• Editor's Note
  As summer comes to a close, we all refocus on what we must do to...
  
  
• Featured Article
  Predictions: What Lies Ahead for Sales and Marketing
  
  
• Silver Bullet
  How to Get More of the Channel Sales Forces to Sell Your Product (Part 2)

As summer comes to a close, we all refocus on what we must do to meet/exceed our objectives for the year and start the planning process for next year. This issue's "Silver Bullet" will help you with your short-term objectives and the feature article will help you with your longer-term planning. I think you will agree that the ideas are pragmatic, actionable and highly relevant.

Regards,

Michael Cannon

Michael Cannon is a sales and marketing effectiveness expert, best-selling author and speaker on topics related to sales messaging and the strategic sales planning process. More About Michael - E-mail Michael

Predictions: What Lies Ahead for Sales and Marketing

by Michael Cannon

As companies shift their strategic focus for improving profitability from cost cutting to growing revenues and market share and to gaining/sustaining competitive advantage, the impact of this change is going to affect Sales and Marketing the most. There is going to be a lot more pressure on these departments to be run more like their Manufacturing, Finance, and Operations counterparts.

Sales and Marketing are going to be run more like their Manufacturing, Finance, and Operations counterparts.

Here is how this is going to play out.

Manufacturing has a set of best practices such as ISO and 6-Sigma to improve the effectiveness of the manufacturing process, e.g., higher yields and lower fallout. These processes are then supported by a host of software automation tools such as MRP, ERP, etc.

Finance has a set of best practices such as FASB and Sarbanes-Oxley to improve the financial effectiveness of the company and its financial statements. There is also a host of financial software automation tools to support and improve the effectiveness of the supporting processes.

Operations has yet another set of best practices and software automation tools to support and improve the effectiveness of its processes.

But when you look at the sales and marketing departments, what do you see? You don't see the same process excellence or discipline. What's missing are a formalized set of best practices and the needed software solutions for improving the effectiveness of how these departments generate customers, revenue, and profits.

This is the big change. The Board and the CEO are going to push even harder on Sales and Marketing to deliver a more effective customer/revenue/profit generation process.

The Board and the CEO are going to push even harder on Sales and Marketing to deliver a more effective customer/revenue/profit generation process.

They will want Sales and Marketing to be more aligned around this imperative in order to extract more profit from their sales and marketing investments, and to gain a core competitive advantage.

What this looks like for Sales goes way beyond sales training. Companies are documenting and aligning their customer’s buying processes with their own sales processes, that is, they are documenting the series of conversations or steps that need to occur in order to walk a prospect through the buy/sell process. They are then aligning the appropriate customer messaging, marketing collateral, and sales tools with these revenue generation processes.

Then they’re overlaying new sales automation solutions that help Inside Sales, Field Sales and Channel Partners quickly find and rate these tools; share best practices; and support, enforce, and track these processes. It’s a big shift. What’s occurring is that the art of selling is being forced to work in the context of sales as a core business process — which is the right thing to do.

Marketing is feeling great pressure in this area, too. Marketing ROI and marketing automation are hot topics. Marketing is figuring out how to justify its expenses and tie them to bottom line contributions. They are also implementing methodologies and tools to better align product development investments with helping customers solve meaningful business challenges. They are developing formal processes for demand generation, lead quality, and conversions. They are figuring out how to get better alignment with Sales, such as how to create, produce, and manage more effective deliverables. This means that customer messaging, marketing collateral, sales tools, demand generation activities, and field training are considered integral by Sales in helping it grow the pipeline and win more business.

The art of marketing and selling is being forced to work in the context of core
business processes.

One of the few true breakthrough innovations that is helping Sales and Marketing make this transition is integration of sales messaging. It includes the acknowledgement of sales messaging as a distinct and crucial customer messaging category, a methodology for creating and deploying great sales messaging, and an objective set of principles for evaluating customer messaging quality prior to testing and launch. It’s the one process improvement that makes a meaningful increase in sales and marketing effectiveness, quickly.

For example, Agilent Technologies used sales messaging as a tool to improve the effectiveness of the competitive training developed by Marketing and delivered to Sales. The result: 60% of the sales reps were able to close at least one additional deal in the sales quarter after the training, because of the effectiveness of the new training. The annualized ROI was astronomically high since the same investment generated substantially more revenue. You can read the case study example here.

The Sales and Marketing leaders who recognize the imperative to drive greater process excellence into their organizations will thrive and will position themselves for greater leadership roles. They will also make a significant contribution to improving their profession’s reputation for being highly relevant to accelerating the growth of profitable revenue and market share.

Recommended Resources to Improve Messaging Quality • Free articles about sales messaging at SBG's Resources Center. • Evaluate the effectiveness of your messaging today with the one-hour, on-demand audio training course, Top Ten Principles of Great Sales Messaging, including a 14-page workbook. • Learn how to implement great sales messaging with the 10-page eBriefing, Best Way to Increase Your Sales.

Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned sales and marketing effectiveness expert and best-selling author on topics related to sales messaging and sales planning. For more information, visit www.silverbulletgroup.com or call 925-930-9436.

How to Get More of the Channel Sales Forces

to Sell Your Product (Part 2)

Part I (see Newsletter Volume 3, Number 1) presented a critical messaging distinction that must be made by Product Marketing in order to get a larger percentage of the channel sales forces (Field, Inside and Channel Partners) to sell its product or service.

The next recommendation is to accept — no, embrace — that the channel sales forces are lazy. Or to say it another way, they are revenue-optimization machines, meaning that they want to make the most money for the least amount of work. When you view it like this, it's exactly what a company should want from its sales teams. It can also be a source of real frustration for those marketing teams whose products are difficult and time-consuming to sell.

Instead of complaining and/or using this reality as an excuse for poor results, Product Marketing must do what it takes to make its products easier to sell. The easier they are to sell, the more the sales team will sell them. It's that simple, and ignoring this reality is perilous to your career.

One of the best and fastest ways to make your product easier to sell is to improve the quality of your customer messaging: provide truly compelling, customer business value-based answers to the prospect's primary buying questions and empower Sales to do the same, which is to implement sales messaging.