespeople not only appreciate what marketing can do, but also take full advantage of marketing’s capabilities. As we stated last May at our annual Summit, in b-to-b marketing the fifth “P” (along with price, place, product and promotion) is sales productivity. While marketing has strategic roles in developing awareness and creating demand, it is also tasked with enabling sales to become more productive. Consider these facts:

• The average salesperson is face-to-face selling only 18 to 20 percent of the time.
• Salespeople spend 20 to 35 percent of their time researching, preparing for calls and doing administrative work.
• The average rep needs 7 to 16 qualified leads to close one deal.

Since it seems clear that sales can use marketing’s help, the obvious question is: Why the disconnect?

The reality is that most sales teams are “heads down” doing their work and, frankly, don’t even know how to ask marketing for help. In addition, with so much having changed in marketing during the last five years, it’s difficult sometimes to communicate the breadth of opportunity marketing offers to impact sales.

While we believe that it’s up to marketing to start the conversation, this should not begin with marketing “talking up” what it has to offer. Instead, marketing should make time to listen to sales and then provide feedback in sales language to describe the specific marketing programs that sales can leverage. Communicate these programs by sales segment (e.g. channel, commercial, major accounts, small and midsized businesses) and explain in specific terms how each marketing program can help.

For example, let’s say you meet with a variety of sales teams and listen to the issues they raise. You can then circle back to share with them what you understood to be their most pressing concerns, and explain how marketing programs align to these concerns, as shown in the diagram below.

This approach will help sales ask more questions of marketing in the context of their key issues. After looking at this diagram, a major account manager might say, “I need more enablement and targeting,” while a territory-based rep might ask for more demand generation. These responses would then lead to deeper discussions of how sales can leverage each marketing program. The best practice here is to create a productive platform for discussion, and to gain credibility by first listening to sales and then following up.

During a recent client forum, I asked our audience of marketing and sales executives two questions:

• How many of you are experiencing buying processes where customers have taken greater control of that process, inviting them later to the decision process, and increasingly making the decision around selling product to the “technical” buyer?
• How many of you have internal initiatives underway to move your marketing and sales approach away from being product-centric and making it more solutions-centric, with a focus on engaging senior executives to sell the business value of their solutions?

In each instance, a good number of hands were raised. In those two sets of questions/responses lies the essence of one of the greatest challenges facing marketing and sales organizations today; in a world where buyers look to take control, push decisions “down the value chain” and make it all about product, how do you climb higher in their organizations and sell solutions to senior-level executives? Facing this challenge starts with understanding how customers are making these decisions, and what will be required by marketing and sales to “swim upstream” around that decision process.

Let’s take an example. The CEO of a large technology company has charged the CMO with improving client retention. As part of this strategy, the CMO and his/her colleagues agree that as part of this initiative, it will be vital to monitor what customers are saying about their brand on the Web. They agree on the need for an analytics tool that will collect/analyze this type of Web data; IT, informed of the request, then conducts extensive research and builds out the requirements/specs of what they’re looking for — producing an RFP that’s sent out to vendors who are finally invited into the buying process.

Now, let’s say you are VP of marketing/sales for a Web analytics tool provider and one of your salespeople received that RFP. Let’s also say that competitive differentiation with your analytics tool is its ability to link with CRM applications, thus allowing a company not just to monitor what’s said about their brand, but to take action in response to it. The “technical” buyer (in this case IT) does not care about this feature and benefit — their main focus is core functionality (which you have) and cost (where you are traditionally higher). The need has been “preordained.” However, that CMO tasked to improve customer retention would definitely be interested in both feature and benefit, as well as the value it could deliver. Unfortunately, they’re out of the buying process.

Your rep is left with two choices: do I play by the rules as constituted and hope for the best; or do I look to re-engineer the buying process, engage the CMO, and reframe his/her idea of the solution? While there are certainly times you may choose the first choice (e.g., the risk of alienating the IT buyer could cost you significant future business), let’s assume your rep picked the second; how does he/she make this challenging trip “upstream” work?

Here’s what marketing and sales readiness will need to do:

• Launch campaigns specifically targeted to senior-level decision-makers addressing key pain points and needs
• Create a “knowledge repository” for sales to access information about the industries and roles they sell into
• Help craft solution-oriented messaging
• Create content and tools to be used during the sales process
• Focus skills training for reps around how to access and engage at a senior level

What sales will need to do:

• Understand how to gain access to senior-level decision-makers (e.g., by developing a champion)
• Gather enough background and insights on the account to be knowledgeable
• Conduct a call with the senior-level executive that will demonstrate an understanding of their business, objectives, issues and specific needs
• Link proposed solutions with the business value it will provide to the executive

Good selling!

How’s your budget? Is it everything you hoped for or wished for? In most cases, the answer year in and year out is “No.” And that’s to be expected when various business functions within your organization are competing for a limited amount of funding. It is a zero-sum game; more funding for one area means less for another. Even in good times — when revenue and profits are growing at a healthy clip — departments are doing all they can to maintain, if not fuel, even more growth. But in these recent difficult times, the competition for budget funding has been much more intense. Areas such as marketing and administrative get cut in favor of areas like sales and product/solution development. Less advertising and marketing activities are done while more sales reps are hired in hopes of lowering costs and increasing revenue.

Easy enough, but at what point does less B2B marketing investment actually result in less sales? What happens when a company no longer attends or hosts the events and activities that sales reps rely on to qualify and win deals? Fewer white papers and Webcasts gathering interest and educating prospects at the beginning of the buyer’s journey, less case studies and reference accounts in the middle of the solution exploration phase, and fewer live events and Web-enabled product demonstrations during the final decision phase. Sales reps are increasingly forced to go it alone and often end up doing what marketing used to do (e.g., host live events to help close deals), which means less time actually selling and winning.

So, instead of fighting against other business functions, why not get smart and stand together to fight the competition? That requires marketing and sales to understand the direct impact that certain marketing activities have on sourcing and influencing the sales pipeline. That requires marketing and sales to understand which marketing activities are most effective at finding, qualifying and closing deals. That requires sales to tell marketing what and when it needs things. That requires clean and clear processes and agreements between marketing and sales, tracking of activities and proper attribution, supportive and integrated systems and tools, and effective reporting capabilities. And that requires a marketing function that is capable, properly funded and up for the challenge. If marketing knows that sales needs more new leads in certain industries or regions then it should invest in activities designed to generate more new leads. If sales reps tell marketing that they need more programs designed to accelerate leads toward the bottom of the pipeline then marketing needs to be able to respond and target events and collateral at those opportunities.

Lots of “ifs” in those statements, but the resulting “thens” are clear. When sales knows the impact of what marketing does and uses that to communicate back what and when it needs help, then sales is more productive and effective — such as a higher percentage of sales pipeline sourced and influenced by marketing, improved close rates, higher percentage of time selling, faster deal velocity, and higher average selling prices — and marketing is more impactful and viewed as a valuable, enabling accomplice rather than just another department fighting for limited funding. It is always better to have a willing and invested accomplice standing with you rather than against you.