Posted by Bob Apollo on Tue, Mar 09, 2010
In today's business climate, useful or important needs might help to get a vendor considered or evaluated, but only urgent needs will get them bought. So it's become critical that sales people are able to elevate the prospect’s need for their solution. This ability to identify or create urgent needs makes all the difference between successful and unsuccessful sales people, and between companies who lead their markets or follow as also-rans.
In fact, I’ve observed that the inability to distinguish between useful, important and urgent needs, or to elevate a prospect’s need for the solution from useful or important to urgent lies at the heart of many sales pipeline challenges.
Why not just look for urgent needs?
Given this, why wouldn’t sales people and vendors concentrate solely on trying to find prospects with urgent needs? There are a couple of reasons why this is not an effective strategy – first, prospects with urgent needs are often already in an active sales cycle with another vendor’s fingerprints all over it and second, urgent needs often have personal, painful and emotional dimensions, and getting prospects to acknowledge this in a first contact may be challenging.
Distinguishing between useful, important and urgent needs...
Useful needs drive curiosity, generate interest and can be helpful in initiating buying processes. Important needs drive consideration, cause evaluation and can be helpful in stimulating evaluation. Urgent needs drive action, lead to purchase and are essential to concluding the sales process. A key way of distinguishing between the different levels of need is to get the prospect to describe the potential impact of not dealing with them.
Useful needs are often irritants without clear economic consequences. Important and urgent needs typically have some measurable economic impact, but the things that differentiate urgent needs include escalating economic impact the longer the issue remains unresolved, the number of people affected, and explicit linkages to “top of list” personal or corporate goals.
The consequences of inaction...
Clearly defined consequences of inaction are an essential foundation for urgency. Faced with an acknowledged prospect need, sales people must establish how the prospect may have tried to deal with the issue before, why now is the right time to address it, who else within the prospect organisation is affected by the issue and – most critically - what would happen if they fail to deal with the issue soon.
It’s rare for needs to be elevated to urgent status unless the economic consequences of not dealing with them have been acknowledged by a sufficiently powerful champion within the prospect. These economic consequences don’t just revolve around the opportunity to reduce cost – they can also relate to missed revenue opportunities.
Qualifying for urgency...
So, with a very few exceptions, if the pain cannot be monetised, persuading the prospect to invest in solving the problem is going to be an uphill battle. In fact, a growing number of our clients have adopted the approach that sales opportunities cannot be valued and should not be forecasted unless and until the pain has been monetised and acknowledged by the prospect.
This has interesting consequences: applying the rule at first reduces the perceived value of the sales pipeline - but in the absence of urgency the affected opportunities were almost always overvalued anyway. It also forces the sales person to think carefully about how to elevate the urgency of the prospect’s need or (if this cannot be achieved) to accept that a longer-term “nurturing” strategy may be more appropriate. Either way, forecasting accuracy inevitably rises.
Consider this...
What proportion of the prospects in your current pipeline have acknowledged urgent needs, and are you able to help them to monetise the consequences of inaction? Are your sales people able to accurately distinguish between useful, important and urgent needs? What are you doing to help elevate your prospect's need for your solution, and how are you dealing with opportunities that seem to have no current urgent need? And does your current sales forecast include prospects who have not yet acknowledged the cost associated with preserving the status quo?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Fri, Mar 05, 2010
Thought leading companies are able to evangelise a better future for the markets and prospects they address, and to articulate a clear and compelling vision of the role that their organisation intends to play in helping them achieve it. Companies that accomplish this rise to the top of their markets by generating a magnetic attraction that draws potential prospects towards them.
In a world where prospects prefer to conduct their own research before they decide which vendors to approach, companies who acquire a visionary status and develop a reputation for thought leadership emerge with dramatic advantages over their competition.
Small, thoughtful, agile companies are able to “punch above their weight” because the competitive playing field has been levelled to the point where an organisation’s reputation is driven more by the quality of their thinking rather than the quantity of their marketing spend.
Vision - or hallucination?
Evangelism is increasingly important in today’s business environment. Where there is no vision, companies perish – and leads dry up. But it’s also been said with some justification that there is no more than a narrow line between vision and hallucination, and this is every bit as true of corporations as it is of individuals.
