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Blog #4 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

Which Half of YOUR Marketing Budget is Working?

It's time to retire the classic mantra of ROI-hungry CMOs: “I know that half of my marketing dollars are effective, just not which half." 

Today's savvy B2B marketers have plenty of tools at their disposal to overcome this traditional lack of visibility, which legitimately plagued their communications and business development efforts for generations. While the next Super Bowl will undoubtedly set new records for mass media advertising costs, few CMO budgets are spent nowadays on anything but laser-focused, personalized marketing content that approaches one-to-one messaging as closely as possible.  

We know from extensive Aberdeen research that modern marketing automation platforms provide their owners with an astonishing array of analytics to better understand which messages, campaigns, and assets generate the most desired audience responses. We can thank the near-total replacement of traditional advertising with digital media for this evolution. And while these same applications can help us link specific campaigns to leads, and the leads to revenue, plenty of marketers are still in the dark when it comes to truly understanding what happens with their content when it is placed in the hands of the sales force.  To back up this assertion, check out this research data from my latest Sales Enablement study:

Figure 1: Best-in-Class Marketers Provide Far More Visibility, Further into the Sales Cycle

Source: Aberdeen Group, November 2014

In this chart, we compare the self-reported competencies of Best-in-Class companies (the top 20% of sales organizations, measured by percentage of reps achieving annual quota, and year-over-year change in average deal size and total team attainment of quota) with under-performers, which reveal a significant collection of best practices that your company should strongly consider when implementing – or upgrading – your sales enablement platform and processes.  The common theme here is all about visibility. Historically, activities-driven marketers were content to think about what happened in the field only in the context of serving as the logo police: Are sales reps using the right fonts and colors?  Do they say exactly the things we tell them to say? Prioritizing the protection of the corporate brand, rather than contributing to the sales pipeline, however, is so 20^th century. 

Don't get me wrong: we need to look no further than the classic understanding of how Pepsi and Coca-Cola have adapted or maintained their brands for well over a century, for validation of brand integrity.  But successful CMO's today, particularly in the B2B space, demand a far more complex and analytical visibility into what really happens in the field. It's less about whether the sales reps are behaving, and more about understanding what's really working. This is where modern sales enablement solutions come into play. 

For example, think about the high-stakes world of pharmaceutical or medical device sales. Well-educated, well-groomed, and well-spoken professional business developers typically have, say, 35 seconds while walking down a hallway with a busy, stressed-out physician or medical practice manager to make their case. They are hopefully empowered with a device- and OS-agnostic sales enablement platform that lets them both show and tell the most effective the story for that particular prospective buyer. If the rep is any good, they will quickly adjust their messaging on-the-fly, as they absorb the specific needs and objections of their target audience.  And if they are very good, they will make either a mental note, or a digital one in a well-integrated sales enablement/CRM/marketing automation data repository, around which messages and assets are playing out most effectively for their marketplace, as well as which ones fall flat. This allows the entire team to improve on pinpoint messaging over time. 

The ability for both marketing and sales leaders to build real-time visibility into what happens in the sales moment of truth provides a wide variety of benefits that both lines of business can turn into the kind of measurable ROI described in the previous entry in this blog series. Beneath the surface of most successful marketers who rose up to CMO is a former writer, designer, or campaign manager who legitimately takes pride in crafting that elusive, award-winning content. 

When the same messaging is directly connected to successfully closed business deals, the satisfaction grows into tangible revenue and ongoing career bonuses. On the sales side of the equation, the modern-day need for reps to serve as micro-marketers is validated by the data points above, which speak to their value as contributors to, not mere deliverers of, the right messaging, for the right audience, in the right environment.

Our next and final blog is about sales mobility: Here, There, and Everywhere: 21st Century Selling Comes of Age.

Peter Ostrow

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.