Sales and Marketing are two teams in business that have seen an explosion of sales enablement technologies, everything from the heavy adoption of CRM systems and marketing automation, to social media, mobile devices, and ubiquitous internet connectivity.
Unfortunately, most are coming to realize that the state of the sales rep is in a continued state of decline, and the role of marketing is in a paradigm shift that, for now, is only making things worse.
The balance of buyer-seller power is tipping favourably towards the buyer, and trends aren’t showing signs of slowing. The solution to the challenges already exists, and though implementation can vary across industries, a turn-key solution may be a click away.
SUMMARY:
- In a majority of firms, sales and marketing operate in silos, and content flow is one way
- Digital content marketing is a dominating trend among marketing teams, and will continue
- The explosive growth is resulting in poor quality content that is abundant
- Buyers are beginning to be turned off from vendor content
- Sales reps are drowning in useless content, and spend time making their own
- Marketing ROI is deteriorating from poor delivery of content management
- The proven solution is to align sales and marketing teams, which is easier said than done
- Closed Loop Marketing (a turn-key solution) naturally encourages alignment by enabling visibility
- The results of CLM implementation are similar to non-CLM alignment practices
Sales and Marketing, a tale of two cities,
In a majority of companies, Sales and Marketing tend to operate as silos with any variety of separate agendas, performance metrics, training, processes, terms, reporting, and accountability. (Source: Marketo)
This kind of operation is less than ideal, especially considering the two teams share not only identical end-goal objectives, but also identical operational focuses.
1) Both teams look to increasing sales, revenue, share of market, and growth of the company
2) Both teams look to add value and attract a purchase decision from the target market
Now you could define those two goals in any number of ways, but broadly speaking, marketing and sales both deal with the target market, and look to sustain the inflow of revenue.
In fact, the only reason there isn’t more sales and marketing alignment is because of the scope or degree of interaction, rather than some level of significant difference between the two.
Marketing is generally a one-to-many level of interaction, with a scope of encouraging awareness, advocacy, or purchase interest.
Sales is generally a one-to-one level of interactions, with a scope of developing the buyer’s decision journey and creating a total sales solution.
Operations of Sales and Marketing
It isn’t a secret that Sales and Marketing work as separate departments, there are entire studies dedicated to understanding the impact of this relationship.
But studies and opinions aside, the fact that both groups work as separate teams is entirely detrimental to the sales process and customer value delivery. The long term result of this type of set-up is that both teams develop newer and newer strategies that aren’t in synergy with the other department.
Marketing Shift to Inbound Content Strategies
Marketing teams are always looking to delight the buyer by reacting to changes in the marketing environment and delivering new and innovative ways of capturing attention. As the world moves to digital, social media grows in reach and popularity, and buyers demand more online interaction, Marketers naturally move to implement more digital marketing solutions.
- 78% of Marketers see major changes happening in the next 5 years
- Digital will account for more than 76% of Marketing budgets in the next 5 years
- 86% see digital as of a strategic importance (Source: CMO Insights)
- 8/10 companies world-wide are participating in inbound marketing (Source: Hubspot)
Content management is going to become a major hurdle for marketing teams, no doubt, as over time, a strategy that focuses on creating content will undoubtedly result in massive warehouses of content to oversee and distribute.
But content development by marketing teams is having an incredibly negative impact on the buyer. It’s not unlike poor quality television or radio ads that make your insides cringe. When everyone participates in content development, there is bound to be some… growing pains.
Unfortunately, growing pains are one thing, but what we have here today is more like a race to publish mass amounts of content in order to out-weigh the competition in SEO.
A great phrase being thrown around today is “random acts of content development”.
Buyer’s Aren’t Naïve!
But the threat of random acts of content development is more severe than many imagine. Buyers are beginning to realize that vendor content often (not always) features information which is poorly composed, generic, self-serving, overly-technical and thus lacking usefulness, and sometimes just blatantly overselling. (Source: Zambito, T.)
Somewhere along the lines, content management and creation has turned into a sport of retrofitting traditional marketing messages, and sandwiching it with keywords. B2B buyers are smart people, and as they read vendor content in an effort to learn, they actually tend to get turned off the brand as a whole.
Buyers are shying away from vendor content
The disaster scenario is upon us, Marketing teams are squandering away the exceptionally valuable asset of inbound marketing because of poor investments in inbound strategies, just like bad radio ads stem from companies with poor communications strategies.
The majority of buyers are now opting for content from professional associations and groups with no particular interest in any one vendor. (Source: CMO Council) This means that even off-beat bloggers could capture more attention than your vendor content.
Trust Based Relationship Sales… Isn’t
Marketing not only creates content for customers, they do for Sales teams as well. The content may or may not be the same as that the customer facing content.
Marketing teams use their research insights to make content that sales teams can use during a sales presentation, and throughout the entire sales process.
The flow is typically one-way, meaning that marketing creates the content for both sales and customers, and sends the sales content, as well as leads generated by marketing content, to the sales team to close the deal.
Sales Aren’t Included in Planning
- Only 14% of reps indicate that marketing includes them in creating customer facing materials
- 37% of reps indicate that marketing rarely or has never included them (Source: Brainshark)
Sales teams are simply the receivers of MQLs and sales content.