The most compelling corporate visions are externally-biased and revolve around the desired future state of the markets that companies have chosen to serve. Conversely, the most ineffective corporate hallucinations are internally-biased, and revolve around the company’s aspirations without regard for their prospect’s priorities.
Your prospects understand this instinctively – and they are a lot less interested in hearing about you than they are in learning what you can do for them.
Crafting the vision...
Compelling visions start with the end in mind. They enable vendors to filter out the noise and concentrate on what’s important to win over their markets. They make it easy to evaluate ideas, make decisions and prioritise actions. They resonate with your most valuable prospects. And they make “what’s important” obvious to employees at every level.
When we work with clients to craft compelling visions, we ask them to start by defining the markets they want to lead, and to imagine what success would look like. We encourage them to describe what they do, and how they do it better, with exceptional clarity. We help them filter out the “me too” phrases and techno-babble that pervades so many weak vision statements.
Living the vision...
Your vision should lie at the heart of everything you say to the marketplace. Establishing a consistent, relevant vision has a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of individual communications, and on your attractiveness to the prospects you are trying to reach. It needs to drive not only your marketing communications, but also your sales conversations.
In fact, whenever any employee or business partner is asked to describe what your company does or what it stands for, the same consistent message should shine through. Having dozens of “elevator pitches”, all different, is no way to create confidence in your company’s ability to help your customers and prospects navigate their way to a better future state.
Consider this...
Is your current corporate vision better classified as a vision or a hallucination? Is it about your company, or is it about the better future you are creating for your markets and prospects? And is it consistently reflected in every communication between your company and its' current and future stakeholders, customers, prospects and partners?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Wed, Mar 03, 2010
According to CSO Insights’ recently published annual sales performance optimisation study, the number of sales people making quota and the percentage of sales organisations achieving their revenue targets both declined faster in 2009 than at any time during the past 16 years.
Sales organisations are reporting extended sales cycles, declining win rates, and that a growing number of apparently promising opportunities are ending in “no decision”. At the same time, they observe that their prospect’s budgets appear to be shrinking, that more players are involved in the decision making process, and that their buyers are exhibiting increasingly risk-averse behaviour.
Product hype and sales pressure are losing strategies...
Faced with an increasingly pragmatic mainstream market, claiming better/faster/cheaper product capabilities isn’t going to have much of an impact – it’s become all too easy for competitors to claim “me too” functionality, and anyway, most buyers are looking for solutions they can have confidence in rather than features they might not understand.
It’s becoming equally clear that “selling and marketing harder” isn’t going to improve matters unless a dramatically different approach is taken. Buyers have become immune to hyped-up marketing claims and manipulative sales techniques. Prospects are still keen to learn, but have come to hate being pitched to. We’re all going to have to learn to sell and market smarter.
Re-architecting the sales and marketing process...
Faced with the realities of today’s markets, I’d go so far as to suggest that for many organisations nothing short of a radical re-architecting of their sales and marketing process is going to suffice – based around a profound understanding of today’s prospect priorities and buying processes.
I want to put forward three simple ideas that seem to be delivering dramatic results for the growing number of companies that have embraced them. They all depend upon an important change in mindset, since they revolve around facilitating the buying process - rather than driving the sales process.
1: Evangelise a better future...
The first step is to envision a better future for your customers and prospects, and to articulate the role that your organisation is going to play in helping them achieve it. For maximum impact, this vision needs to be crafted outside-in (around what your solutions can help your customers to accomplish) rather than inside-out (around what you do – much less compelling!).
It’s often said that there is a narrow line between vision and hallucination, but companies who prove to be powerful evangelists with a clear and compelling vision invariably emerge as thought leaders in their markets - and are able to generate a magnetic inbound attraction for potential prospects (and other key members of the BuyerSphere) who want to learn more.
So - what is your vision of a better future for your customers, and what is your role going to be in helping them achieve it? And how are you evangelising this vision to them?
2: Elevate the need for your solution...
