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Joining IDC CMO Advisory Practice

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Kathleen Schaub

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined IDC as Vice President, CMO Advisory Practice.  In my new role, I’ll help expand the execution and delivery of this service, which provides research-based guidance and marketing best practices to most of the major IT vendors.

You can read the press release here.

I’ve had so much fun as an independent consultant at TrellisOne – with interesting projects and great clients. I’ve met so many amazing new people.

Joining IDC lets me take my work to a new level.  I gain a rich research base, a highly respected brand, smart colleagues, and some of the best and most forward looking marketers on the planet as customers. IDC also has a great Sales Advisory practice, too. I look forward to the synergies that will come from working with sales teams, too.

Wow! Can’t wait to get started.

I’ll continue to blog. Future posts will appear on the IDC blog – http://techmarketingblog.blogspot.com.  Please subscribe or bookmark this URL so we can continue to dialog. I’ll also continue to Tweet as @kathleenschaub.

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The Other TWO THINGS Sales People Want Marketing to Know

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Kathleen Schaub

I asked a LinkedIn group: “What is the ONE THING that sales people wish marketing people knew about the sales job?” Their 90 comments revealed three things.  Two I’ve summarized here. The other is in an earlier post.

The VPs of Sales and Marketing group on LinkedIn offered thoughtful insight about the most important things that sales people wished marketing knew about sales. Their primary answer, explained in my last post, was “sales people wish marketing knew… how much effort it takes and how important it is to transform general product messages into specific customer benefits.”

Additionally, sales people wish marketing knew… that closing a deal requires an intricate dance.

Coaxing a buyer into a commitment takes finesse.  Unless you have been personally involved in this tango, it’s difficult to appreciate the interpersonal skills and logistical maneuvering required.

One commenter, Becky, said, “The most important thing for marketing to understand IS the sales process. Marketing often has very little visibility into anything beyond lead generation and closing celebrations. Qualification, proof, demonstration, and overcoming objections are words that have no meaning to many marketing teams.”

About 35% of comments expressed this desire for marketing to respect the craft of selling. Knowing when and how to communicate with prospects is an art. Sensing when to ask questions and refrain from spewing information, how to dig out the truth, and how to build trust take professional-level skills. It takes a great deal of expertise just to get an honest evaluation of a lead’s viability.

And finally, sales people wish marketing knew… that the real objective is revenue.

About 25% of responders wished that marketers knew what it feels like to live and die by a quota.  Few marketers know what it feels like to be judged, as sales people are, by a single clear metric.

Some people felt that this lack of clarity can cause marketing to forget that marketing programs are good only if they contribute to the ultimate revenue goal.  Others, like Peter, called for new incentives for marketing, “Often, strategic marketing can slip by without being judged by the same rigid performance accountability assigned to sales. For marketing to effectively support the selling effort I think they should share their income and job security based on the success of both.”

The group wanted marketing to know that it is this single-minded focus that drives trade-offs sales people must make, such as unwillingness to spend time on leads that aren’t ready for prime-time.  Gary stated, “Marketing delivers barrels of leads… They only see the fruits of their labor. If they had an intimate knowledge of how many of their leads were dead-ends, they would become more empathetic.”

I’d like to conclude my summary of the THREE THINGS sales people wish marketing knew about the sales job with this quote from Paul:

“The division of sales and marketing is becoming more blurred based on how buyers buy today. Marketing needs to feel responsibility for ‘the number’- that is, the revenue being generated. A marketing program is only good if it produces sales, leads are only really good when they produce sales.

…Sales has done a poor job of helping marketing understand the science of sales, it is a lot more than a slap on the back and a good marketing presentation…Sales also needs to understand that marketing wants to help them. The bottom line is – those that figure out this (new way) will win.”

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The ONE THING Sales People Want Marketing to Know About Sales

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Kathleen Schaub

I asked a LinkedIn group: “What is the ONE THING that sales people wish marketing people knew about the sales job?”  I found surprising clarity in the 90 (mostly) thoughtful, comments. 

The VPs of Sales and Marketing group on Linked In shared their experiences in a lively exchange over about a three-week period.  Although there were pages of responses, I was pleasantly surprised to see agreement emerging from the discussion. I summarized the group’s answer into the three things that sales people would like marketing to know about their job.

