cadenceblog

Are you a warrior, a lover, a magician, or a sovereign?

I was listening to a podcast today called The Team’s Archetypes (Businessweek's executive editor John Byrne talks with leadership guru Nikos Mourkogiannis about how knowing the four basic types of people in any organization allows you to harness their strengths).

Are you a warrior, a lover, a magician, or a sovereign?

It also brings into perspective the difference between sales and marketing. I can picture sales as warriors, sometimes lovers. Perhaps marketing is part lover, and part magician.

Some amount of conflict is a good thing as mentioned in a previous post about marketing and sales alignment. More importantly, I can see why you would want to have all of these types in a business environment. A good example was made in regards to a product roll-out. Your first impulse is to jump to the warrior, get it done and out the door! But you need the magician to develop the ideas and concepts, the lover to build relationships, and the sovereign to perhaps put it all together, make people believe in what they are doing, and keep everyone inspired.

 This is by no means an attempt to stereotype or simplify people, because I think most people have some of each trait, though there may be a dominant trait. The podcast also mentions, how we change as time passes. The point is to recognize strengths in yourself and others, and use that knowledge to build a better company, a product, or team.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Webcast

Looking for research and commentary about sales & marketing alignment,  I think you will find this webcast presented by the American Marketing Association (AMA), called For Better or Worse. Marketing and Sales Conflict Can Actually Produce Positive Results useful. It was presented today, but you can view it anytime.

"AMA and University of Florida will debut the findings of a recent Marketing and Sales Alignment survey that amazingly shows how conflict between marketing and sales departments, if managed well, can actually contribute to more positive results."

Some of the things mentioned seem intuitive or obvious by experience but it was good to see some research behind it. Sometimes we feel emotional as marketing or sales folks...and we know there is a difference in perspective, but don't know how to dig through the emotions to the real problems. This webcast identifies very specifically different mindsets and values  between sales and marketing (according to the study) that bring about such conflict. It also provides insight into what can be done to resolve them. It also talks about how some amount of conflict is good, and can lead to positive change for individuals, the groups, and the business as a whole.

You'll see  characteristics and mechanisms of best practice companies in terms of aligning sales and marketing such as joint meetings, cross functional teams, use of coordinators, job rotations, and tradeshows.

Watch this webcast for more information on this research.

Also, visit the AMA Marketing & Sales Alignment site for more information, webcasts and shows on Demand Generation, Sales Effectiveness, and Customer Messaging.

Marketing's Role with Strategic Accounts

In a previous post I mentioned my Top 6 List of B2B Sales & Marketing Resources.

One of them was Miller Heiman - a sales performance consulting company, they publish a well known sales best practices report, and also have a free newsletter.

My boss forwarded me another terrific Miller Heiman article called Choosing and Working with Strategic Accounts. I think a lot of B2B companies struggle with understanding their strategic accounts. How to choose them, how to keep them, and how to measure their success -- this article provides insight and answers into those questions.

Also in a previous post called Developing long-term trusted relationships with B2B customers, I mentioned an article, Becoming a Trusted Advisor. In the post I only talked about the first point - Customer Executive Briefings. The 2^nd point was Account-Management Teams and the article stated:

2. Account-Management Teams
When a customer knows that you have a dedicated account team just for them, it goes a long way toward establishing partnership and trust. Each account team typically consists of four functional roles:

· "A business contact from the solution-provider side (typically the account salesperson).

· A technical contact from the solution-provider side (lead senior engineer).

· An executive manager from the solution-provider side (typically the president/CEO).

· A representative from the customer side (a senior IT exec).

Keep in mind that one person can fill more than one role, and more than one person can fill a single role. The key to this approach is that it shows a deep commitment on the part of the solution provider toward the customer." 

 The Miller  Heiman article Choosing and Working with Strategic Accounts brings about this point as well:

“It’s a business initiative versus a sales initiative,” Johnson remarks. “You need organizational alignment, executive endorsement and metrics to assess your success.”

When you’re working with a non-strategic account, a strong account manager relationship can be enough, but when you’re working with a strategic account, a cross-functional team should be set up for communication at all levels. And, every person at every level—particularly those at the executive level—should be on the same page: The relationship should be perceived as a partnership. “If both organizations aren’t committed to the partnership, you shouldn’t move forward,” Johnson says.

So here you can see again the executive partnership theme.

However, how do you see yourself as a Marketer in terms of Strategic Accounts?

I view myself as an additional resource to those customers. One advantage that I have as an IT B2B Marketing is my technical background. I am comfortable to engage in some degree of technical discussions.  However, technical understanding is not enough. You also have to be aware of the business issues your customers face, especially the business issues that your offerings solve.

One year I was organizing a holiday event and we had low registration.  Sales didn’t have anymore time to promote the event and it was decided that I try to call customers myself. Prior to that, I did very little outbound calling. I actually did get through to some customers and because it was more of a relationship event, where I was inviting and encouraging them to come out (rather than a sales call), I had some pleasant conversations.

After that event, customers commented that they were very happy to hear from another person in the company.  This is when I first learned directly that it was important to customers to have other levels of contact, outside their direct sales rep.

I try to engage with customers at events as much as possible. Marketers try to get the right people to an event, but also try to create a professional and enjoyable experience for them. Sometimes, I feel that marketing people at events think that means being friendly, courteous, and professional. That is all very important…however I try to also remember faces and companies, and speak with them about their issues in a non-sales way. Also, since it is not always possible for sales to cover each person in the room, I look for gaps and try to fill them.