You may have identified a prospect need – but unless the need is urgent, you are unlikely to translate this into a decision to buy. This is one of the major reasons why apparently promising opportunities end in a decision to “do nothing”. Interesting needs are often enough to get your solution considered, important needs can drive formal evaluations, but in today’s business environment only urgent needs drive a decision to buy.
Sales people who fail to distinguish between interesting, important and urgent needs invariably end up wasting their time on too many low-quality opportunities – but sales people who are unable to elevate interesting and important needs to urgent ones will end up with too many “no decisions”. Sales trainers talk of the need to identify a compelling event, but in order to create a compelling reason to buy sales people need to get the prospect to associate a significant cost penalty with maintaining the status quo.
So - how would you categorise your prospect’s typical needs as interesting, important or urgent? And what are you doing to elevate the consequences of inaction?
3: Eliminate barriers to buying...
B2B buying decisions typically evolve through a number of key phases, separated by checkpoints that determine the progress that the prospect is making in their decision making process. Most follow a sequence that looks something like this:
Status quo- Recognising the need for change
- Economic consequences identified?
- Investigating possible options
- Exploring potential solutions
- Decision criteria defined?
- Evaluating formal proposals
- Preferred vendor selected?
- Justifying selection decision
- Implementing solution
The buying process can get stuck in any of the phases – and the checkpoints usually prove to be the bottlenecks. Rather than – as conventional thinking might suggest – trying to drive the sales forward, if the vendor has articulated a compelling vision and the sales person has identified an urgent need, they would be better advised to think in terms of identifying and eliminating the barriers to buying.
When this buyer-centric perspective is applied, it’s usually possible to identify a handful of the most common sticking points, and to create revenue roadblock removing programmes to systematically address them.
So – what are the most common barriers to buying in your prospect’s decision making process? And what are you doing in order to systematically eliminate them?
You can download an extended pdf version of this article here...
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Last week I took part - together with 30+ senior sales and marketing executives from the technology sector - in an excellent discussion hosted by Richard Eldh of Sirius Decisions on the topic of sales and marketing alignment.
The audience included experience of everything from early stage start-ups to mature market leaders – a spectrum I’ve written about in a recent blog about "The Jungle, the Footpath and the Highway".
Crossing the Chasm Revisited
Richard offered an idea which I’d like to develop here, because I believe it lies at the very heart of making intelligent decisions about sales and marketing strategy. In fact, the Sirius perspective is that it provides the essential foundation for all sales and marketing efforts.
I imagine anyone in high tech will be familiar with Geoffrey Moore’s characterisation of technology markets as evolving from early adopters and then crossing the chasm (with varying degrees of success) to address mainstream and - ultimately - laggard buyers.
New Concepts, New Paradigms and Established Categories...
Sirius presented the idea of the “demand spectrum”, and identified three categories – new concepts, new paradigms and established markets. For reasons that may become apparent later, I've tended to use "established category" for the latter.
As you’ll see in a moment, it’s clear that the behaviour of both buyers and sellers changes significantly between demand types, and that making the wrong assumptions – or choosing the wrong strategies – can wreak serious damage to an organisation’s sales and marketing effectiveness.
I’d like to offer my interpretation – drawn from experiences and observations of a growing number of B2B clients – as to how the idea of the demand spectrum can and should drive sales and marketing strategy.
New Concepts
New concepts are truly disruptive product or service offerings. They either solve a new problem which has so far been unrecognised by the market or – perhaps more likely – open up a potentially important new opportunity. Budgets are unlikely to exist – they will have to be created. The solution category is unlikely to be widely recognised – so educating the market is critical.
Without obvious reference points in the market, vendors introducing new concepts have to fire the imagination of their potential prospect champions, who will almost always be forward thinking executives for whom the new concept will help them achieve a breakthrough goal. It’s hard to achieve this without effective issue and thought leadership of a world without reference points.
My take? Without existing category reference points, the potential market needs to educated - or more accurately inspired - about the potential of the concept to help them address a critical business goal.
New Paradigms
New paradigms offer innovative ways of addressing an already recognised problem or opportunity. Unlike new concepts, with new paradigms at least some of the reference points exist – the category of problem is already understood and accepted as important by the market place. It’s the way in which the problem is solved that is innovative – perhaps bordering on the disruptive.
