As hard as it might be for some of us old-timers to believe, 2015 represents the exact 30-year mark referenced in Back to the Future Part II. Makes you feel old, doesn’t it?
The concept of time, beyond Hollywood's interpretations of traveling through it, is a core currency among modern B2B marketers and sellers: product developers are under constant pressure to reduce speed-to-market. Marketers are tasked with refreshing – and controlling – the brand more frequently than ever before, and delivering more quality leads, and faster than a DeLorean. Sales leaders are pulled in a million directions, and never have enough space on their calendar to ride along with their reps in order to provide proper coaching. Reps themselves are now required to act like micro-marketers, adding the stress of delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person, to their already-metered selling time. And even clients are required to become smarter buyers, distilling terabytes of user-generated and Googled data into just-in-time, lean purchasing behaviors that minimize face time with traditional B2B sales reps who cherish that 1:1 encounter more than anything else.
This first of a five-blog series on sales enablement focuses on the value of Time in each of these scenarios, and serves as a permanent link in connecting the subsequent topics – Content, Productivity, Visibility, and Mobility – in a way that will provide you with both strategic and tactical recommendations to improve your business. This advice is rooted less in what I think, and more based on how your peers, contemporaries, and competitors exhibit behavior, and use technologies, that result in stronger overall enterprise performance.
For example, Aberdeen’s most recent Sales Enablement research breaks down 261 companies into high, medium, and low-performing cohorts, whose year-over-year vital stats look like this:
Figure 1: Annualized Performance Results of Top Sales Teams: How do You Measure Up?
Source: Aberdeen Group, November 2014
If your company is consistently delivering annualized results like the blue Best-in-Class, then maybe your sales workflow engine is already finely tuned, and time management is something everyone on your team has mastered. Your marketing/sales alignment must be a thing of beauty to behold, as well. If you’re more like the green, 80% of under-performers not hitting these numbers – or worse, you don’t measure these KPIs – then you’ve got some work to do, and some time to use more effectively. The good news? This blog collection will identify a series of specific best practices that your Best-in-Class competitors will reveal as the secrets to their success.
So let’s embrace sales enablement, a highly popular term these days that boils down to this: selling smarter, not harder. And, leveraging a collaborative, results-driven agenda equally shared by two lines of business that used to merely point fingers at one another: Marketing and Sales. I won't bore you with too many statistics in this first blog entry, but the research overwhelmingly links stronger inter-departmental alignment with superior business results.
In the past – and perhaps in pockets of 20th century selling that stubbornly still exist today – the relationship cadence looked something like this: (a) Marketing sends Sales to a trade show, armed with boxes full of the newest brochures and collateral. (b) Sales test-drives the content a few times, sees little positive reaction, shoves the boxes under the table, behind the drape, and continues to leverage what they consider their best asset – their own winning personalities – to develop business during the event. (c) Preparing to go home, Sales tosses the content out. (d) Back at HQ, Marketing excitedly asks how the new messaging played out. Sales honestly says, "All the brochures are gone!" (e) Marketing conveniently misinterprets, and gets to start all over again, with even better fonts and CMYK blends.
Friends, this is not sales enablement; it's a huge time suck for all parties involved. What we know from the research, and hundreds of end-user interviews, is that the time spent by B2B marketers and sellers needs to be optimized in a highly competitive marketplace, especially considering how much more powerful today's buyers are. They have virtually unlimited resources in their hands to evaluate our goods and services without engaging directly with us, so the precious moments we have in front of them necessitate bringing our “A” game, every time.
The traditional boundaries of these two lines of business have been aggressively melted, though, by Best-in-Class companies, who understand that marketers are now held accountable for sales results rather than activities, and behave accordingly by taking ownership for populating the pipeline with both quality and quantity of opportunities. Many CMO compensation packages even associate all variable pay with purely sales-driven results. Funny how the old focus on butts in seats, clicks, and downloads gets less time mindshare from the CMO now, as a result.
As mentioned above, the micro-marketing abilities now accorded to professional sellers may, at first glance, seem to add even more duties to their already crowded daily agenda. But in reality, creating a customized 1:1 conversation with your account, by selecting the right message and assets, will yield a far better sales batting average allowing you to close more deals in less time.
Stay tuned for the remaining blogs in this series. We’ll dive more deeply into the hard research findings, though I’ll leave you today with this single data point: under-performing sales organizations spend 20% more time not doing their job – in other words, looking for content, data, intelligence – than Best-in-Class firms, which are more able to maximize the time their reps spend selling, closing, and beating quota. How do they do that? We’ll start learning with the next entry, The Sales Rep as Micro-Marketer: Welcome to the Last Mile of the Content Kingdom.
Peter Ostrow
VP & Research Group Director
Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness
Peter Ostrow Vice President, Group Director | Sales Effectiveness & Strategy
Peter Ostrow is the VP/Group Director, Customer Management and Principal Analyst, Sales Effectiveness at the Aberdeen Group, a leading provider of fact-based research focused on the global technology-driven value chain.
Peter has been focused on sales and marketing best practices for 25 years, beginning with a long-time stint at advertising firm JWG Associates. As JWG’s third employee, he participated in every aspect of the company’s sales growth, from $1M to $135M, until its acquisition by Monster Worldwide’s TMP AdComms division. At TMP, Ostrow deployed additional CRM, pipeline management, lead generation and competitive intelligence practices as VP, Global Sales Administration. He then spent five years as VP, Business Development with MarketOne International, a global provider of lead lifecycle management services to technology sales and marketing executives.
At Aberdeen, Peter oversees research consumed by end-users in Marketing, Sales and Service management roles. He also leads the Sales Effectiveness practice, covering the technology, service and consulting enablers that enterprise sales forces deploy to become best-in-class organizations. His research is widely publicized and covers topics such as sales training, sales intelligence, CRM/SFA, sales performance management and integrating technologies around customer acquisition and retention.
Peter holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from Brown University.
