Our Blog

Browse our blog and you will find that we are consistently discussing Sales and Marketing Alignment: the process of having a common set of definitions that describe prospects and customers at each stage of the sales funnel, and how these stages start from the marketing team as prospects, and move on to the final stages of the sales process to closed business. Yes, alignment is key, but it more so refers to the linear arrangement and positioning of the two departments together.

Blog #5 of #5 in our Peter Ostrow Guest Blog Series

Here, There, and Everywhere: 21^st Century Selling Comes of Age

Answer this question:  is your sales team inside or outside?  If you hesitate before mentally responding, you’re in good company.  

Over the years, my Sales Effectiveness research has seen a steady blurring of these traditional job roles, as work/life balance employment trends, ever-cooler handheld devices, and lightning-fast connectivity have dramatically changed the landscape of B2B selling.  Traditionally, enterprises employed low-cost or entry-level staff to smile-and-dial their way toward qualifying leads for the field, and showered their high-flying outside reps with all the goodies that accrued to coffee-drinking closers.  The line between the personas was clear, although proactive sales leaders were wise enough to build a dues-paying, promotional path between them for the strongest inside sellers to graduate to the field. 

Technology has greased the wheel and has exponentially accelerated the business process in the last several decades, and more so - in the last several years. Yet, in an ever-evolving environment, what has remained the same is the vital role that the marketing exec plays in the successes of both the marketing and sales teams.

Sales forecasting, discovering trends and aligning sales and marketing are just some of the reasons why leading sales organizations use analytics. Companies are consistently working on extracting data from the sales pipeline in order to increase win rates and shorten the sales cycle. Yet, even though data-rich analytics work to track key sales activities, sales execs are still lacking the necessary insights needed to improve the sales process. The question becomes: why, among all the information that’s available through sales analytics, are companies still not achieving growth? 

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.  

Blog #3 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

What Do You Mean, “Margin Matters”?

A long time ago, in companies far, far away, B2B marketers marketed and their sellers sold.

The former were responsible for guarding the integrity of the corporate logo and generating tons of leads; the sales team was left to their own devices, and expense accounts, if they sold enough stuff. Obviously, times have changed. Contemporary marketers have, for a decade or more, been held accountable less for how many bodies, clicks, and downloads they generate, and more around ROMI - return on marketing investment. Considering the well-publicized analyst predictions that by 2017 the CMO's budget will out-pace that of the CIO, ROI had better be part of the equation for marketing leaders hoping to keep their jobs secure.

Blog #2 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

Traditionally, the B2B customer acquisition process is perceived as a two-dimensional, linear workflow: the mad scientists in product development cook up a brand-new iteration of the solution in their dark laboratory; product marketing launches a revolutionary messaging campaign in the newest, coolest medium; field marketing runs ads, events, and promotions to develop a pile of net-new leads; and then the sales team…closes the deals the same-old, same-old way they always have. Just like that - as if the proper order of things dictates that all content-based creativity and flexibility ceases to exist, once the white-hot leads are passed to sales, whose reps merely have to collect another signature in order to generate the revenue stream. If, however, enterprise sales reps are only expected to perform repetitious, uncreative, end-of-cycle tasks, why do we pay them so much?

The inherent problem with this model is obvious to all of us who have carried a bag, and a quota, but less so to the persona of the "celebrity CMO" who too often rides their white horse into town to fix things, but doesn't spend enough time interacting with real prospects or customers to truly understand whether their content is resonating where it counts. In reality, B2B sales leads are becoming an anachronism.

The challenge for today’s sales exec

Sales execs are under pressure now like they’ve never been before. They are increasingly under pressure to achieve higher revenues with less support, and they are in constant battle with increased competition. They are faced with the challenge of overseeing larger sales teams, and their roles have changed to take on more marketing functions. In such a world, old approaches to sales and sales management simply don’t cut it anymore.

Recent IDC research found that companies spend $5 billion annually to drive best practices into the organization through sales training. The disappointing result of that weighty investment is that more than 80 percent of the salesforce failed to retain what it learned after 30 days." 

Research indicates that most customers buy because of the sales rep’s ability to leave insights and provide education that matters most to the customer. But how can a sales rep know what information to leave behind? Is it specific questions that should be asked? How do we ask the right questions during the sales process in order to pinpoint the exact needs of the customer?