One of the best examples of the introduction of new paradigms is CRM delivered through software as a service, exemplified by Salesforce.com. CRM was already seem as an important function, albeit one that often cost too much, took too long or failed to deliver the promised results. With this as a reference point, Salesforce were able to show that their distinctively different approach delivered dramatically better results.
My Take? The market did not need to be told about the problem – they needed to be educated that there was, in fact, a better way of solving it.
Established Categories
The third group - established categories - represents the vast majority of product and service offerings. The problem that they solve is well understood, and they fall within a well-recognised and clearly defined category of solution, so there is no need to educate the market on the need for the solution. But because of this, the market is also crowded and fiercely contested.
Vendors are milling around in the market, all trying to steal market share from each other. The question is not whether the problem needs addressing, but rather when to solve it (urgency) and which vendor to solve it with. It seems to me that vendors in this market have two choices – to either out execute their competitors in a head to head battle, or to outsmart the opposition.
My take? If you're not already the category leader, I’m a great fan of the second approach - helping your prospect to rethink the problem in a way which de-commoditises the situation and differentiates you as a vendor in a meaningful way.
Where do you sit on the spectrum?
So – where are your products or services positioned along the demand spectrum? Are they new concepts, new paradigms or established markets? And are you consciously tuning your sales and marketing activities accordingly? If not, what's holding you back?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Feb 04, 2010
CSO Insights recently released their annual Sales Performance Optimisation study – and the results make for sobering reading. Their global survey of more than 2,800 companies revealed dramatic declines in average sale performance.
According to CSO Insights, the percentage of reps making quota fell from 58.8% to 51.8%, and overall revenue attainment vs. plan dropped from 85.9% to 77.9%. At the same time, lead generation budgets were being frozen or reduced in more than two-thirds of the companies surveyed, training budgets fell, and investments in sales enablement technologies were curtailed.
You can't cut your way to success...
As CSO Insights point out, most firms increased sales quotas from 2008-2009 – and then tried to “cut their way to success” by reducing budgets – a strategy that has manifestly failed. 85% of the firms surveyed have now raised sales quotas again for 2010, without significantly changing their behaviour. You’ve got to wonder whether they are about to have a Groundhog Day experience.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Now, I’m not arguing that organisations thoughtlessly throw money at the problem – but I believe the only way that companies are going to dig themselves out of this hole is to get smart and have a ground-up rethink of the sales and marketing process from the buyer’s perspective and eliminate anything that isn’t creating customer value.
Eliminating wasted effort...
It’s not as if there isn’t a lot of well-meaning but wasted effort that could be redirected. The American Marketing Association, in a series of studies, concluded that between 80-90% of all sales collateral played no useful role in the buying process. Frequent failures to get marketing and sales organisations to agree what constitutes a “sales ready lead” cause similarly dramatic wastes of money and effort. Investing huge amounts of effort on deals that at the end of the day decide to do nothing is a third example. You can probably think of many others.
I’m going to suggest that it’s time to take an evidence-based approach that clearly defines the characteristics of your most valuable prospects, identifies their most pressing challenges and aligns them with your most powerful capabilities. But perhaps most important, it’s time to align the sales and marketing process around a deep and profound understanding of how and why your potential customers choose to buy.
Step into your prospects' shoes...
How would they describe their problems or challenges? What triggers their search for a solution? Who do they trust when they are looking for advice? What are the key steps they follow in their buying journey, how can you determine what stage they have reached, and what can you do to persuade them to move forward with you? Equally important, what might be holding them back, and what can you do to remove any barriers that might lie in their way?
Armed with these insights, you can focus your efforts on connecting with the right sort of prospects, and on doing the things that are most valuable to them in their buying process. You can concentrate on the issues that really matter to them, and be in a better position to qualify out prospects that are not right for you (or you for them) far earlier in the cycle, and redirect your efforts towards more profitable activity.
Have intelligent conversations...
You can also equip your sales people to have intelligent conversations with informed prospects, to ask diagnostic questions that reveal the true cause of the prospect’s pain rather than simply treating the symptoms, and to help the prospect solve problems, simplify complexity and manage change.
