Here are a few basic steps that can transform a mediocre introduction into one that is highly successful:

• Know your customer. This might be the hardest step. Your team works with sales reps every day, so you know them, right? Not as well as you think. Top reps take pre-call planning seriously and put significant time into researching their customers. This goes beyond the basics of the company product line and its competition to include understanding industry issues and barriers to the company’s growth, as well as finding clues within company annual and quarterly reports. In the same way, developing solutions that help increase your reps’ efficiency and effectiveness is possible only when your team understands what a rep’s day truly entails and which activities are pulling them away from core selling activities.
• Explain before attempting to deliver value. As with any sale, the sales “customer” needs to understand the product before taking in a value demonstration. Before investing in a new solution, it is important to not only get your reps’ input, but to get their buy-in. But what about all the other tools that are currently available for reps? It may be necessary to re-explain those solutions and their value, too, especially if they’re underutilized. This is where testimonials come into play. Find internal evangelists who recommend a solution to others; document and post their stories on your sales portal.
• Manage the relationship. In b-to-b sales, the best reps are always looking for opportunities to grow relationships within their existing customer base. When issues arise, these reps are quick to respond to demonstrate a higher level of service and commitment that separates them from the competition. Unfortunately, we do not always take this approach with our internal sales customers. It may require effort, but it is that effort that builds trust. Try this approach, and the next time your team asks for input from the sales team, you’re sure to get a better response than ever.

Don’t go it alone. Learn from your sales reps – the experts when it comes to listening, explaining, communicating value and developing relationships.

As I discussed in the blog post Service-Level Agreements: Not Just for Sales, marketing should use an SLA to make a commitment to sales, including a timeframe for newly generated leads (e.g. from an event) to be entered into the lead management process. Marketing should also specify the treatment these leads will receive (e.g. placement into a nurturing program). In addition to committing to a timeframe and engagement strategy for new leads, many marketing organizations commit to the cumulative number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) they will deliver to sales. Note: The definition of an MQL should be agreed upon by marketing and sales and should be automated through a lead-scoring model.

This cumulative-MQL SLA component does not deal with the timeframe for MQL engagement, but with how many MQLs the marketing organization commits to send to sales during a specified time period. It can be made more precise by specifying the number of MQLs that will be delivered for different types of contacts (e.g. from a specific industry or for a particular solution). This can be valuable for organizations with several different product lines or business units.

The benefits of including in the SLA the cumulative number of MQLs to be delivered to sales include:

• Alignment. Aligns sales, teleprospecting and marketing on how many MQLs marketing is expected to deliver. In doing so, it takes the revenue amount marketing has committed to and puts a line in the sand defining what it will take to get there.
• Accountability. Provides a scorecard that can be used to measure marketing’s contribution to sales against an agreed-upon metric. This benchmark can then be used in discussions between marketing and sales (e.g. to discuss shortfalls in marketing contribution to the sales pipeline).
• Scheduling. Helps with capacity planning. By understanding the total number of MQLs that marketing will provide, as well as how many MQLs will be sourced in each time period (e.g. quarter, month), lead-receiving functions (e.g. inside sales) can more effectively plan and allocate resources to accept and process these leads.

However, it’s important to balance support and bias toward your product with the realities of the marketplace. There’s a difference between being a champion for your product and being blind to the market, customer needs and perceptions.

There are countless examples of former industry leaders who underestimated their competition and were beat by scrappy upstarts. There are also countless examples of scrappy upstarts who have underestimated the reach and resources of industry leaders. In many of these cases, objectivity toward the market was overpowered by hubris.

