thefunnel » sales

Value added marketing

Tomas Berghall — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:26:54 +0000

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.

Back to basics

Tomas Berghall — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:32:12 +0000

As an “outcome based” marketeer it can sometimes be hard to let go of the metrics, but quite often this is exactly what is required to be successful. Activity based marketing versus outcome based. We all like to only do the things that are measurable, but what if the organization doesn’t really care about the metrics or strategies? Impact versus content. Someone once said that you’re only as good as your last power point presentation. Well, it depends. Sometimes you need to step in /up and do the “right” things, even if they are not “perfect marketing things” or measurable, and make sure the fundamentals are covered. Things like does the sales people have the tools they need to be successful, never mind that you show up on google search or not.

Marketing Relevance

Tomas Berghall — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:21:21 +0000

What does field marketing do and how can field marketing create value? This is an interesting question, particularly in engineering focused companies, where there’s sometimes a lack of marketing understanding, and marketing at its best is often marginalized to entry level marcoms, like production of specification sheets, etc. So how can a marketing organization in these situations justify its existence, and achieve a higher level recognition? One way to do this is to partner with sales, because even the most engineering minded organizations needs sales to survive. This might feel like marketing is taking a sub-servant role, and in many organizations, unfortunately this is the case, but played our right this could be only a start. One way to think about the marketing value is to use the sales model concept from solution selling. In solution selling, the sales process (focus, value, relationship, intent, etc.) is generally thought as being in one of four phases or levels. Level one selling is where the relationship with the customer is casual, the focus of the efforts is the product, and the only intent is to get the customer to consider buying. Level four selling, on the other hand, is a place where the sales person is an insider, in a symbiotic relationship with the customer and through a thorough understanding of the customers’ business can provide strategic advice, while making a sale. Similarly, marketing on level one is normally limited to lead generation, providing presentation material and general assistance, while a level four marketing is a partnership, enabling, equipping and providing sales with strategic leadership. Using a model like this can benefit marketing in many ways, but most importantly by aligning the marketing efforts to whichever level the selling is done, “sales support” can be optimized for maximum fit, which helps build the relationship with sales providing a good platform for success. In addition in knowing the maturity level of sales, marketing can help push the organization to the next level of sophistication and value, and ultimately be able to use more of its brainpower and earn the recognition it deserves.