Technology can help - there are a growing number of promising collaboration, social media, networking and new generation CRM solutions that can help facilitate your prospects buying processes. Training can help to equip your sales people to have intelligent, provocative conversations that stimulate prospects to take a fresh perspective. An integrated approach to campaigns, media and sales can also contribute.
Change your perspective...
But first, you have to get the mindset right. It’s not about selling harder, or trying to do more with less without changing what you do. It’s about making it easier for your best prospects to buy from you. If you can get that right, you can break free from the depressing decline in sales productivity. Because you can be sure that your less-smart, less-agile competitors won’t have grasped the seismic change that is happening around them.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Feb 01, 2010
An experienced VC once described the journey that he saw B2B companies going through as the jungle, the winding road, and the highway.
During the initial “
jungle” phase, whilst the company may have successfully sold their initial product offering or service to early adopter customers, every sale still feels hard-won. Like an explorer deep in the jungle, progress involves energetically hacking away at the surrounding undergrowth, but the best way forward is not yet clear. Inevitably, much effort is wasted. Many start-ups – maybe a majority – never get beyond this stage, but those that do find themselves on the winding road...
On the “winding road”, patterns are starting to emerge and a way forward is becoming visible, even if the route is not always completely signposted and still requires widening and straightening. Whilst the general direction is clearer, work still has to be done to ensure that the company can move faster in its intended direction. Companies often broaden their offerings and recruit significant sales forces and or partner channels in the hope that they will speed the organisation’s progress. Many established companies find themselves bogged down by uneven or unpredictable conditions, but a few manage to make it to the final stage...
By the time these companies finally reach the “highway”, their direction is clear – to the point of being difficult to change. Processes have become highly standardised and - in theory - very scalable and repeatable. As long as conditions remain constant, rapid progress can be made. But it’s hard for these organisations to divert from their route, even if the environment changes. Companies that are optimised for the highway can find it challenging to explore the winding roads or jungles that could represent radically new opportunities.
I found his simple metaphor tremendously powerful. As he pointed out, very few founders (with the probable exception of Gates, Dell and Ellison) have managed to successfully steer their companies through these transitions. But it’s not just CEOs that need to adapt – it’s the whole organisation, and I believe that this provides an explanation for why so many apparently promising companies get stuck in either the jungle or the winding road, and why companies who appear to be masters of the highway end up running out of road when markets or technologies move.
Managing to evolve...
The attitudes, skills and experience needed for employees to make the right contributions (and I’m not restricting my remarks to executive leadership here) can vary significantly from one stage to the next. Factors like the ability to work with or without structure or supervision, tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to change and openness to innovation all play their role. Successful companies manage to establish the appropriate culture and bring in the right people at each stage along the way, but one thing is clear – they manage to evolve.
For example, I’ve seen many “winding road” companies accelerate their progress as a result of bringing in a suitably experienced chief operating officer (COO) or equivalent who can complement an entrepreneurial founder by adding the appropriate degree of discipline, focus and alignment. But I’m sure that you’ve also seen many hiring disasters when jungle or winding road companies were tempted to bring in “heavy-hitter” sales leaders from a leading highway-style company who turn out to be completely incapable of delivering results without the support of the infrastructure and brand awareness they have become so accustomed to.
Getting the right people on board...
Having the “right” people on board prior to each transition seems to be vital, as does finding ways of helping existing employees grow with the company. The experience that comes from coping with change often proves to be critical. When adding new talent, the evidence suggests that companies should strive to bring in key people who have successfully (and recently) experienced the transition from the current stage to the next.
The journey isn’t over when the company finds itself on the highway, because as we’ve observed, companies that are optimised for this mode can find it difficult to travel off the beaten track. As Clayton Christensen pointed out in the Innovator’s Dilemma, organisations at this level of maturity can find it hard to exploit radical new opportunities. Adaption - and ultimately, survival - may depend on creating autonomous business units populated by people with a jungle or winding road mindset.
Moving ahead...