Successful product managers and marketers walk a fine line between being completely objective and being a die-hard super-fan supporter. Here are two simple tips on how to respect your competition when it’s natural to be focused on how much better you are than them:

1. Consciously seek out objective viewpoints. Spending all of your time in the office with colleagues or interacting only with happy customers isn’t going to provide you with a real picture of what’s going on in the market. Rather than hiding in a self-congratulating bubble, actively seek out places where you will get objective viewpoints. Go to a conference for an industry where you’re not the market leader. Reach out to customers who have left you for another vendor. Find places outside your product’s comfort zone and keep your ears open and your mouth closed. The feedback will be enlightening.
2. Be conscious of the many roles you need to play. In a given week – or day – product managers need to wear a number of different hats. One hat might be the one you wear when you’re working a trade show booth and trying to make your pitch to prospects. Another hat might be the one you wear when you’re making your case to senior management for more funding to address weaknesses in your product. You wear another hat when you’re enabling your sales force and yet another when you’re conducting market research. In each of these scenarios, you’re in a different mode, that requires a particular attitude. Your “rah rah” attitude should be in full effect when you’re making your pitch to prospects at a trade show booth, but it should be put in check when you’re conducting site visits as part of a market research project.

The job of sales enablement, to a degree, is to prepare reps for improvisation. I’m not talking about showing up on sales calls and making things up off their top off their heads – but the ability to spontaneously adapt and react to whatever happens on a call and with a buyer.

Too often, we see clients fall into the trap of trying to message their way to sales enablement. They create elaborate discussion guides, presentations and battlecards. They teach their reps exactly what to say when a buyer throws out an objection – if the buyer says this, you say that; if the buyer says that, you say this. Unfortunately, no call ever goes exactly as scripted or planned. As one client shared, “Trying to provide our reps with template discussion guides didn’t work – the clients always forgot their lines.”

Does this mean that messaging or discussion guides are not important? Not by a long shot. Messaging, thought leadership discussion starters and whiteboard presentations that share unique insights are all terrific ways to engage buyers in a conversation, and can help establish differentiation for both your reps and your solutions.

The role of sales enablement is to ensure that a rep possesses the skills, knowledge, tools, assets and processes to handle what happens once they have engaged the buyer in a dialogue. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to ensure that your reps have this ability to improvise – it takes ongoing learning, practicing (and practicing and practicing) and coaching. Consider another artist renowned for his ability to improvise – legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. It took years of practice, training and playing (including attending the Juilliard School in New York) to get to the level of improvisation that made him a music pioneer.

So crank your sales to 11 and get those reps ready to improvise!

If you have data that tells you who touched what tactic and when, you have what’s called a “time series” of data. The more information you add to this data, the more you can get out of it. For example, if you know the role or persona of each person in your time series, you can begin to isolate the tactics more commonly used by one persona vs. another. If you can define groups of buyers who are related to each other (e.g. all the individuals in a company who interacted with marketing efforts that resulted in closed deals), you can compare how tactics correlate with closed deals over time. Other types of information that might lead to useful insight are the buyer’s geographical data, company information and industry. The more information you have, the more easily you can segment buyers into groups that can be compared. For example, you could compare the effectiveness of telemarketing invitations to events across different industries and conclude that one industry is more receptive than another to a particular approach.

Be careful to avoid creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all you do with a specific persona is invite individuals who match that persona to one type of event, then your data will show that they are interacting with these events. If you include a variety of tactics in your mix, you can compare their impact.

Another area that requires careful consideration is attributing the impact of specific tactics to a deal or group of deals. Attribution can be calculated in all sorts of ways, some better than others. Marketing automation platforms and sales force automation systems are becoming more sophisticated in this area, but often they look at the first or last touch as the causal event that triggered the opportunity. A better (but not perfect) approach is to weight the different tactics, although it is hard to determine the relative impact of one tactic over another. Scoring models can be used to assign weights as well.

In my next post, I will discuss a more-sophisticated method for assessing the impact of different tactics.

The presentations covered a wide range of topics important to b-to-b marketing, sales and product leaders, from the rearchitected waterfall to the unified integration model. But sprinkled throughout each presentation was a subject that is near and dear to me – sales enablement. As I made the rounds and introduced myself, the conversation consistently turned to sales enablement, even before I mentioned that I cover this area.

