I had the pleasure of speaking at a conference last week in Chicago and being in the presence of about 200 senior sales and marketing executives, as well as high-caliber thinkers in the area of sales impact. Rebecca Wettemann Vice President from Nucleus research and Joe Galvin from vice president from Sirius Decisions a sales research company. Great crowd--full of smart and insightful execs from top companies such as JP Morgan, American Express and GE. A lot of probing questions and good conversation. SAVO Group, a partner of the Phelon Group, and event host invited me to speak about listening to the voice of sales and the Phelon Group’s methodology. SAVO provides technical solutions for sales organizations allowing them to increase sales effectiveness through the use of a central system for enabling sales interactions. For many reasons, I believe SAVO is on the cusp of something incredible. The company has passionate and customer-centric leadership team, an innovative product that solves a real and growing set of concerns, and a renewed focus by companies on what is truly required to enable better, more value-oriented selling. At the event, I shared our method and provided the audience with best practices for how organizations should listen to Sales. For the past six years, we’ve spent a lot of time helping company’s listen to customers. In 2003 or so, we started listening to sales and applied some of the voice of customer guiding principles and concepts to listening to sales. Our experience has shown that marketing and company resources can be better utilized if the organization can make fact-based and objective decisions about what sales needs replacing assumptions and gut-feel with real data. Further, once it’s known what sales needs, that insight must be contextualized by how your target customers and prospects make buying decisions. Both of these factors help companies better understand where to point the arrow. During the presentation, there were two points that resonated with the audience and I thought I’d share here: 1. The existence and importance of two types of sales insight. Today, when most companies and marketing teams talk to sales, they are looking to inform mostly tactical decisions. Unfortunately, the questions that get asked are around a specific events or activities—let’s say what should be on the agenda for sales kickoff, requirements for a new tool or portal, what are your needs, how you use these tools, what did you think of the field marketing program that was launched, etc. These are utility insights or data. On the other hand are strategic insights which rather than gathering usage information or requirements data, treat sales people as a conduit to the marketplace. Questions become: how are customers making buying decisions, what is our competition doing to de-position us, how is our new branding campaign and messaging impacting customers, what pain are customers feeling around new regulations in their industry? To juxtapose them: strategic insights help identify and inform strategic and complex decisions the company will make or should consider about go-to-market, positioning, etc. Utility insights, where 80% of currently sales listening focuses, is oriented toward making tactical adjustments. Both sets of insight—strategic and utility—are important, but there is an important distinction both in when you gather it, how you gather it and from whom, and how that intelligence gets used. B2B Marketers especially need to be cognizant of this distinction and be sure to gather strategic insights. 2. The need for an actionable framework that aligns marketing and sales. Over the last few years, everyone from Harvard professors to frontline marketing managers has talked about the lack of sales and marketing alignment and its implications on revenue. Through our focus on customers, the disconnect is absolutely clear. Instead of blogging about it and over-analyzing about the why of misalignment, we focused our energies instead on developing a framework or tool that would help our clients address it. As you will see in the last few slides of the presentation. We’ve created a Heat Map tool that does three things: 1) represents the customer and their “needs” as an anchor point by which to align marketing and sales; 2) visually represents, in a common language, the real challenges and areas of misalignment from a seller’s perspective; and, 3) provides a sense of the specific and budget-impacting actions that can be taken to get on the same page. We invented this proprietary heat map to give companies a singular tool to see what sales needs, how customers buy and where marketing does and should invest. Working with companies to listen to sales has created opportunities for marketing and sales-supporting group to spend in areas that not only increase sales effectiveness but enhance the company’s ability to sell to customer pain and buying habits. The idea of talking to 2-3 sales people before making an important strategic investment is no longer enough. The challenges that marketing faces today in demonstrating not only to sales that it’s there in the trenches, marketing must now bubble up its impact to the CEO and CFO—tying significant investments in marketing to corporate performance and top-line results. Here is a quote from Harvard professor Benson Shapiro—Shapiro is the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. If marketing and sales do not cooperate, the company's strategy will be inconsistent and weak; and execution will be flawed and inefficient. In today's hyper-competitive world, the sales and marketing functions must yoke together at every level—from the core central concepts of the strategy to the minute details of execution. Promise Phelon Promise.Phelon @ Phelongroup.com

Labels: marketing, Promise Phelon, sales, SAVO

I was recently in Singapore and met with a colleague who works for a large government agency there—one that just received a few billion (yes, billion!) dollars from Singapore’s government to roll out new programs. As we walked and talked, I asked about utilization and if their current programs were being adopted. After a long pause, I realized that tracking usage and adoption wasn’t something their team focused on. Instead, they tie success to new programs and attracting new people into them versus getting folks to maximize their use of what’s already there.

