thefunnel

A recent blog citing research done by ISTMA claims that an average sales person only spends about 40% doing direct selling. The rest is consumed by non sales, travel and administrative tasks, of which according to the research 25% is marketing related activities. A good marketing organization could therefore “create” 25% more selling time, which at least in theory translates to 25% more revenue, if all of it is used as effectively. How can marketing provide value add? I’ve come to conclusion a long time ago that at least the following needs to be considered. Providing alignment, direction (strategy) and training, lead generation, sales enablement tools creation, sales process automation and account planning intelligence. Recently I added a few things to my list. The first one is mindshare. For sales people that have many things to sell, how do you create mindshare? The other one which is the most difficult one is passion. Passion is the driver and the customers can feel it. It cannot be learned, but it can be experienced.