Here are my answers to three of the questions I encountered most often during those discussions:

What is the best way for our company to manage all of our sales content? Simplify! Most people I spoke with told me they have hundreds of assets for each product line. Anyone who had the opportunity to hear Jim Ninivaggi and Jay Famico present their presentation “Science, Not Art: Calculating the ROI of Sales Enablement” would have seen powerful heatmaps and charts that help identify low-use assets, content gaps and outdated material. A cluttered office does not increase a person’s productivity, nor does a stuffed sales asset management solution.

Our sales reps continue to call field marketing for content. How do you get reps to use the sales portal? There must be inherent value that motivates reps to use the sales portal – if there’s no value, there’s no activity. The portal should be stocked with content that help reps move buyers through their journey (e.g. industry trends, competitive analysis, competitor news feeds). Also, companies with high adoption have made it easy for reps to access the portal. Do you still require reps to use a virtual private network to access the portal? Then work with IT and eliminate that barrier. Does the rep need to remember a different password to access the portal? Eliminate that hurdle with single sign-on through your sales force automation solution.

We have a way for reps to rate content, but none of them use it. How do you get feedback on the content they use? It’s true: Most reps do not come back into the system to rate the content they use. Why? Because it is an extra step that does not have perceived value. One client came up with a clever idea that increased the number of ratings by 20 percent. It established an automated system that sent an email requesting a rating two weeks after the rep used the content, with a direct link back to the specific piece. The email was sent to a sample of reps so as not to bombard the sales force and discourage reps from downloading content in the future. The email mentioned how ratings and comments help marketing make improvements to the content.

To keynote Summit
General Stan McChrystal
talks teamwork and goals

More informed buyers
thus reps need in-depth knowledge
to affirm value

Rearchitected
waterfall one year later
still blows people’s minds

Reps must focus on
higher-yield activities
drive efficiency

Align your message
build content operations
revolution launched

A model for all
Unified Integration
binds nine key functions

Go innovate now
balanced investments inform
fuel company growth

That same idea reminds us to step back from the complexities of our b-to-b marketing day jobs to make a simple decision: what type of demand we are trying to create.

The demand type of a product or service drives a number of fundamental marketing decisions – messaging, targeting, the offers you create, the tactics you use and more. Yet seemingly agreeable colleagues often disagree on which demand type matches their products or services. This disparity is dangerous to your ability to market effectively as a team.

SiriusDecisions has identified three demand type categories:

• New concept: A disruptive product or service with no budgetary line item within its target audience. New concept marketing is typically based on defining a problem that is solved by your solution.
• New paradigm: A product that promises to retool or optimize an existing process, automate a manual process or solve known issues more effectively than what is currently in place.
• Established market: A product or service that is accepted by the majority of target organizations to be necessary and best-of-breed. The market for these products and services is generally served by a few powerful providers that battle for market share.

Check in with your colleagues to identify the type of demand you’re trying to create for the product that you’re marketing, ensure it hasn’t changed as the product has evolved, and make sure that demand type isn’t different based on region or geography (it’s indeed possible for the type of demand you’re trying to create to be different from one geo to another).

For those of us looking to bring our teams together toward the common goal of marketing and sales alignment, demand type is a fundamental place to start. Simply agreeing on the type of demand you’re trying to generate and what that means for your strategy, messaging and tactics can mean the difference between a futile demand creation effort and a successful strategic initiative. The takeaway? Take the time to get back to the basics.

In working with companies on developing account-based marketing programs, I’ve seen marketing become its own worst enemy when it comes to the concept of aligning effort to the right opportunities. Nearly every company has some form of the 80/20 rule (approximately 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of customers), but too few define marketing requirements based on this reality and its implications. We worry way too much about pure volume of activities and dollars and way too little about context and understanding the right investment levels to reach our ideal prospects, support our best customers and support the sellers aligned to them.

