Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview – When Planets Align: Sales and Marketing

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This is the second excerpt from my interview with Andrew “Birchy” Birch, CEO of Sungevity, a leading provider of home solar-energy systems.

Sungevity is creating Solar 2.0 through Sales 2.0, and proving it is possible to work for social change and make a profit. Birchy worked with my company, Phone Works, to test and implement a customer-focused inside sales system and successfully introduce the principles of Sales 2.0 to the solar-energy industry.

Anneke: A key theme in Sales 2.0 is sales and marketing alignment. Marketing programs really drive prospective customer interest in Sungevity’s options. How are marketing and sales working together?

Birch: A lot of solar companies have fantastic experience in installation and technology, but the majority aren’t as professional as they could be in marketing and integrating that into sales. We’ve hired great people with really strong marketing skills, and with [Phone Works’] help, we’ve implemented some of the best practices in the inside sales industry. It’s really about the people who do those jobs having that skill set; that hasn’t really happened in the solar industry to date.

Step one is the people, and step two is the process and what you’re actually doing. Our marketing campaigns tend to be more focused on the online segment, and we do a lot of PR just because this is such a fantastic story about positive change. We do high-impact things such as the White House campaign, and we emphasize that going green is now easy with a zero-cost solar system. We try to get that message out through non-conventional PR channels, as well.

That integrates to sales through our online design tool. Sales has to manage the volume going through the design phase and manage the quality, which is really key. Then sales obviously needs to have active communication on a daily and hourly basis, through the software, to see what’s coming down the funnel and make sure each of the sales people has a good pipeline of candidates.

Anneke: What would you say to a CEO who’s managing a more traditional business? Why even entertain Sales 2.0?

Birch: It seems very logical that all CEOs would be, first and foremost, focused on the customer. My belief, having implemented inside sales in this industry, which hadn’t really seen inside sales before, is that this is a fundamentally better customer experience, so it’s definitely worthy of testing. Thereafter, assuming that is correct, the economics will take care of themselves.

Read the full interview with Andrew “Birchy” Birch in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0, sales and marketing alignment

Sales & Marketing Alignment: When Does Marketing Hand Off to Sales?

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This excerpt is the third and last in a series featuring David Satterwhite and Mark Hamilton, whom I highlighted last year in a post titled, “Avoiding the Blame Game Between Sales and Marketing” (Feb. 9, 2009). At the time, they were a terrific twosome at newScale, a company that offers IT service catalog and service portfolio management software solutions. David ran Sales; Mark ran Marketing.

They’ve since left newScale (David went on to run sales at Genius and is now executive vice president of sales at Yammer, and Mark is starting up a new company to bridge B2B marketing with social media), but I had the opportunity to talk to them both again about their collaboration and their views on collaboration in general.

Anneke: Where does Marketing’s responsibility for prospects leave off and Sales’ ownership begin?

Mark: Traditionally, Marketing has thought about its job as getting a prospect up to a certain point in the cycle and then Sales taking them from there. To me, it only matters when the deal closes at the other end. Marketing can run the best campaign in the world, but if it doesn’t result in business, who cares? Marketing leaders need to understand that in order to be relevant to Sales.

David: Every function in the company is trying to get more streamlined; it’s our constant goal — trying to focus on doing more with less — so spending a lot of money on marketing you can’t attach to revenue is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. You need a lot of collaboration at the top around your strategy to make sure you can tie revenue to marketing activity. Mark might come to me and say, “I’m thinking of an awareness campaign; how do you think it will help a sales person when talking to a prospect?” You have to have these conversations so you can throw the strategy up against the reality of the sales cycle.

Mark: Marketing is a portfolio of programs you run: You have awareness campaigns, direct lead-gen campaigns and others. If you don’t have alignment between Sales and Marketing, the balance of those different pieces of the portfolio can get all messed up. So the conversation with Sales might be: “I want to do an awareness campaign, but it’s hard to tie that to leads; let me show you how it all fits together, and how we’re trying to balance the portfolio of investments.”

Anneke: Is there a specific time or place Marketing should hand off a lead to Sales?

David: It can happen in multiple places. It’s really about what the buyer is telling us. At Genius, we found viewing certain web pages and spending 15–30 minutes on the site correlated to buying, so we handed those leads off to Sales at those points. On the other hand, we found downloading certain white papers didn’t correlate to buying, so we didn’t hand off at those points; we kept them in marketing for nurturing.

