Struggling with changing buyer behavior? The key lies in greater internal collaboration.
- Summary:
- If marketing isn’t as close to the customer as sales is – and if both teams aren’t close to one another – how can they collaborate effectively? Shannon Duffy, VP of Marketing, Salesforce Pardot, has some practical tips distilled from listening to real-world customers.
It used to be that B2B sales were all about personal relationships.
Actually they still are - just in a different way.
The B2B buying cycle is becoming more complex, with more and more people getting involved in the process. In fact, research from the CEB shows that an average of 5.4 stakeholders are involved in a buying decision. At the same time, customers are doing a lot more research before contacting brands about a possible purchase. As you can image, this combination of more stakeholders and more information means that closing a sale is more challenging than ever.
What this means for sales teams is that success is less about the individual with the amazing relationship and more about sales and marketing working more closely together to ensure they are hitting customers with the right, personalized message, at the right time, and on the right channel. It’s no longer a relay with marketing doing the early lead-gen work and then handing over to sales. Instead the two teams need to closely collaborate throughout the buying cycle, rather like a pair of doubles partners.
While what needs to be achieved is clear, how to actually do it is another matter – and one that is causing pretty much every B2B sales or marketing team I meet some consternation.
In fact, I was in London last week for the launch of our Pardot Engagement Studio, and, in between meetings, I hosted a customer roundtable focused on this very topic. The 22 senior sales and marketing representatives who attended, from some of the best-known British brands, all had their own ideas about closer collaboration and provided some interesting advice.
One of the key issues they face is a disconnect between Sales and Marketing. This observation goes straight to what seems to be the nub of the problem: if marketing isn’t as close to the customer as sales is – and if both teams aren’t close to one another – how can they collaborate effectively?
There were plenty of suggestions from the attendees based on their experiences, but they largely fell into three themes, as outlined below.
Information sharing
A lack of information sharing was cited by all attendees as the biggest barrier to collaboration. The speed of business and the last vestiges of a ‘lone wolf’ culture mean that information isn’t always shared generously.
Another offered this piece of practical advice:
Every time we lose a bid, marketing sits down with the sales rep and goes through all the reasons why – it’s not just looking at the database, we need to understand what really happened and then capture it accurately in our CRM system. We’re now revisiting old sales leads at a more appropriate time and in a more appropriate way.
A representative from a financial services company also outlined how its sales team is starting to take members of the marketing team with them to client meetings, simply to get closer to those customers.
Efficiency
While all this extra knowledge sharing is absolutely essential, the companies around the table all recognized that it can be very time consuming if done manually, and can increase the cost of every sale exponentially. However, many of them are putting processes in place to make this information gathering and sharing more efficient.
Attendees unanimously recognized that automation has a big part to play. Automating parts of the lead-generation process and storing customer and prospect data in a system that is accessible to the entire sales and marketing organisation has a massive impact on both productivity and conversion rates. As one participant said:
Using a customer information system is at the heart of our sales process. We have customised particular fields, some of which are mandatory, and pull data from it to inform upcoming training and improvement sessions. It’s making us a more effective team.
Relationship building
Several of the attendees also attributed the disconnect between sales and marketing to the fact that those teams didn’t physically sit near each other in the office. They missed talking things over informally and even “shouting across the desk to check something.” My experience echoes this: camaraderie between sales and marketing teams (rather than suspicion or competition) is vital for true collaboration.
At Salesforce we strive for transparency and see this as a big factor in sales and marketing working as one. As well as our teams sitting together, we use Chatter – our enterprise social networking tool – for real-time, informal and open conversations among the team, drawing in colleagues with the @mention. Everyone is welcome to join in these conversations.
Another good piece of advice was to facilitate shared learning. One marketer commented that at his company:
Sales and marketing colleagues attend industry events together; it means they have a common experience to build on.
For my part, I think my top tip would be communication. The points above, from sitting near each other to understanding where deals have gone wrong, all hinge on communication. If sales and marketing teams can put in place processes and a culture that celebrates and rewards communication, then I believe the rest will follow smoothly.
We’re living in the age of the customer. We all talk about communicating with our customers, seamlessly, across all channels. But what about our own internal communication? If we want to ensure both our success and our customers’ success, we mustn’t forget that either.