This is not to suggest that all marketing dollars must be allocated to supporting that 20 percent. In fact, sometimes that group requires less marketing help than other segments, from a program investment point of view. However, support for the largest and highest-potential accounts should be a starting point for investment, not an afterthought. Here’s a checklist to help you align resources to opportunity the account-based way.

• Separate ideal targets from obvious targets. The largest customers all require support but don’t all represent large growth opportunities. Segment those that require more maintenance and those that will help the company make its growth targets. Ensure adequate marketing support for the highest-potential accounts and the teams that sell to them. It takes many more small deals to make up for not winning the big deals.
• Don’t turn support for major accounts into a part-time job. Account-specific support, especially for large and named accounts, is often layered onto the responsibilities of already-too-busy field marketers. Decide whether the competing priorities (e.g. broad-based demand creation, events) are the right use of their time and budget. In many cases, tighter alignment to sales account goals is a smarter way to allocate field marketing time. Field marketers will thank you, because they’re on the front lines, balancing requests to help sales with account-level goals, but with too little time to do it right.
• Determine how marketing resources can align better to sales’ go-to-market model. Is your marketing function set up to support the needs of sellers as they are segmented? Sales reps supporting higher-value and high-potential accounts should have a clear idea of what support they can expect from marketing. Marketing contribution should be an extension of sales’ plans.
• Don’t waste effort on finding opportunities sales won’t care about. Marketing must avoid attracting contacts and companies that won’t matter to sales, especially if the company has a named-account model. For example, if inbound tactics are attracting the wrong contacts in sales’ view, change the tactics so they find the right contacts more consistently.
• Measure progress as it aligns to selling goals. The fastest road to change is often adjusting measurement to focus clearly on what matters. Make sure tactics can be viewed in the context of the goals they’re designed to support. This can include account- or segment-specific goals, and may not all be about generating leads. Sellers have relationship-focused goals as well as opportunity goals in their account plans. Consider support for relationship development a meaningful contribution from marketing, but put a baseline in place so that even qualitative changes can be tracked.

The day’s events began with the Summit’s traditional highlight video showing the sights and sounds of the participants enjoying the event, including last night’s tour and dinner aboard the USS Midway.

Today’s first speakers, Cynthia Gumbert and Michael Xu from Return on Integration (ROI) Award winner Dell’s global demand center, discussed Dell’s work to optimize demand creation through lead generation and sales plays, as well as measurement dashboards delivered to thousands of stakeholders throughout the organization.

Next up was Jay Gaines, vice president and group director at SiriusDecisions, who introduced the new SiriusDecisions Unified Integration Model. The model brings together nine marketing, sales and product functions to establish a shared understanding of goals, processes, measurements and market perspectives.

ROI Award winner LinkedIn was next on stage, represented by Brian Goffman (VP, Enterprise Marketing) and James Raybould (Director of Insights, Global Sales Organization). The ROI Award recognized LinkedIn for its use of analytics and automation to drive sales productivity. Goffman and Raybould demonstrated the power of analytics when it named its top users among Summit participants (including SiriusDecisions staff): Jeff Lash of SiriusDecision was the earliest LinkedIn adopter present, Mark Yolton of SAP had the largest network, Stu Schmidt of ConnectAndSell was the most endorsed, and Jon Miller of Marketo was the most popular.

Summit 2013’s final presentation featured Jeff Lash, research director, product management at SiriusDecisions, who unveiled the SiriusDecisions Innovation Framework. This model represents innovation investments on a continuum between higher-risk breakthrough-innovation offerings and lower-risk core innovation. Currently, only 11 percent of organizations align their process for investing in new offerings with marketing and sales budgets, Lash said. The Innovation Framework is designed to bring balance to innovation spending.

Summit participants have a year’s worth of food for thought before they return for Summit 2014, which will be held May 21-23, 2014, at the Peabody Orlando Hotel. See you then!