The one-way flow with no input from the actual users and keepers of customer-centric knowledge is almost like 18th century firefighting. Workers pass on buckets of water down a line, and the end user throws it on the fire. The only difference is that the input isn’t just one thing like water, with sales content management, it could be anything. Imagine being that last receiver facing the fire, and being passed a bucket of garbage instead of water, that’s pretty much what it’s like at some firms.
- Only 21% of reps indicated having any relevant content to share with their buyers (Source: The Sales Way)
- 71% of reps get their material from Marketing,
o 51% say they spend time modifying their sales material,
o 68% say they just go ahead and create material for themselves (Source: Brainshark)
- 60%-70% of B2B Marketing content goes entirely unused (Source: Sirius Decisions)
And as sales tries to understand the buyer and provide value added content, they get bogged down in wasting time creating their own.
The Reality of Sales and Marketing (Dis)-Alignment
There are two major impacts from the trends detailed above. Sales is getting overloaded trying to make heads or tails of the content they’ve been given, and Marketing is seeing a poor ROI from their investments.
Sales gets overloaded because the abundance of content is largely misguided, offers no real value, and doesn’t suit the actual needs of the sales teams. (Shocker! -considering most marketing and sales teams don’t cooperate).
- 22% of reps say they need a GPS to find material they need
- 78% say they get frustrated on a bi-weekly basis or more while trying to find content (Source: Brainshark)
- As of 2013, reps spend 25% less time actually selling, than in 1998 (Source: ROInnovation)
The overloaded sales rep is now wasting time trying to put together materials in order to add value to their conversation, while being bombarded with more content.
Poor Marketing ROI from activities is nothing but the simple truth that stems from nobody actually using the content.
- 80% of MQLs are lost, ignored, or discarded (CMO Council)
- Up to 80% of marketers send leads to sales that wouldn’t qualify as SQLs (Source: Marketing Sherpa)
- One study shows that up to 90% of marketing deliverable created for sales are never used (Source: Ernst, J.)
In fact, an estimated 1 Trillion dollars a year is wasted on mismanaged marketing and sales operations, worldwide. (Source: The B2B Lead)
Best in class companies have already proven that inbound content tactics are more cost effective, and produce a lower cost per lead, than any other kind of marketing strategy.
The Buyer’s Perspective
The real impact of this poor content management is felt by the buyer. Buyers are trusting sales reps less, and moving on to develop their own buyer criteria without bothering to contact a sales rep.
Less trust in sales is a result of reps struggling to maintain relevancy. Buyers are interacting with content online, and creating unknown sets of buying criteria which make it very difficult for a rep to add value. Worse still, much of what a rep sends to buyers is content they’ve already seen on the vendor’s site, meaning that reps don’t add value anymore, they just sell canned conversations.
- Only 22% of reps were deemed as understanding the buyers specific issue, and are able to position where they can help
- Just 62% of reps were deemed as knowledgeable about their own product (Source: The Sales Way)
Buyers learn their own sets of buying criteria and develop themselves through the buying stages. The role of guiding buyers through the sales process through a conversational consultative process is slowly becoming irrelevant.
Buyers are opting to read non-vendor sources of information, which could be inaccurate, out of context, or entirely unrelated. Buyers challenge reps with unforeseen inputs, and throw sales reps on the back foot while they regroup and try to meet the empowered buyer.
- Up to 70% of the buyer’s journey is over before they contact a sales rep (Source: Zambito, T.)
- By 2020, it is expected that 85% of customer relationships will be managed without ever talking to a human (Source: Forbes)
This is the new reality of sales.
A Turn-Key Solution
First, there is a pretty exceptional solution to this issue, it’s called Sales and Marketing Alignment. Fewer than 1 in 4 organizations actually have any kind of alignment (Source: Zambito, T.) but the ones that do are actually seeing incredible marketing ROI, greater MQL acceptance, positive measurable impacts to revenue, and etc. (Source: Marketo)
Achieving Sales and Marketing Alignment is much easier said than done, with respect organizational changes that lead to alignment. There are best practice studies, but in a majority of cases, there is no one single organizational change that aligns both teams.
The turn-key solution to getting this done is called Closed Loop Marketing (CLM).
Now, CLM isn’t an immediate solution, but a gradual one. Closed Loop Marketing uses sales analytics software in order to create two levels of visibility that naturally encourage aligning processes.
1) Extensive Visibility of content consumption from sales and customers is a process that captures data by the end user and enhances marketing awareness of the usefulness and functionality of their content
2) CRM Integration is the alignment of sales content delivery to target customers with the CRM system. This integration allows for enhanced content tailored to the buyer persona’s traits, which allows reps to add real value to a sales presentation.
By enabling this two fold awareness, both departments slowly become more aware of how their role impacts the other. Over time, the benefits of CLM match or exceed those of non-CLM based sales and marketing alignment.
Results of CLM
Here are just some eye-opening facts about having extensive visibility and CRM Integration
- 43% reduction in sales creating brand new content for their own purposes
- 82% improvement in using “voice of the customer” insights for content creation
- 243% improvement in content being tailored for job specific roles
- 121% increase in formal planning process existing between sales and marketing
- 77% increase in the effectiveness of guided selling
- 22% greater YOY increases in total company revenue
(Source: Aberdeen)
It’s not a science or a process, its enabling awareness. When the two teams act in silos, they aren’t aware of their actual role. When the two see and know their impact, they better align naturally.
Are your teams struggling with sales and marketing alignment? Is content overload and an empowered buyer destroying your reps ability to be consultative? Are you interested in using Closed Loop Marketing? Maybe we can help.
