In Adam’s mind, he felt that the presenters of the Sales/Marketing alignment session were pushing marketing back into a sales support role, one that he felt didn’t align with the purpose of today’s Sales 2.0 demand generation strategies.

I’ve never met Adam in person, but having read some of his writing at Silverpop, Left Brain Marketing, and on his own personal blog Propelling Brands, he has always produced insightful, thought-provoking content related to B2B demand generation. Thus, I was intrigued by his conviction that marketing and demand gen were not “sales support,” but a holistic, integrated set of processes that speed and maximize business development.

In stark contrast to Adam’s ideas is an article I read several weeks ago from BNet’s “Sales Machine” blog. In it author Geoffrey James forcibly decries what he sees as one of the biggest failures of marketing departments — that they “turned from service functions into a ‘strategic leadership’ role.”

James goes on, “Marketing geeks started showing up in product design meetings, pretending that they understood the customer . . . The problem isn’t that two co-equal groups [sales and marketing] need to work together. The problem is that marketing got uppity and forgot its place.”

Hmm, so which is it? Marketing and demand gen as a strategic, holistic business practice? Or a subservient lackey to the sales team’s needs and imperatives?

As Adam stated in one of his tweets, “In a Web 2.0 world, #B2B marketing must become the leader of a holistic demand gen process — not just tactical lead gen.” Ideally marketing is about producing “closable” leads, but it’s also about branding, educating potential buyers, creating valuable content, and generating “thought leadership” in the market — all of which ultimately produces better quality leads in the future.

That said, having straddled the sales and marketing “Great Divide” for nearly six years now, Geoffrey James’ words carried some weight with me. Too often marketers get away with living in a “measurement vacuum,” and the C-level doesn’t hold them to the same level of hard metrics as sales. Marketers want to be “creatives,” with all of the associated “freedom,” without being tied down to “mundane” lead qualification rates and cost-per-acquisition.

Yet Adam’s vision of what could be ultimately seems to be the best long-term strategy. If marketing and sales need to align, it’s precisely because of Geoffrey’s point. Sales reps can no longer chase after marketing-generated “rainbow sunshine”; they have to maximize every lead they get, every minute of time they have. If marketing isn’t producing quality leads, sales reps don’t have the luxury of throwing good effort after bad, especially now. And a good demand gen strategy, based on quality sales intelligence, analytics, and processes, will absolutely provide more and better opportunities.

More than anything, the question boils down to, Who has the final say in what marketing should be doing? The CMO, or the VP of Sales?

“Subservient” might be too strong of a word, but I do think that ultimately if marketing isn’t producing quality leads for the sales team, it’s sales’ job to get the course corrected. When it’s all said and done, the buck stops in sales, not marketing.

Branding, connecting with the customer, sales approaches, creating demand, and so on, all have some crossover between the B2B and B2C worlds.

But I’ll admit I’ve had a hard time justifying investing lots of money into social media. In the B2B space, it just always seemed relatively unimportant in the scale of things, compared to other means of business development.

So I was interested to see a post on No More Cold Calling that affirmed my suspicions.

Author Joanne Black states,

“Social media is a powerful tool for three things and three things only:

1. Search engine optimization — use your key words and raise your presence on the web.
2. Find out who people are — learn about a person’s background and your connections.
3. Find out who people know — look for close connections that you can leverage.

Some salespeople tell me they actually get clients through social media. Well, maybe if you have a commodity business. Could it happen? Yes. Do I rely on it? Absolutely not. I only count on what I bring about-through a proactive, intentional, referral strategy with personal introductions.”

As Joanne says, are there absolutely zero direct marketing opportunities in B2B using social media? No, but the very nature of B2B demands working with multiple decision-makers, multiple levels of needs to address, and multiple tiers of implementation. The simple fact is, the “reach” necessary to make large scale B2B sales happen through social media is incredibly thin.

The question I asked at the end of Part 2 was, “How can you align a marketing team to produce sales leads without hurting, or challenging marketers’ deeply held beliefs about the need to create an emotional connection between a buyer and a product, a person and a brand?”

While I don’t know all the answers, I can offer the following advice, based on our own experiences here at InsideSales.com:

1. Make an explicit, hierarchical list of priorities that align your marketing production to your sales.

One of the first things I did when I sat down with our marketing team earlier this year was draw up a “focus list” for each of our daily activities. Any time we sign off on an activity, the global priority is established with it. Our list is provided below, yours may differ:

1. Remove barriers that cause drops in incoming leads (i.e., refining split test Web content that doesn’t appear to be working, Google Ad words / keywords / ads that aren’t working, bad PR. Obviously the worst type of “Bad PR” is poor service and product, but the marketing team rarely has control over those issues).
2. Increase existing media conversions.
3. “Widen the funnel” on existing media.
4. Find new media to generate leads.
5. Increase Credibility.
6. Sales Story
7. Collateral
8. Corporate Communications
9. Research
10. Brand

Notice that “branding” and “research”—two of the items vigorously attacked by BNet’s Geoffrey James as being superfluous for most B2B marketing organizations—are the last two items on the list.

2. Acknowledge marketer’s need for recognition.

Though company goals are always the same, marketers often want to be “rewarded” in different ways. Most sales reps don’t care about being “recognized” by the company for their efforts; their own internal satisfaction (and big pay checks) are enough. Marketers, while they appreciate a nice bonus as much as the next guy / gal, typically crave praise. They want recognition for the ideas they produce, as it resonates with their internal dialogue of creativity.

3. Don’t ignore branding activities altogether, just prioritize them against the need for direct sales results.

Studies have shown that a consistent “branding” message does lead to gains in sales over the long run, so it’s important to have a “look and feel” that’s appropriate to company need and industry. But the fact of the matter is that there are very, very few B2B “love brands” (i.e., brands that cause users to “self-identify” with the product), and trying to “manufacture” one is most often futile. A consistent message of value, productivity, and credibility wins the day in B2B marketing.

In Part 2, I want to take a closer look at this concept, because as sales and marketing teams continue to evolve, and move ever closer in alignment, at some point the “culture war” between the two will spill over into the corporate workroom.

In review: Sales “culture” is business- and results-oriented; marketing “culture” is connection- and human-interest driven.

The question becomes, when push comes to shove, which viewpoint takes precedence?

BNet Business guru Geoffrey James gives us the answer—and it’s based on a belief I’ve long held myself:

“In business-to-business (B2B) firms, the legendary conflict between sales and marketing stems from a difference of opinion about what marketing should be doing. Most marketing professionals believe that they should primarily be concerned with market research, building brand equity and creating marketing materials. Most sales professionals believe that marketing should be generating qualified sales leads.”

Very true. But the next part is where the article gets interesting:

“This is part of the blog where I’m supposed to be diplomatic and politically correct, and write some yada-yada-yada about teamwork and respecting differences, etc., etc.

Forget that. Here’s the honest truth: Marketing is dead wrong; Sales is dead right. In B2B environments, marketing is only useful insofar as it generates qualified sales leads. Period. The glamorous activities near and dear to the hearts of B2B marketers everywhere have almost no impact on selling, other than driving up the cost of sales . . . [Marketing should be compensated] based upon its ability to reduce cost of sales. Period.”

And as much is it will pain my own internal marketing team to hear it, Geoffrey James is right.

I don’t want to devalue the work, effort, and talent of marketers (especially my own), but in the B2B space, the best value a marketing team provides is in the ways it can get my sales team more qualified leads today.

The question for B2B sales and marketing managers then becomes, what does this mean from a corporate development standpoint? How can you align a marketing team to produce leads without hurting, or challenging marketers’ deeply held beliefs about the need to create an emotional connection between a buyer and a product, a person and a brand?

Stay tuned for Sales and Marketing “Cultural Alignment” Part 3

So go read them now, and then come back.

Welcome back.

One the biggest challenges of my current position with InsideSales.com is making the connections between sales and marketing more visible, repeatable, and cost effective.

And a key idea that kept pounding in my head while I reviewed Adam’s material was that aligning sales and marketing is difficult because employees on each side largely come from two different production “cultures.”

In a nutshell, sales are largely business types, marketing people are creatives—and getting the two to take a look through the other’s “lens” often sends them into foreign territory.

Most sales people are brought up through the ranks of business schools—or at least integrated into a business culture. Whether or not they actually finish a college degree, good sales pros typically show an interest in management, business, and corporate practices. Even sales reps brought up through the “school of hard knocks” without any formal education eventually get enculturated into a business mindset:

Production, ROI, pipelines, and bottom line. Inventory, cash flow, expenses versus revenue.

Marketing people, on the other and, generally see themselves as artists. Communicators of a deep, psychological mystery that connects them (and their marketing message / brand) to the human race at large. They’re designers, writers, illustrators, graphic artists, brand experts, ad campaign managers.

This is not to say that the two sides can’t cross over into the other’s territory. But at their roots, the core “language,” the underlying views and ways of thinking for each side are fundamentally, intrinsically different.

Now of course, any good marketing or advertising executive will tell you that the bottom line is ALWAYS more sales. But when I talk about “culture,” or “language” I’m not talking about the conversations that go on in weekly management or sales meetings—I’m talking about the internal dialogue of the employees doing the actual work. The self-perception of those sitting at their desks, pounding out digits on their keyboard or phone (of course, our sales reps don’t literally “pound the phone,” since they’re using our PowerDialer sales tool, but I digress).

The bottom line is that the language of sales is about ever-increasing numbers and revenue. The language of marketing is about “connecting” with people.

More on this tomorrow.

(Editor’s Note: Rod Sloane makes an interesting comment below, stating that most sales types he knows largely “fell out” of the ranks of a typical college education. Just to clarify, my point is not to say that sales reps are “college educated,” merely to say that whether college-educated or not, most of them self-select themselves as being part of a “business culture” and “business mindset”—competition, results-oriented, facing challenges, etc.)

1. Web site design/content (65% stated they were increasing budget allocation)
2. Email marketing (54%)
3. Web search optimization (51%)

Great news, right? Good to hear that the economy is picking up, and that smart companies are following current trends in effective Web lead generation.

So why did my “Massive Disconnect” alarm start going off almost immediately?

Here’s why: because indicators show that the majority of companies are terribly, horribly un-optimized to take advantage of the leads their Web marketing activities generate.

Even though the article states that 75% of sales organizations now use a CRM tool of some kind to track and monitor sales activities, MIT research shows that most of them still aren’t following good lead management practices to get the most from their increased marketing spend.

For example, how many of the companies surveyed are currently responding to their incoming, “hot” Web leads in 10 minutes or less? Because if they aren’t, MIT’s research shows they’re potentially losing 20 times the total effectiveness of the leads they generate. Even worse, the research shows that 45% of companies don’t even respond AT ALL to new Web-generated leads—let alone in 10 minutes or less as best practices suggest.

So let me get this straight: the top three increased marketing budget allocations for the next year are all based on Web marketing—yet nearly half of companies don’t respond AT ALL to incoming Web leads.

Hmmmm.

Furthermore, of the companies surveyed, how many call/contact attempts are they making to reach their new Web leads? MIT’s research shows that barely 7 percent of companies make at least 6 total contact attempts by phone and email to incoming Web leads.

Yet according to The Bridge Group, the average number of “touches” needed to convert a new inquiry into a prospect is somewhere between 6 and 7—and dead “touches” like no-answer phone calls don’t even count towards that number.

So tell me again—why are companies increasing Web marketing budgets when statistically only 7 percent of them are even meeting the absolute, barest of bare minimums to get the value they want from their leads?

My “Massive Disconnect” alarm just went into overdrive.

Is it any wonder that in spite of progress, Propelling Brands says that sales and marketing still have a long way to go to align their processes?

A few thoughts about Apple’s recent PR problems:

1. When your client has a real problem, simply telling them “You’re holding it wrong” isn’t a real solution.

Even if it’s the truth, clients and prospects rarely want to hear that their process is to blame. Even if it is actually part of the problem, be extremely careful and proceed with caution. A lot of people at the client’s organization have spent a lot of time and energy putting the current process in place.

2. As dense as the general public (read: your clients) often seem to be, they can tell when you’re pushing spin, and when you’re really trying to solve their problem.

You think that the G4′s buyers, many of whom had owned earlier iPhone iterations, were excited to hear that their brand new hardware had an engineering defect, only to have Apple saying to the press, “It’s no big deal, just buy our slip case for it!”? Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, it just comes across as arrogance.

3. Be extremely cautious about what you treat as a “random outlier,” and what you treat as a real problem.

Bad news never travels well. You think the V.P. of production wanted to have a meeting and tell Steve Jobs, “Hey, um, I think there’s a problem with our antenna design?” How soon did Apple know they had a problem on their hands? Within the first 5,000 units sold? The first 25,000? First 50,000? (Some seem to think Steve Jobs showcasing the Apple slip covers during the product launch meant they knew about it all along.) One of the biggest problems that leads to disaster is the fact that employees don’t want to communicate bad news for fear of the consequences. If your employees don’t feel empowered enough, or trust management enough to let you know when you have a real problem, your corporate culture is in dire need of change.

4. If it’s real, own the problem.

The words “Yes, but . . . ” should never leave your lips until the problem is solved. Clients and prospects don’t want to hear about how amazing you were six or 12 months ago. Don’t point the finger at other vendors, or other people in the company. “Well, if So-and-so Technologies had made Widget X properly, we wouldn’t be having this problem.” It’s not their problem, it’s yours. Fix it.

5. When you definitively know there’s a problem, act decisively, act now, and tell your clients what you’re doing about it.
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The worst thing you can do in a situation like Apple’s is to “circle the wagons” and go silent. Open channels of communication tells your clients that you’re more interested in actually fixing the problem than in trying to save face. Be proactive.

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Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.

She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.

Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:

1. Inside Sales / Telemarketing
2. Executive Events
3. Trade Shows
4. Webinars
5. Email Marketing
6. Search Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0

The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.

The rankings for 2008 were:

1. Executive Events
2. Inside Sales
3. Search Marketing
4. Trade Shows
5. Webinars
6. Email Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0

Lead Capture is the process of getting someone who clicks to your site to fill out a form. 

The look, feel, and length of the form are technically part of the web design; but what does the form do?  Does it put the data into a table, send an email, or populate directly into some form of database?  The form is the transition point between lead conversion and lead management.  Most companies still have to manually type in a lead from the website into tracking systems that range from simple spreadsheets to a customer relationship management (CRM) database.  Ideally a lead is able to be captured and redirected to the appropriate department for response in real time.

Lead Routing is the process of getting the lead into the hands of the most appropriate salesperson.

Speed is critical.  We are finding that most leads sit somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-two hours before the salesperson actually attempts the first live contact.  Much of the slowdown in routing leads is because there isn’t a pre-defined process to decide which salesperson get’s to work the lead.  Many sales managers still dole out leads by hand after considering who is best suited to work each of the leads. 

Most lead routing is still defined by geography.  In a day when the Internet is removing geographical boundaries and there are many effective tools to allow a full sales process to be done remotely, this is a practice that should be reconsidered.  If the sale is followed up through an inside sales or remote sales strategy, then geography should have very little bearing on the decision.  If outside sales or face-to-face sales strategies are required because of product constraints, then geography may have a strong bearing on lead routing.

If fairness is important to management, then routing by a ‘round-robin’ process that systematically and evenly distributes leads is also available.  This often creates a more desirable final result.

Better alternatives to geographical and round-robin routing are routing by performance, skills, or specific vertical market knowledge.  Both the company and the salesperson do better when leads are matched up to the best qualified salesperson.

Lead Source Tracking is an extension of the web analytics process.  The end-goal is the flow of source data from the original search engine, keyword or partner source all the way through the sales process.  This can only be done if all of the associated systems are at least partially integrated with each other or if one system is able to do it all. 

Ideally you’d be able to track closed and paid revenue back to the level of original lead sources.

Lead Response Management is a process to immediately and systematically push leads into the hands of qualified salespeople so they may contact and qualify the leads.

This is the portion of the solution that is most often neglected.  Our experience and studies show leads generally sit for an average of forty-eight hours and get called between four and five times with a ‘contacted’ ratio of only fifty-five percent.

This is the most common hand-off point between the marketers that drive the web leads and the salespeople who are in charge of responding to them.  The baton gets dropped. 

Who drives the process?  Who owns it? 

The marketers want data on how fast and how many times the salespeople respond until they make contact.  They often get frustrated because they lose control of the lead at this point. 

The sales department wants a lot of quality leads quickly.  There is a fine balance between quality and quantity.  They don’t want junk or ‘tire-kickers’ that waste their time, yet they want a continuous flow of qualify leads. 

The salespeople often don’t realize that it is their sales manager and the routing system that often slows down the process.  Sale departments get frustrated because there aren’t enough quality leads.

One elegant solution is to embed a web-form onto a website that captures the lead and pushes it real time into a database.  It then quickly routes the lead to the best suited sales rep, a telephony tool immediately gets the rep on the phone and automatically calls and connects the lead to the rep.

Why dial them immediately?

1-    Because this is the only time you know where they are.

2-    They are surfing the internet because they want help now.

While it does this, the system also moves all of the lead source data into the database for further analytics, tracks the number of calls, tracks the call time, and drives a lead response process to ensure quality control on each and every call.

Another solution is to have someone else do it for you.  LeadQual.com is the first company of it’s kind, an outbound call center that specializes in immediate lead response on behalf of it’s clients. 

Lead Qualification is the process of contacting a lead and turning it into a prospect based on the lead’s interest level.   A prospect enters the Sales Process and is further qualified for need, urgency, budget, and decision making capability.  The skill sets for this process are usually different than lead generation, in fact, they are often the reverse.  Qualifying for interest often casts a wide bucket, qualifying for need casts a small one.  Interest is often the counterfeit of need.

This process is usually done by the Sales Department, but two big problems make it difficult:

1-    Leads lose Interest very quickly.

2-    People are difficult to make contact with. 

Jacques Werth, from High Probability Selling, quotes the average Business to Business Contact Ratio is 14%.  That means you need to make 7 dials to get 1 contact. 

Our experience shows this varies dramatically by industry. Our average is closer to 10% when trying to make contact for the first time.

What is the solution to increasing your contact ratio? 

It goes back to Lead Response Management: Acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople, a system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects.  Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost net results by 20 to 200%.