The first answer I’ve highlighted below. I’ll summarize the other two in subsequent posts.

Sales people wish marketing knew…

How much effort it takes and how important it is to transform general product messages into specific customer benefits.

There is a huge gap to be resolved between messaging created with a one-to-many orientation and the painstakingly individualized way in which sales people must conduct one conversation at a time with specific customers.  Approximately 40% of the comments spoke out on aspects of what I call the “last mile challenge”.

Commenters expressed how each buyer was unique, how benefits needed to be endlessly tailored to fit different roles and situations.  The general nature of messages marketing provides is why sales people must continue to create their own dialog tools.  John, a Director of Key Accounts, contributed, “Marketing tells what they think is important but they aren’t in the trenches to know what the customers thinks is important. It is like the restaurant owner telling the chef he must use a knife to cut meat, when he really prefers a cleaver…the chef will find a cleaver if it makes his job easier.”

The group did not conclude that the one-to-one orientation is more important than the one-to-many.  Plenty of people chimed in to express the importance of both kinds of messaging. Rather, the sales people wanted to express that messages created for one-to-many were inappropriate and insufficient substitutes for the one-to-one dialog.

Sales people would appreciate help with the humongous amount of work of customization. Paul commented, “I don’t think marketing can really tailor the presentation materials for sales, but they can understand the process and provide hints, collect customized sales presentation for sharing, and understand that the customizing isn’t an affront but more of a necessity. Most sales people would love it if you could provide the end materials – but that is difficult.”

Fortunately, there were plenty of success stories where marketing and sales had jointly worked to bridge this gap between one-to-many and one-to-one. Here’s what works:

  • Participate in sales calls to better understand what is needed
  • Create lead nurturing programs that ease the transition to a person-to-person dialog
  • Study the entire buying process (especially the later stages) to understand what buyers need all along the way
  • Solicit feedback on messaging from your best sales people –directly and through online collaboration tools
  • Keep a picture in your head of a buyer with a sign on his forehead that says “so what” – then make sure you are really answering that question
  • Use technology to assist the heavy-lifting of tailoring communications
  • Simplify
  • Use social media to become accustomed to real two-way individual conversations

The second and third things that sales people would like marketing to know about the sales job will be highlighted in subsequent posts.

Posted in Communications, Marketing, Sales, Sales Enablement | 3 Comments

Collaboration for Sales Enablement: Ideas from Salescraft and Jive

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Kathleen Schaub

Collaboration tools that work like ‘Facebook for the enterprise’: will they be effective for sales enablement? Jive , maker of one such technology, hosted a Salescraft meeting where sales and sales enablement leaders explored this aspect of social selling.

Collaboration tools are a type of social media that can be part of the technology toolkit supporting social selling. Early adopters of these tools are mainly knowledge workers who both produce and consume lots of information.  R&D and customer service teams are two examples.  Besides Jive, other providers of enterprise collaboration platforms include Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter.

Sales people consume knowledge but haven’t historically produced as much. Will they find collaboration tools useful? If the tools do have benefit, how can companies boost adoption?

A group of about 25 sales and sales enablement leaders discussed these questions with Matt Tucker, Jive co-founder and CTO (@MattTucker – pictured right) and Viviana Faga, Jive Product Marketer (@vivfaga). The discussion was led by Salescraft founder, Sharon Little (@salescraft). 

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

Why use collaboration as a sales enablement tool?

    • Locate expertise – Media-based information is important, but sometimes only a real live human expert will do.  Sales people use collaboration tools to find key experts, access them, and quickly involve them in a deal.   Jive said that this application is the most common use of enterprise collaboration by sales teams
    • Share competitive tips – A collaboration tool can be used as a virtual ‘war room’. Sales people always want the competitive inside scoop from peers.
    • On-board new sales reps – Collaboration tools capture conversations.  Jive said that some companies experience a 40% per year sales rep turnover. In addition to CRM files, new account managers could benefit from the qualitative insight that prior conversations provide.
    • Provide feedback loops –  Sales teams can provide their companies with instant feedback on the quality and usefulness of launches and sales tools so that (hopefully) changes can be made faster.

Social tools are ‘noisy’.