There are no hard and fast rules, though. In the world of Sales 2.0 and marketing automation, we monitor the process all along, and we learn from the monitoring process. Sales development or lead qualification plays a critical role, engaging buyers who are qualified enough to go to Sales but not yet qualified for a quota-carrying salesperson.

Mark: There’s no magic answer. To me, it depends on various factors such as sales reps’ personalities, skills levels, and the time of the quarter or month. Some reps can handle high volume without getting overwhelmed, and focus on building territory. Others don’t want to talk to a prospect until they are ready to buy. There’s no way Marketing can make a unilateral decision regardless of personality. We can give a rep the ability to dial it up or dial it down. This can change during the last 30 days in the quarter. Some reps can close sales in 30 days, so they need leads even in the final month. For new people or people who are building pipeline, we’d have a different process.

Also, as the marketing guy, you have to be really cognizant, check in with Sales, ask how you’re doing and if the program is tied to revenue. You have to be careful in that discussion, because it can come off as pointing fingers or blaming. I work really hard never to have it perceived that way.

Read the other excerpts of this interview series,  “New Age Buyers: Are Your Customers Changing?” and “Sales & Marketing Collaboration: Driven by Culture or Technology?” or find the full interview in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: marketing automation, Sales 2.0, sales and marketing alignment, sales development

Sales & Marketing Collaboration: Driven by Culture or Technology?

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book.  This excerpt is the second in a series featuring David Satterwhite and Mark Hamilton, whom I highlighted last year in a post titled, “Avoiding the Blame Game Between Sales and Marketing” (Feb. 9, 2009). At the time, they were a terrific twosome at newScale, a company that offers IT service catalog and service portfolio management software solutions: David ran Sales; Mark ran Marketing.

They’ve since left newScale (David went on to run sales at Genius and is now executive vice president of sales at Yammer, and Mark is starting up a new company to bridge B2B marketing with social media), but I had the opportunity to talk to them both again about their collaboration and their views on collaboration in general.

Anneke: What strategies, processes and technologies supported your sales and marketing collaboration?

Mark: The technology was a secondary factor. You can’t solve lack of cooperation by bringing in software; it’s not a technology problem.

David: The right tools help facilitate it, but culture is more important than technology. Maybe that’s why collaboration gets ignored or dropped, because it’s not about strategy or process; it’s about culture. If you set up the right culture, everything comes from that: You get the right people, process, tools.

Anneke: Let’s say you’re working for a huge company where the culture does not foster sales and marketing collaboration. Is it possible to create a culture within your own departments that’s not the same as the corporate culture created by the CEO, and drive that alignment?

David: I think you can go part way. A liaison role needs to be created between Sales and Marketing in larger companies to help make this happen. It then becomes harder for Sales and Marketing to point fingers at each other, because it’s the same person.

Mark: You don’t have to have a company culture of collaboration. It’s great if you do, but it doesn’t preclude you from having it between Sales and Marketing. What would preclude it is having a CEO who encourages a culture of conflict. Then you can’t win. In one of my previous chief-marketing-officer roles, there was a corporate marketing function, but in each of the geographic territories the marketing function reported into Sales. When I first took over the group, the regional sales reps didn’t want anything to do with corporate marketing. We ended up setting a culture where each geography’s marketing team came up with ideas, then sold their ideas to other geographies. The German territory actually funded their program by selling and executing campaigns for the UK and other countries. We began to see collaboration between the sales-driven geographies and corporate marketing functions.

Read the first excerpt of this interview series,  “New Age Buyers:Are Your Customers Changing?” or find the full interview in the Resources section of this website.

What are your views on the importance of  culture and technology in supporting collaboration and integration between sales and marketing? Which tools – or cultural changes – have helped bring sales and marketing together in your organization?

Tags: Sales 2.0, Sales and marketing integration

New-Age Buyers: Are Your Customers Changing?

I first wrote about David Satterwhite and Mark Hamilton in a post titled, “Avoiding the Blame Game Between Sales and Marketing” (Feb. 9, 2009). At the time, they were a terrific twosome at newScale, a company that offers IT service catalog and service portfolio management software solutions: David ran Sales; Mark ran Marketing.

They’ve since left newScale (David went on to run sales at Genius and is now executive vice president of sales at Yammer, and Mark is starting up a new company to bridge B2B marketing with social media), but I had the opportunity to talk to them both again about their collaboration and their views on collaboration in general. I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts (this is excerpt 1) from the interview, which will appear in my next book. To read the full interview, visit the Resources section of this website.

