The Power of Joining Forces
If you’re a marketing or sales leader in an organization faced with revenue and expense challenges that re-define the word “stretch” then you might find this blog a valuable use of your time. However, if you haven’t been faced with one or more of the following situations, save your time and move to one of your other high priorities:
1) Marketing and sales teams tend to operate out of individual vacuums which frequently creates operational confusion and chaos
2) Marketing budgets have been cut but the revenue objectives have increased
3) When revenue numbers start falling short of projections, subjective decision making is applied to determine how to close the gap.
4) We wait for key learning’s gathered from testing to improve our sales performance
5) We find ourselves in a constant three way struggle between sales, product marketing and market communication when trying to determine who is accountable for poor campaign performance
So what’s the most efficient solution? The stripped down answer: Change the way your marketing and sales department operate. However, I’m not going to preach the virtues of an expensive software application(s) or a complex targeting and segmentation strategy. What I’m going to focus on is a shift in many of the planning processes and daily management processes which will empower your teams to develop an annual plan set-up for success vs. failure, as well as tools to “course correct” unexpected variables that inevitably present themselves throughout the year.
1) Make everyone a stakeholder: Align all of your business unit objectives by product, sales, marketing, operations and engineering. This is a hidden trap and it’s not uncommon for an organization to believe “we’re doing this today”, but take a closer look at the departmental and individual objectives and you might find that some business units have juxtaposing objectives which inadvertently work against another business unit’s objectives. An example of this might be, if channel expansion is the agreed upon strategy for growth but operations has an objective to reduce last year’s expenses by 20% the 2 objectives end up as incongruous and the departments are at odds with one another vs. working synergistically.
2) Collaboratively establish a sales and marketing plan which stretches past achievements but doesn’t set the sales channel up for failure: This is about setting metrics and sales expectations during the planning process. Sales, if you’re feeling like you’re the tail end of a kite that’s already taken off, I encourage you to assert yourself and establish critical metrics in the earliest stages of the process. Address critical questions such as: What are the minimum closing ratio and the minimum sale per call that must be achieved by product to meet the monthly sales goal? Does the plan focus on the products which generate the highest sales volume or greatest revenue per sale? Challenge the assumptions of the plan by breaking sales goals down to the individual sales rep: by product, per day, per rep. Is the stretch realistic? Does the plan drive enough calls into the centers to support the goals? Does your sales management team have a plan of all the campaigns scheduled for the year to support the surge in call volumes? Can the product goal(s) be achieved? Before the plan is approved or the campaign goes out the door "communicate, communicate, communicate" with your marketing partners to help them understand your challenges. Collaboratively arrive at a plan which will prioritize the product sales focus, support the sales channels with additional training, monthly/weekly incentives or comp plans and establish a unified front to the organization.
3) Establish a process to distribute Daily Scorecards. Many companies operate without having any specificity around the performance of the various marketing and sales tactics used to achieve the revenue objectives. The reasons are numerous but usually roll up into a single reason; the company doesn’t have the software/billing system/analytics to provide this level of information in an accurate manor. Hence, this serves as decision making support justifying the continued practice of managing essentially blindfolded. An alternative to “doing nothing” is to focus on capturing the data that is relevant to the 20% of the products that usually generates 80% of the revenue. This reduces the task to something that seems more reasonable. Most databases are query-able today however; it may be a step which requires manual support or some other creative solution. This may not be quite as sexy or as accurate as an automated CRM program but it’s better than operating without any information. A good friend of mine shared a personal motto of hers “What gets measured, can be fixed”. I agree with her whole heartedly!
4) Establish a Rapid Response Team. This team should consist of at least one team member from each business unit that will feel the impact of a campaign or marketing initiative that is underperforming against previously assigned financial results. This team should be charged with developing “gap” closing plans before a “gap” emerges, eliminating the normal chaos that can disrupt an entire organization. I encourage all companies to proactively have a “bag of tricks” pre-identified and ready for deployment to cost effectively mitigate unexpected results. In essence, you’re developing a back-up game plan which reduces stress throughout the organization.
5) Develop a reactionary process/operational plan before an emerging revenue gap occurs. The Rapid Response Team needs to make recommendations that will “course correct” an underperforming initiative as close to “real time” as possible and identify an implementation plan that can be supported by the departments in which they represent. At minimum, this step will eliminate any surprises by your front-lines sales force and speed the implementation process up by as much as 30 to 60 days….. critical time to help close a revenue gap and reduce the pressures that inevitably move downstream to the sales channels. I’m guessing many of you could share multiple horror stories of what happens when a “great idea” is pushed out the front door without the proper prep time.
These five low cost/no cost steps can make all the difference in the world to ensuring that the marketing and sales plan which was laid out the previous year will produce the intended results in the current year. These steps will also validate or invalidate assumptions used to develop estimated impacts of any given initiative. With time, the teams benefit by becoming smarter through invaluable key learning’s which are applied to support future planning assumptions.
Have some “low cost/no cost” ideas of your own? Have a horror story you want to share when teams aren’t aligned? Share the wealth so we can all operate a little smarter tomorrow.
Prefer to talk one and one, call me at 570-574-6089.
Christine Feeley
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