Marketing & Sales content strategy and processes cannot be created in a tunnel. It really doesn't work if you have other marketing and sales tunnels crawling across your enterprise, all focused on their own objectives. How effective do you really think your messaging will be if it's not consistent at every touch point?
Can you say, "customer confusion?"
I see this phenomenon happen with both smaller and larger companies. Not just occasionally, but often. Consider the following scenario that could occur if your company has a variety departments, teams, or people with distinct objectives:
- Corporate marketing is launching a new website with a shift in position messaging.
- Field marketing is launching an email marketing campaign to generate new leads and nurture them farther into the pipeline for sales, but has no visibility to the website project.
- Outside Sales is searching for what they believe are higher-value leads—than marketing can deliver—and linking their emails to outdated white papers or product data sheets because, hey, that's what they have on their laptops.
- Conversational talking points are being created by each individual sales rep, without regard to marketing initiatives or intelligence about customer relevancy or interests. Quite possibly because they are siloed around the enterprise in various forms and seem impossible to aggregate in any meaningful way.
- Direct mail campaigns went out with the new positioning messaging on time, but the new website had a glitch and isn't live yet, so your prospects are seeing unrelated content - even if you're able to get a landing page up to go with the link in the mail piece. Which is probably next to impossible because the agency managing your website has a two-week lead time.
- Telesales is asking qualification questions that look great on a status report, but don't actually deliver any insights or actionable intelligence that forwards the sales conversation.
- If you ask anybody what a qualified lead is, you'll get a different definition.
Any of this sound familiar? Have more examples you can add? It's no wonder that frustration is running on high for many companies. Each department, team or person is tasked with creating specific results. They have to keep moving or they'll miss meeting, sometimes impossible, goals.
You're waiting for me to give you an easy answer to this, I'll bet. Boy, do I wish I could. Unfortunately it's not that simple. But, instead of continuing on in this fashion, start by taking incremental steps to connect the variety of marketing and sales efforts and coordinate processes and strategies by shining more visibility on them.
Yes, it's a big job, but the starting point is easy. The Customer.
Start with a customer profile. Buy-in on the customer definition is critical. Not any customer, but your ideal customers. The ones you'd love to have more of. Define the problems you solved for them and the reasons they had them in the first place. From their perspective, not yours. That's the most critical part.
Then get all of the various issues out on the table and determine where shifts need to occur to meet that ideal customer perspective. Remember that a shift is an incremental change, not a tossing-the-baby-out-with the-bathwater type of thing. Sometimes changing a couple of words, or a sentence or two in a marketing piece or sales conversation can be enough to bring the two closer into alignment, for now. It's a start. Pat yourself, and each other, on the back.
Take a look at your technology resources and determine how you can better connect all of your marketing and sales efforts. Consider an integrated portal that provides:
- collaboration tools,
- feedback loops for clarity on what works and what doesn't,
- access to one, relevant, updated set of collateral, messaging and strategy for using them
- insight on lead activities (whether caused by sales or by marketing, or by the leads, themselves)
- initiative calendars with copies of messaging and creative
- a process for connecting goals and creating dependencies that have all parties benefit from helping each other get best outcomes
Those are only a few. I'm sure you can think of more. Prioritize them and roll them out one at a time. You didn't get this unwieldy overnight, you won't streamline it overnight. But, if your company doesn't recognize and accept the challenge, and start taking steps to correct it, things will get worse.
Business is moving fast and isn't going to slow down. Customers are getting more demanding. They want quality experiences and they want them on their timeline. Plus, the Internet has probably given them more information about your company than your employees have.
So, you need to determine how to keep up, how to do it in a coordinated and gracious manner, how to stay relevant and continue to deliver your expertise in a meaningful way and how to deliver value while your customers demands change and escalate.
Your best bet is to start working on that single-view. Your incremental results will show shifts that gain in size as you go. Patterns will develop that help you redefine processes and get more out of them than ever before. It's powerful stuff. A single view will shift your company to a customer-centric focus that will become a competitive advantage.
In the Forrester report, Sales Teams Need Portals, Laura Ramos says, "Portals let marketing share consolidated reports, visual charts, lists, and team spaces so sales can see the same numbers, follow the same trends, and track who is working most efficiently to convert lead flows into deals. As a result, both teams use the portal to work from one set of metrics, understand deeply customers’ unmet needs, and uncover new opportunities to grow the business."
Marketing & Sales with a Single View can become unstoppable!