So – where is your organisation? Hacking through the jungle, jogging along the winding road, or driving down the highway? And – assuming that you have ambitions to accelerate your progress or move to the next stage, what steps are you taking to ensure that your team is fit for the journey?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Fri, Jan 22, 2010
Gartner have just revealed the results of their annual survey of CIO priorities. It makes fascinating reading when compared to last year’s report. IT spending for the coming year will increase by an average of 1.3% - but that is compared to a dramatic decline of 8.1% in 2009. 2010 IT budgets are back to the levels of 2005 – half a decade’s growth in budget has been wiped out.
From managing resources to managing results...
According to Mark McDonald, Gartner Group VP and head of research for Gartner Executive programs, the role of IT is changing from merely managing resources to taking responsibility for managing results, while the technology focus is shifting from heavy owner-operated solutions to “lighter weight” hosted services.
Business process improvement remains the #1 business priority, followed by reducing costs and improving workforce effectiveness (promoted from last year’s #4 to #3). But the real change in priorities comes on the technology side. Last year, enterprise CRM was the #2 technology priority. In 2010, it does not even make the top 10.
Reshaping the role of IT...
Gartner anticipates that CIOs will change their focus from driving cost-based efficiencies to achieving productivity gains, using collaborative and innovative solutions that leverage services-based and social media technologies, including virtualisation, cloud computing and web 2.0. They see them providing the platform for information and process-intensive solutions that will ultimately reshape the role of IT.
Salesforce.com is one of the more obvious beneficiaries of this change - but there are many others. I suspect that few of us are going to bemoan the passing of traditional “big iron” IT projects that inevitably cost too much, take too long and deliver too little. But what benefits might a more agile, adaptable IT infrastructure bring – and what do we need to do to position ourselves to exploit the potential for improving sales and marketing performance?
From automation to enablement...
I suggest that a great deal of the answer lies in what processes we choose to IT-enable. We need to stop thinking about automating often badly-aligned “sales” and “marketing” processes and seize the opportunity to facilitate our prospect’s buying processes and embrace the dramatic changes that the net and web 2.0 have already made to buyer behaviour.
If we are to take advantage, we’re going to have to do better at connecting with our most valuable prospects and customers, identifying their most pressing problems and understanding how and why they choose to buy. If we can leverage the dramatic change in technology to change how we think about the role of sales and marketing, we’ll create the scope for achieving dramatic gains.
But if all we do is to apply this wave of innovative technology to traditional approaches to the sales and marketing process, we’ll probably still end up spending less money, but on doing the wrong things...
Posted by Bob Apollo on Wed, Jan 13, 2010
What was your 2010 New Year Business resolution? The one I've been hearing most often from Chief Executives and Sales and Marketing leaders is to "get closer to their customers" - which seems like a laudable objective.
Who wouldn't want to? However, it seems that becoming REALLY "customer-centric" or "customer-focused" or "customer aligned" (choose whichever term you prefer) is proving harder than it first appears. The indications are becoming rather too familiar:
- "Customer-Aligned" organisations that still describe themselves in terms of who they are, or what products or services they offer, rather than what they enable their customers to achieve...
- "Customer-Focused" sales people who can't wait to jump in and prescribe their solution the moment the prospect admits to a problem, rather than taking their time to diagnose what may really be going on...
- "Customer-Centric" marketing organisations that still don't have a very clear idea of who their best prospects are, what really matters to them, who they turn to for advice, or how or why they choose to buy...
Dangerous attraction...
The list could go on. It's not because these people, or these companies, refuse to acknowledge the benefits of customer alignment. It's because the systems they work within seem to have a dangerous magnetic attraction that keeps tugging them back to thinking in terms of their company, their products or their services.
I've come to the conclusion that this is a cultural thing, and that changing it is going to require more than sloganising. Where customer-centricity works, there seems to be an institutionalised curiosity about who their most valuable prospects are, what their most pressing issues might be, and how they go about making buying decisions.
The insights within...
The sad thing is, many of these insights already exist with organisations that are struggling to become customer-focused. The front line sales people and other customer-facing employees often have invaluable insights - and would be prepared to share them if only they were asked.
I don't think this is usually an issue of willingness - it's an issue of process. With this in mind, I've recently revamped our methodology to help make it easier for our clients to capture and apply the information.
Download the check list...
