You may have implemented Marketing Automation But Is Your Culture Ready for a Sales and Marketing “Process” Driven Culture?
In Part 1 of this series we discussed why as a B2B outsourced company we felt that implementing a sales and technology stack focused on marketing automation is only the start of transforming your organization. In that blog we share what an ideal database technology stack looks like for marketing and sales. In that blog we also posited the following four pillars:
- Sales Content and Marketing Content that sells to the buyer the way they want to buy.
- Training your sales in this new approach
- Giving Sales a Shared Sales Quota
- Implementing the sales and marketing technology stack
All four pillars are ultimately process driven where the results need to anchored in data requiring the need for a marketing automation platform.
If you examine these pillars they point to the following game changers for sales and marketing organizations:
- You can no longer function in silos when you create content. Sales needs to talk to marketing and marketing needs to talk to sales.
- You can no longer measure your success or failure in silos so your data needs to be integrated.
- We all give lip service to being customer centric but you can no longer be successful unles you focus all your attention respecting where your customer is in their buying cycle or you will lose business to your competitors.
Unless you are launching your sales and marketing organization from scratch all the points above may require a cultural shift:
- You can’t expect bag carrying sales reps and executives understand the new paradigm because they are focused on growing revenue and closing deals this quarter.
- You can’t expect a marketing organization to embrace having their B2B demand generation efforts be measured on closed business
- With the buyers calling the shots now your marketing team may need to listen to the “Voice of the Sales Force” More than they are comfortable with.
- Your executive team may need to be convinced that these endeavors are both a marathon and a sprint.
So ultimately if you look at the challenges your organization faces in aligning sales and marketing — the challenge you may face is no different from the challenges most organizations face – you need to start with commitment to a “process” driven culture.
To make this shift ultimately starts with a shift in culture. And the cultural shift needs to start from the top down. You either believe that the buyer now controls the sales process or you don’t. If you do believe the buyer controls the process you need to decide if your organization willing to:
- Evaluate both teams and bring in talent that understand both the technology and processes so you can shift your culture?
- Genuinely create an approach that puts the customer at the center of your process which starts with listening to the Voice of the Salesforce since they are closest to the customer?
- Is your company convinced that long term success that you need to committ to nuturing and educating customers not ready to buy?
The final blog in this series will give you some current trends that you can explore internally to see if your company is throwing B2B Marketing and Lead Gen Budget down the drain. Are you losing because you will not commit.
If any of the facts and figures we are sharing hit a chord or to see if Outsourcing or some Sales and Marketing Process Consulting may be able to help you accelerate your B2B Demand Generation Engine please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.
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