Like a lot of companies and organizations, teams tend to be intoxicated by the newest frontier. A client’s customer told me a few years ago, “Solution providers live with an eye toward the future, but we’re just trying to survive in the present.” Yes, every company needs to be forward-looking; but it’s also true that adapting to new, new, new is a challenge for most customers and their organizations.

Study re-confirms the importance of retention

A small, recent study put out by an organization called DemandGen highlighted, as we’ve said for years, that retention as a corporate strategy is essential to profitable growth—not only because retention gives you the ability to get more from existing customers, but also because it gives you and your customers a better ability to absorb change. The study, which took into account the responses of 200 sales and marketing executives, focused on the sales and marketing aspect of being “new-market focused.” Two key takeaways for you:

1. The majority of sales and marketing executives said that their companies’ top two growth strategies for the coming year are “new product/extensions” and “change focus on customer/segments,” at 76% and 62% respectively. This is shocking because “deepening customer relationships” and “growing existing accounts,” two of the other answers, are known to be key to rapid growth and yields but were not noted by respondents as top priorities.
2. Constant “innovation” is becoming hard to digest. Sales organizations, marketers and customers often are not ready to receive new products and services, new models for engagement, new… new… new…. DemandGen’s study pointed out that 58% of respondents said their greatest challenge was “implementing strategy,” while 34% said they were only somewhat prepared to deliver on their customers’ biggest demands.

Is retention in your plan for the next fiscal year?

What are you doing in your plans for the upcoming fiscal year to connect with and segment your customer base and put into place a retention strategy for your value segments? As part of your new fiscal year plan, do a simple exercise of valuing the new versus the existing base: what is the potential value of your current customers versus the value of the new market (taking into account the cost required to enter that new market or attract those new customers)? If you consistently do this exercise and implement a retention strategy as par-for-the-course, you’ll be able to better put your current versus new market opportunities into better context and capitalize on the breakthrough growth that retention as a strategy provides.

Promise Phelon, CSO and Founder
Promise.Phelon@phelongroup.com

Labels: corporate strategy, customer retention, customers, growth, marketing

Last Thursday I attended SVAMA’s event on MARKETING THOUGHT – Ideas That Drive Results. Overall there were some good points and learnings to take away. While Guy Kawasaki is always great to listen to and learn from, it was the Gartner Group presentation by Robert Goodwin that resonated with me. Of course that was because his topic speaks to what the Phelon Group lives and breathes every day, Customer Buying Trends and Influence - the TOP 10 Most Effective Marketing Activities in IT. Gartner is in the process of releasing one of their studies, and Robert shared some of the insights gained from the study. So in the spirit of “Pay it Forward” (and by the way if you haven’t seen the movie, you should rent it), I share with you some of the IT buying trends that emerged:

1) The Sales channel is becoming more important in technology as buyers look to this group to help them determine the value they will receive from their purchases.

2) High touch selling is still the most effective way and preferred way that executives buy. These decision makers put Digital Media at the bottom of their list as ways they make decisions or are influenced. So much for all this blogging and webcast stuff! Gartner recommends investing in all the classic high-touch methods: sales presentation and interaction, contact management, events, the website.

3) There is a growing trend that technology solutions are now being purchased from the line of business and not purely the IT departments.

4) And on the subject of delivering technology to the marketplace, leading edge technology buyers are acquiring technology “as a service” rather than as "owners" as they have in the past.

So for those of you in the technology sector who are reading this, it may be time to check in with your customers on “How they WANT to buy” and time to get in touch with your sales people on what they need to more effectively sell.

Debra Colombana, Vice President of Client and Market Development Debra.Colombana@phelongroup.com

Labels: blog, blogging, customers, marketing, results, sales, selling