The Salecraft group was hopeful about the use of social collaboration tools to help salespeople, but remained skeptical.

The main drawback to social media, several people felt, was there was just too much ‘noise’. It takes time to glean nuggets from firehouse of chat. The Salescraft group was dubious that sales people would find enough value sufficient to add yet one more social networking to their already full plates.  Apparently, this concern is shared by many who use social tools. For example, a Cambridge University study reports that one third of social media users feel overwhelmed by the social media in their lives.

Finding success using collaboration for sales enablement

Aside from the skepticism, the Jive team, as well as a few of the practitioners at the table, reported that some organizations are successful using collaboration for sales enablement. Some tips included:

    • Active and skilled community management 
    • Link to a specific task – such as accessing expertise networks. The worst rollouts happen when IT brings in this cool tool but there is no business reason to use it.
    • Sponsorship – Highly visible sponsors (like the sales SVP or the CEO) should to be visible and active in the network.
    • Rewards – Highly leveraged compensation programs attract people who thrive on competition and visible recognition. Use this to your advantage and create usage heroes.

The sales team may not be the best first organizational group to try enterprise collaboration. However, when the kinks get worked out, the Salescraft group agreed that collaboration could be an important sales enablement tool.

Posted in Communications, Sales Enablement, Social Media | Leave a comment

Put Your Sales Playbook on a Diet

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Kathleen Schaub

I’m looking at a gorgeous playbook from a well-known tech company. Too bad their sales people won’t read it. If only marketers would leave out just two things – playbooks would get a better response.

This playbook contains 32 pages of beautiful tables, infographics, and careful prose.  Most marketers would die to produce such a piece.  But the sales people are not that excited. They desperately need a playbook. However…

  • The first page they care about is page 8.
  • They must sift through the other 24 pages to find the nuggets they need
  • This book is one of six they must read to get the full set of plays for just one new product (for a total of 192 pages)

These marketers could have helped their sales associates by doing two things better:

Leave out the detail. Many marketers, particularly those with technical backgrounds, are great problem-solvers. This type of marketer knows that the devil is in the detail. They want sales people to be able to answer all possible questions.

For example, some might find the description “cherry lollipop” inadequate. A more information-rich description would be “bright red, natural cherry- flavored, hard candy, spherical (three centimeters in diameter), and mounted on a 12 centimeter solid white paper tubular stick.”

Way later in the sales cycle, a buyer may ask for that detail. But playbooks are used primarily to get the selling motion started. Sales people just want the crisp highlights.

What to do:

  • Limit yourself to a one page ‘cheat sheet’ on the product – maybe two. Save the additional detail for product data sheets and technical white papers. A playbook doesn’t have to do the complete sales training job.
  • Limit yourself to the top three-to-five plays rather than include all possible scenarios. Select the most likely situations and/or the most strategic.  Use the 80/20 rule. Don’t sweat the minority of situations you might miss.

Leave out the context: Many marketers, particularly those with MBAs, are great strategists. They love context and implication. These marketers know that intelligent action results from understanding how a situation fits into the bigger picture.  They want to arm their sales teams with the background needed for best outcomes.

If these smart folks were marketing a cherry lollipop, they might include a rich infographic of the manufacturing process, and discuss the psychology behind why kids select cherry instead of grape. They would communicate the candy’s nutritional value (or lack thereof) and talk about why it is better to savor it than to crunch it.

Sales people need to know some of this background information, but at far less depth than marketers are prone to provide. Much of the context should be left out entirely. It is irrelevant to the selling motion. Playbooks should be summarized and focused.

What to do:

  • Restrict context to what is immediately important to the play. For example, short persona descriptions are useful (who should I talk to, why will they care, and what should I watch out for).
  • Highlight a short paragraph on four-to-six macro-trends. Save additional detail for thought-leadership papers. Post backup reference articles on your sales enablement site.
  • Eliminate the pages of detailed process instructions. Instead include a quick reference guide on getting more help.

It helps to put your sales playbooks on a diet. For each product, limit yourself to a single playbook of maybe eight to twelve pages. Make every word fight to be included. This kind of discipline is not always easy. However, your sales teams may actually use the playbooks you give them.

Posted in Communications, Marketing, Sales Enablement | 4 Comments