The Sales and Marketing Joint Process

By Mike Hancock, ViaMetric Partner

Sales and marketing should work together as a team, or more accurately as a seamless joint process. As we all know, sales performance is easy to track, but marketing performance is often much more difficult to put into terms of ROI.

When the two systems of sales and marketing are viewed as a collaborative process, the process can be measured end-to-end in terms of sales closed. Ultimately, subject to the overall business objectives of the company, the process also extends to repeat sales, as marketing deploys and measures efforts to retain and up-sell existing customers.

When working together, the company can successfully track and measure the joint process of sales and marketing to find actual cost per lead, ultimate cost per sale, and value of customer loyalty, among various other metrics. We all know what sales does, but what is it marketing does again?

“A more simple, practical, yet worthy definition of marketing describes its basic mission: getting the right message to the right people.” See Marketing Tactics - The Medium or the Message?

When marketing gets the message to the right people, salespeople stop coming across as trying to make a sale. Instead, they become consultants, advisors, or guides, ushering in the new buyer to the new acquisition.

This is especially true in business to business sales, where it is said:

“Corporate executives, business owners, investors, and senior management rarely have time for sales people; they always have time for businesspeople.” From The world needs fewer salespeople.

The point here is… don’t act like a salesperson… act like a businessperson, and solve problems and add value. This is precisely what the brainstorming of strategic marketing should be able to achieve: salespeople have enough to do without reinventing the value proposition during the pitch.

It will always take good and well disciplined salespeople to close sales as long as we deal with humans. After all, people still sell to people. The job of marketing (if you’re a Drucker person) is to prepare the perfect deal for the perfect target, and find the ways to bring the two together.

The cycle of the sales and marketing process is to convert demographic targets into prospects, and then filter these into leads, which the salesforce then qualifies as opportunities, and turns into closed sales.

Everything within this cycle can be measured. It begins with bright thinking and ideas, and nothing should be initiated without thinking and implementing ways to measure its effect. The argument that some marketing efforts, such as TV advertising, are impossible to measure, is countered by building into each “unmeasurable” initiative a unique feature that is measured at the closed sale end. Thus, end to end accountability, respected marketers, happy salespeople, and satisfied customers.

And don’t forget the resell, up-sell, part of the cycle: the customer loyalty and retention effort. This is even easier to make uniquely identifiable through to the sale.

At ViaMetric, we help customers with many types of demand generation efforts. However this doesn’t mean we think sales is a numbers game; quite the contrary… plenty of people will tell you that sales is NOT a numbers game, that it’s a quality rather than a quantity operation. Try this quote about the “numbers game” myth:

“…by saying that sales is a numbers game, one is avoiding the responsibility of being smart about prospecting […] If you’re not getting satisfactory results, the answer isn’t to increase your activity. The answer is to change your activity to something that gets results.”

It comes back to delivering an appropriate message to the right target at the right time. Our demand generation efforts (telesales, email marketing, Internet), are continuously measured and adjusted as we go. We’re not interested in delivering X percent of leads that don’t close. At ViaMetric, we want X percent - an increasing X percent - of leads that convert to closed sales. We set and measure metrics at every definable point in the marketing / selling process. In this way, we are able to pinpoint what’s working and what’s just scattershot. Then we do more of what’s working; maximizing your spend to revenue.

Sometimes I think that because the sales and marketing profession is as studded with legends as baseball, we believe the players have to be heroic to get the job done. Everyone thinks they have to have ten of ten “A” players. Not so, in my opinion. It’s the process of smart marketing, and effective sales. The right sales process and forecasting methodologies can take “C” players and make them “B” players and “B” players and make them “A” players. It’s all process, requiring talented and skilled players to be sure, but process all the same.

Share This