Taking Sales & Marketing Apart

Why do we hear the term “Sales & Marketing”?

So many times, I have heard this term carelessly thrown around.  It reminds me of how people refer to Raleigh-Durham or Minneapolis-St. Paul as if they are singular places.  If you live in Raleigh, you don’t live in Durham.  Likewise, sales is a totally separate function from marketing.  If you had to link the two, it would actually be better to call it “Marketing & Sales” to convey how a strong marketing effort precedes the success of a sales organization.

I’ve had the privilege of performing each function at different times during my career.  They are truly as different as night and day.  In addition, I feel sorry for anyone that performs one without the benefit of the other.  The relationship is that of one feeding the other.  For those of you that have read my blog from the beginning, you will recall that I set out to delve into questions.  So I will look at both from the perspective of how each functions raises questions or answers questions.  Let’s look at each one separately.

Marketing is thought to be many things: promotion, advertising, research and branding.  While all of these things might be elements of, marketing can be distilled down to one all-important function: it must generate qualified leads.  The marketing machine churns out prospects that are interested and motivated to buy.  So the key questions that drive marketing relate to how to get people interested.  What generates interest?  It is the ability to find and spotlight problems and alleviate pain.  What does the ideal client look like?  If you research your market carefully, you will be able to better pinpoint the characteristics that make a suspect easily convertible to a prospect.  The bigger the market, the more serious a problem it becomes if there is no marketing machine to filter the big, bad world.  What’s the right bait to entice the fish I want to catch?  How does the company create the right brand identity?  What techniques create the highest number of well qualified inbound leads?  Are we getting the most out of our existing client base with respect to referrals?

The best marketing programs have numerous initiatives.  Its like investing in stocks.  You have a diverse portfolio, of which some will be winners, some will swim sideways and some will lose.  Over time, these initiatives will be evaluated and the weak will be replaced by new ones, the same way you manage your investment portfolio.

So, what about sales?  What are your sales people doing to create closing opportunities?  Interestingly, I had a suspect reply to me via email in an interesting way.  Essentially, what I had done was a cold call follow up to what was borderline spam email.  OK, maybe it wasn’t so borderline, but I have no lead stream from a marketing effort, so I’m desperate.  The email response I got was, “If you are talking about a 15-20 meeting just for you to tell me what you do, OK. If you are looking for me to invest any time up front in providing you with information about what we currently do and how we do it or if this will result in a relentless hard sell afterwards – I’ll pass.”   Was there a little sensitivity there from previous engagements?   Clearly!   I got the appointment anyway, by responding with a bit of humor in the form of, “I promise I will stop short of relentless”.

What type of metric does the cold-calling approach create.  For instance, how many cold calls lead to how many meetings, leads to how many product demonstrations and so on and so on.  The mass email and endless cold call scenario leads to a very poor metric.  The bad news is that without changing the way that leads are generated, this metric will never change, ever!

When fed by an effective lead generating machine, initial calls are more of a welcome interruption, introductory meeting are received with far less skepticism and a sales persons time is more efficiently spent managing their pipeline and closing business.

So if your sales volume is not what you would like it to be, perhaps the answer is not that you have a lousy sales force.  Perhaps you just need to change the process metric by looking at your marketing effort and its connection to your sales team.

By David Phillips
Connect to me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlphillips