Ken Krogue

Sitting at our booth at Dreamforce, I’m always amazed at the energy these big conferences bring. It’s a testament to me of the power of human creativity, how we as people are at our best, our most noble, when we are in the act of creation—from steel and silicon to words and ideas.

We are a race of builders. We weren’t meant to sit around and wait for society to create itself. We make it ourselves, in our images.

I don’t know why I’m bringing this up at this very moment, sitting in this rock-hard plastic chair, the noise of a crowd echoing—but it’s the truth. Building something, sustaining something is the point of who and what we are.

I guess I bring this up because marketing, particularly direct marketing, too often settles for something less. We talk about tapping in to customer needs, organizing our efforts around creating real customer value, but end up simply selling the “thing,” not what makes the thing valuable.

Over the next four days, I’m interested to see who’s going to be giving out real, valuable information and insight, and who’s going to be giving out thinly-veiled promotional pitches.

In two previous posts, we’ve identified that:

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.

Having just re-read sales and marketing blogger Adam Needle’s 4 part series on the “Unspoken ‘Real State’ of Modern B2B Demand Generation,” I once again cannot commend enough the value of the data and analysis he presents. If you have any interest at all in B2B sales, marketing, branding, or sales management, this is a fantastic set of articles.

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.)

An outstanding article by Propelling Brands’ Adam Needles discussed the fact that according to SirusDecisions, less than 10 percent of B2B businesses have successfully redefined the necessary role of high-impact lead generation and lead nurturing that will be required in 2010 and beyond.

I don’t want to steal his thunder, so go read the article, but the major point is that over the past 10 years, the roles of sales, marketing, lead generation, and lead nurturing have consistently become more holistic.

Sales managers are recognizing that they HAVE to have usable, critical intelligence data about how marketing is getting them their leads—and vice-versa, marketing managers are realizing that their efforts have to line up from Day 1 with what sales is trying to accomplish.

Every marketing and sales touch point is becoming increasingly attached and interactive with a half-dozen other touch points along the way—and for businesses to really get what they need out of their marketing spend, it has to be this way.

Trish Bertuzzi and The Bridge Group provided a set of data that added some weight to this assertion. Their survey of 115 companies indicated that dedicated lead generation/lead nurturing employees have nearly doubled in the last three years, and that there’s increasingly a split—almost exactly 50/50—of which department lead gen reports to, sales or marketing.

While there will never be a total overlap between sales and marketing, I don’t think the time is far distant that we may see the development of a new, hybrid department that works as an intermediary between the two. The “Market Oversight” department, or “Sales Analytics” department, will have the specific role of measuring, testing, and developing the ways in which sales and marketing will combine their efforts.

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.
   1. What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales | Ken Krogue – 10,316 Views
   2. Inside Sales Best Practices | Ken Krogue - 893 Views
   3. KPI – Key Performance Indicators | Ken Krogue – 702 Views
   4. Inside Sales Tips by Ken Krogue | Ken Krogue - 653 Views
   5. Inside Sales versus Outside Sales | Ken Krogue – 316 Views
   6. 6 Reasons Salesforce Users Need Hosted Dialer Technology | Ken Krogue - 312 Views
   7. Is Leaving a Voicemail Worthwhile? | Ken Krogue – 305 Views
   8. Leadscon East Vendors Need to Drink their Own Medicine | Ken Krogue - 117 Views
   9. Behind the Cloud – Ken’s Notes | Ken Krogue – 239 Views
   10. Demand Generation Tactics and Strategy | Ken Krogue – 199 Views
   11. Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations Last Week of the Month | Ken Krogue – 177 Views
   12. Inside Sales Tips – Interest is The Counterfeit of Need | Ken Krogue – 149 Views
   13. Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep | Ken Krogue – 134 Views
   14. Inside Sales Tips – How LinkedIn Gives you 3 Free SEO Backlinks | Ken Krogue - 134 Views
   15. Inside Sales is Top Method of Lead Generation | Ken Krogue - 125 Views

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.

Top 15 Articles on www.KenKrogue.com