But what I'd like to share with you right now is a simple 15-point check-list that captures much of what we've observed. Please download it here. I hope that it might stimulate some fresh perspectives - please drop me a line if you would like to share them with me.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Dec 17, 2009
All the publicity surrounding the Copenhagen Climate Conference has reinforced the world-wide need for sustainable development. It seems clear that this can’t be left to governments alone – we’ve all got a role to play, and a responsibility to avoid wasteful behaviour.
Thinking about how we can all eliminate waste isn’t just good for the environment – it’s a powerful perspective for improving the efficiency and productivity of everything we do. And maybe we can do more with the idea than our politicians seem able to.
Where's the waste?
I’m specifically thinking about how we might establish a framework for sustainable sales and marketing. Ever since John Wanamaker famously complained that “half of my advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half”, marketing has had a deserved reputation as a wasteful endeavour.
Of course the truth of the matter is that a great deal of conventional sales and marketing activity is far more inefficient than even John Wanamaker knew. I’d suggest that in sales and marketing terms, sustainability involves using our resources wisely to generate the maximum customer value with minimum wasted effort.
More Science than Art
I think it is (or should be) pretty obvious to everybody involved that neither marketing nor sales can continue to hide behind a claim that they more art than a science. A series of significant studies from CSO Insights and others have proved the value of repeatable, adaptable process.
In fact, I think it’s legitimate to claim that effective sales and marketing processes foster innovation and creativity rather than suppressing it. So what are the keys to achieving sustainable sales and marketing? Here are three to start with...
Three Recommendations
First: do nothing that is of no value to your customer. This does not have to mean charging them for everything you do – although sooner or later an exchange of tangible value needs to take place. But before conducting any sales or marketing activity you need to carefully consider whether your prospect would be prepared to invest their time or money on the outcome. For example, does that expensively produced piece of sales collateral play any useful role in facilitating the prospect’s buying process? Most (up to 90%, according to a recent study) don’t.
Second: if you are going to lose, make sure you lose early. Chasing deals that are never going to close, or are inevitably heading towards a competitor, is an unbelievably wasteful strategy. Yet sales pipelines around the world are full of these limbo deals. The problem seems to particularly affect middle-of-the-road sales people. The top performers are too smart to waste their time on a losing proposition. The also-rans are too scared to qualify them out because it makes their pipeline look smaller. If you are a sales manager, the single most powerful thing you can do to eliminate waste is to insist on evidence of buyer potential and intent, and to qualify the remaining deals out ruthlessly as early as possible in the sales cycle, and replace them with better ones.
Third: don’t waste your time pushing your products towards the prospect with scattergun marketing campaigns, find ways of getting them to pull you along with them. You’ve got to deeply understand the trigger events that disturb your prospect’s status quo, and you’ve got to ensure that you get found when they start searching for solutions. Rather than focusing on promoting return on investment, help your prospect to recognise the costs and consequences of inaction should they choose to ignore the issue – and ensure that you can demonstrate that you are the lowest risk of all alternative outcomes – including a decision to do nothing.
Lean Thinking
There are many other lessons that sales and marketing could learn from the lean thinking that has already revolutionised manufacturing industry. But don’t be misled into thinking of lean as primarily a cost-cutting exercise. I believe that its’ primary value actually lies in the thoughtful and efficient creation of real customer value, and in refocusing everything else onto more purposeful activity. You can read more about lean sales and marketing here.
What do you think? Is it possible to achieve sustainable sales and marketing? What other strategies have you found helpful in eliminating value, avoiding waste and improving predictability?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Dec 17, 2009
The past year has proved challenging for some sales and marketing organisations, but others have seized the opportunity to rethink their plans, out-execute their competitors and win market share. Our own observations, backed up by the latest research from the likes of McKinsey, Stanford, the HBR, CSO Insights and others, have identified 5 strategies that seem to be particularly relevant as we enter 2010.
These strategies are already enabling top-performing teams to eliminate wasted effort, increase revenue predictability, and improve the return on their sales and marketing investments. We're pleased to share them with you here, in the hope they might prove relevant to your own situation:
How do these strategies align with your own priorities for 2010? We'd love to hear from you. By the way, we've captured some of the key implications in a 15-point checklist which you can download here.
Let me know how you get along...