Wide Angle

History is ripe with famous feuds: the Capulets and Montagues, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Burr, or, as I glibly noted in a previous post, Peggy and Al Bundy.  Enter Sales and Marketing to the fray: often at odds, though truly dependent on one another for the successful operation of any given company.  If early results from our sales and marketing alignment diagnostic are any indication, the two groups have managed to find at least some common ground: commercial messaging is crucial … and it’s something we’re not very good at it. Read More »

Following up on The Five Profiles of Sales Reps, I promised to discuss the ramifications of these findings for B2B marketers.  But first, let me offer some clarity around that work as there seems to be a fair amount of interest from across the membership…

The work previously summarized is specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist. Read More »

For those of us in the B2B marketing world, understanding what drives sales rep effectiveness can help define the role we play in supporting our sales team.  In a recent quantitative effort by the Sales Executive Council (SEC), rep characteristics—having to do with Attitudes, Skills/Behaviors, Activities and Knowledge—were studied.  They found that certain attributes tended to clump together into a few profiles.  More specifically, five distinct groups of sales reps were found, each containing a very different combination of attributes.  See if you can guess the clear winner and the clear loser as I summarize them here: Read More »

If your web site was one of your sales reps—out there on the road, entering prospects’ offices, and making his best pitch—would he be a high-performer: informed, thought-provoking, and persuasive?  Or would he behave more like the typical low-performer: talking at length about your company’s history; describing products and services in an indiscriminate, “dump truck” fashion; asking unnecessary, tedious questions; making bold claims that outstrip anything your company can actually deliver on?  Read More »

Frank Sinatra famously crooned that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Little did he know that, in an ironic bit of pop culture repurposing, the song would come to signify the often hostile—though ultimately committed—relationship between Peggy and Al Bundy in the TV sitcom Married … With Children.

Dysfunctional?  Yes.   Mutually dependent?  Absolutely.

The same can be said of Sales and Marketing.  The two functions often butt heads behind closed doors, but their cooperation and interconnectedness is necessary to achieve key business objectives.  Of course, getting the two groups on the same page is often easier said than done.  We typically see breakdowns in the following areas: Read More »

In this day of the attention economy, most B2B companies have bolted electronic publishing houses onto the front of their marketing engines.  For many, it’s constructed out of little more than a marketing agenda, a keyword index, and reluctant technical staffers-cum-copywriters.  Given its emerging status as the divine path to high-quality sales leads, the online content manufacturing business is burgeoning across nearly every industry. But to the potential buyer conducting research online, this development has been a blessing and a curse, as picking through such a swelling mass of relevant style-over-substance content leads to frustratingly few instances of “I’m glad I read that.”  More often it leads to feelings of boredom combined with a vague sense of being misled with hype, slanted content, unsubstantiated claims, and complex arguments.  Why? Read More »

I’m on United 7094 to Chicago, thinking through a barrage of B2B member conversations last week that all led back to a seemingly intractable problem – the proper structure, interface, and (potential) integration of Marketing and Sales. B2B marketers have long had an inferiority complex relative to their B2C brethren, to which B2B folk reply, ‘if you had Sales to deal with, you’d feel equally humiliated.’ Touché.

Why the conflict? Why the insistence on separate spheres of influence? Why all the talk and no walk? Over the past two years, MLC members have seen quantitative research demonstrating the necessity of marketing and sales partnership, whether it be in differentiating the purchase experience to drive loyalty, or crafting a unique customer experience to boost preference. Here’s what I’m hearing as the stumbling blocks to full partnership and better business results: Read More »

A recent New Yorker article on the financier Martin Armstrong’s obsession with cycle theory got me thinking: while I don’t know anything about cycle theory, I’ve looked at enough data to observe that some numbers are indeed fixed. Not literally fixed in that they are absolute numbers like pi, but fixed in the sense that they are hard to move and in that they will tend to revert back to the mean. This makes them very powerful from a management perspective in that changes in either direction provide you with a lot of information about what’s happening in the marketplace. Read More »