Over the years I have developed rapport with customers. Now when Imeet and greet them at events, it is beyond a trivial professionally friendliness. My role (beyond event organizer) is to understand their needs, make them aware of relevant solutions, and point them to resources that will hopefully advance their buying cycle. I believe some of this has contributed to the success of sustaining and growing strategic accounts.

My role is shifting from executing events to overall marketing strategy and planning. However I still look forward to face-to-face genuine interactions with customers and prospects. Not only to understand who I am marketing to, but also to help our company sustain and growth our valuable relationships.

In summary, here are the articles that relate to strategic account development:

Choosing and Working with Strategic Accounts – Miller Heiman

Becoming a Trusted Advisor – CRN and Var Business

Developing long-term trusted relationships with B2B customers – a previous cadenceblog post.

Who is responsible for lead generation - Marketing or Sales?

One of my main responsibilities in the past few years was to increase marketing activities. My company wanted to focus on business seminars to improve customer relationships.  So over the years I have been concentrating on this. Working in a small company, resources are scarce, and putting on seminars takes a good amount of time. I  have some support from my vendor partners, and have learned how to leverage them as best as possible. The part that helped me the most though in raising the level of activity was planning and process. I was able to plan quarters ahead (instead of scrambling to get something on the calendar for next month). I was able to avoid a lot of stress and unplanned activities by being on schedule and having a documented process.  As well I had a plan that I could always go back to for improvement.

A new problem emerged. Suddenly I had a lot of inquiries and I was passing them on to sales.  We were calling them leads, but they were really "unqualified leads".  I started to ask  a lot of questions like were my leads any good, and was sales following up on my leads, and hang on, what exactly is a lead, when and how do I pass leads off, how could I track these things, and why am I not tracking this!!. (if you are wondering, yes, I started to lose sleep over this).

I started researching these issues, and came to recognize my dilemma as a major "disconnect" between sales and marketing. I realized that I was not alone and that a lot of organizations were having the same issue. The question remained however: whose job is it to create and manage leads? I was creating  more than enough "leads" and passing them along, wasn't that enough? 

I found quite a few good resources, but nothing sank in or put it all together the way Brian Carroll did in his book "Lead Generation for the Complex Sale". In future posts I want to talk more about his strategy, the book, and what I've implemented so far. For now, for those of you that are struggling with these issues, I recommend following Brian's blog - B2B Lead Generation Blog. Also, here are some other resources that have shaped my thinking:

• AMA: A Multimodal Approach to Lead Nurturing for Complex Sales
  This webcast will introduce you to some of Brian's strategies and cover high level ideas from his book

• Duct Tape Marketing: Sales vs. Marketing Podcast
  This podcast illustrates the difference in how sales and marketing thinks!


• MarketingSherpa: Lead Scoring & Management Roundtable
  This is a special report where 6 experts  (one of which is Brian Carrol) share their views on lead qualification.  You must be a member to read, or you can sign up for a trial membership.  BTW, MarketingSherpa is an excellent resource, especially their B2b newsletter. They have  real-life case studies,  practical  know-how articles, and benchmark data.  Last year I purchased a report called Business Technology Benchmark Guide. It was worth every cent.


• KnowledgeStorm: The Fine Art of Lead Qualification
  Great statistics and best practices (leans towards online leads, but can apply to offline).  If you want prove of how important timing is when following up with an inquiry,  you'll find data to support this. You may need to register for this whitepaper (well worth it).

There are a lot of resources, insights and information on the subject of lead generation and I can't hope to document them all. The most important thing is to recognize and understand the problem in your organization, and find a way to tackle the issue.

And for those of you that have lead generation and nurturing programs in place already --- boy do I envy you. Especially if you played a part in starting one up, or improving one.  Please tell me it looked like Mount Everest at one time (looking up), and let me know what it feels like at the top :)

 

Developing long-term trusted relationships with B2B customers

How many of your customers consider you a "Trusted Advisor"? I recently came across a brief article in VarBusiness Magazine called "Becoming a Trusted Advisor". It listed three methods, one of which is Executive Customer Briefings. As the article states, in order for these to be successful, there are three key elements:

• Understanding the customer's business and goals
• Approaching the customer’s problem from a long-term strategy
• Suggesting specific solutions to achieve their business goals and long-term strategies

Looking closer at these  elements, I realized that they go beyond the context of Customer Briefings or a “sales only” initiative. What if marketers could think in terms of the business value that their company could provide customers or potential customers? Then, help convey these benefits throughout the marketing and sales cycle. How would this affect the development of valued “Trusted Advisor” relationships?

On a related thought, I recommend reading What B2B customers really expect, from the Harvard Business Review (HBR), as I found some of the revelations quite interesting. (If you are not a customer of HBR, just watch a short ad, to see the article, it is worth it). There is chart in the article called Customer Expectations Revealed, which shows the relationship between what customers expect, what vendors think customers expect, and what vendors recruit for.

As a third article of reference on the subject, that discusses how marketing can actively play a part in developing these relationships, read Get Strategic with Account-Based Marketing from Marketing2IT (a TechWeb newsletter with trends and tips for the IT Marketers that I also recommend).