Anneke: How have buyers changed in the Internet age, and how does that affect selling and marketing?

Mark: Buyers are behaving differently now; they’re becoming much more educated, and that ties into why you need to make sure you have alignment [of Sales and Marketing]. The traditional ways of thinking about phases of education and touch points are no longer viable. The cycles are a lot shorter now. When people reach out and express interest, you can’t have much latency anymore; qualified buyers are ready to move.

David: There’s no more “put it in a batch and get the letters out next week.” We highlighted an MIT study at Genius that shows the difference between following up on a buyer’s interest in 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes. Of course, the specifics depend on your business, but the point was clear: It’s critical to capture the buyer when he or she is interested. Otherwise you have to spend a lot of calories getting them to re-engage.

Mark: The marketing and sales teams have to be much more coupled than they were in the past. It used to be a linear, batch world. One of the things we struggled with at newScale was running webinar programs where 1,000 people would register. There was no way our sales development group could follow up with 1,000 people. With our other programs, we began staggering our outreach to address that issue, but we had a challenge with webinar respondents, given events are time-sensitive.

Anneke: How did you manage the high volume of required follow-ups, given limited sales resources?

David: If 950 prospects aren’t getting a phone call for two weeks, we have to be able to sort out the “body language” a buyer is showing over the Internet, in terms of what they’re doing on our website. Then we test our response to certain behaviors. In some cases, it makes sense to follow up with e-mail. We didn’t have the budget or head count to have 100 reps on the phone calling up the prospects; that’s really expensive, so we had to be able to distinguish between who was really interested in buying now and who was not. We have to have the tools to determine who is qualified and who is not.

Tags: Sales 2.0

Social Media Marketing and Online Lead Qualification: What is Effective?

A current debate that I’m following — and would love your perspectives on — is whether and when to require a prospect to complete an online lead qualification form in exchange for content, such as a report, e-book, recorded webinar or white paper. I find that traditional marketers and social media marketers disagree about the use of forms or landing pages that appear when a prospect clicks on a link to offered information. Generally speaking, social media marketing professionals claim that the new culture of selling requires open sharing of information (“conversations”) to create trusted relationships. Therefore, in the social and mobile world, the general consensus is that required forms can be an instant turn-off for customers. On the other side of the debate, most traditional direct marketers — and sales managers — suggest that if a prospect isn’t willing to share some information about themselves, their companies and their buying processes, they aren’t qualified and are wasting sales people’s valuable time.

In the Sales 2.0 world, where marketing and sales are closely aligned functions, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with and share ideas with some of the best lead generation marketing thinkers and practitioners. One of them is online marketing manager Dave Ewart, whom I met when we at Phone Works were assessing and improving his company’s inside sales team. Dave’s Twitter campaigns have been a success in terms of generating interest; he knows his message, audience and offer are relevant because of his click rate. But he’s testing several new approaches to improve his rate from click to conversion (to qualified sales opportunity and through the sales cycle to close):

1. Instantly delivered summarized content, tailored to the medium

Dave has created a “social-brief” content format: a mobile-friendly template for all his marketing assets, from white papers to webinars, consisting of about 300 words of high-value content — not marketing speak. This provides immediate value to prospects by instantly delivering what they clicked on. And through invitations to “Share This” embedded in these briefs, he’ll expand his reach even more (and track those referrals).

2. Full content in exchange for an e-mail address

To receive the full content (such as a PDF or recorded webinar), Dave’s prospects will be asked for one thing on a form: an e-mail address. Since the content will be provided by e-mail, he’ll be able to verify  the e-mail address is valid. Dave says, “I didn’t give up on demand generation, just optimized it.”

His view is that this gets the prospect into his CRM system and gives him the ability to develop the opportunity through lead nurturing (“drip”) campaigns. His theory is that when qualified prospects revisit his site, they’ll be more inclined to provide additional demographic information, and he’ll have more behavioral data to score.

By removing “friction from the conversion cycle,” as Dave calls it, he is expecting to see ROI by generating more leads, more re-tweets (RTs) and more followers who should engage additional prospects.

What is your view of using lead qualification forms in social media campaigns?  Is it a valid assumption that the most qualified prospects are those willing to fill out lead qualification forms?

Tags: Dave Ewart, lead qualification, marketing and sales alignment, Sales 2.0, social media marketing, twitter