“What conversation?” you might ask. A lot has been written about creating conversations between marketing and the customer, and between sales and the customer. But few have entered the space between marketing and sales, because there is usually little two-way communication that takes place there. Indeed, usually the name of the game is marketing vs. sales.
All too often marketing creates sales collateral and the sales people either use it or not, or change it to suit the needs of the customer. Rarely does the sales person sit down with the marketing group to explain how the customer reacted to the message, and even more rarely does the marketing person accompany the sales person on a client call.
Miller Heiman’s 2008 Sales Best Practices Study reveals that only 37% of respondents agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need. Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, says its actually worse than that. “The lack of synergy between sales and marketing is so common as to risk cliché. Marketing feels that sales doesn't follow-up on marketing-generated leads. Sales counters that the leads aren't any good, and the information they provide isn’t helpful. My experience confirms that this communication breakdown affects nine out of ten companies.”
But with the current economic meltdown, a lot of sales and marketing people are hurting. And “necessity,” it is said, “is the mother of invention.” Leaders in the marketing and sales professions realize that there is value to be had in a more robust discourse between them. Speaking recently before the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Linda McGovern, director of marketing at USG Corporation observed: “The recession's pressure on budgets is forcing conversations between sales and marketing that would not have taken place in the past.” Gary Slack, chairman, chief experience officer, and partner at Slack Barshinger, noted that “The recession is helping to bring marketing and sales closer together. More important is the increasing emphasis on content in marketing.”
But how to make it happen? Time is the biggest barrier. Sales people are still client focused, and marketing people are still message focused, and neither has the time for the work needed to break down the barriers between the two organizations and engage in ongoing dialogue.
One powerful solution that has come onto the stage recently is called the “eWorking platform,” a software solution that captures the customer’s reaction to a marketing message and provides feedback to marketing. Then marketing tweaks the message and the process continues to improve the message iteratively, all without an actual face to face conversation. The software captures the sales person’s changes based on the customer’s reactions, and a virtuous cycle is started. Marketing has the advantage of a virtual presence at the client meeting. Sales has the advantage of a virtual presence at the marketing meeting. The result is a virtual conversation: both groups benefit from the conversation that never really took place.
LeveragePoint has embedded the “virtual conversation” between marketing and sales into its LeveragePoint for Value Management software suite. As the value message created by marketing is played out with the customer, the sales person makes changes to nail the sale. As the message is refined, it is fed back to marketing.
The concept of virtual conversations, a kind of collective corporate awareness that captures and redistributes what we know, contains real strategic and competitive power. The largest untapped resource in our organizations—the inherent or tacit knowledge of our knowledge workforce—is destined to become one of the most important competitive assets of the global marketplace. We are developing the physical ability to tap into and effectively capture, categorize, and redistribute that previously elusive resource and blend it with other resources—both internal and external--in a single personalized interface.
We are only at the beginning of this process, but the value to an organization is real enough, even at this early stage. The solution is so important to corporate competitiveness and organizational effectiveness it kind of makes you wonder why we waited this long.
Jonathon Levy
Chief Strategy Officer
