I recently had a meeting with a fast-growing B2B company who asked for my suggestion on selling add-on services to clients.  The conversation went a bit like this:

Me: What are you doing now?
Response: They send some emails, engage in social marketing, and are thinking about new mobile technology. Me: What do you do with your emails?
Response: We send notices about new products but it doesn’t work so well.
Me: What do you do for your sales and client service teams?
Response: They have resources to sell anything to their clients.

Me: Ah. Do you do segmentation for them to determine the right product for the right client?
Response: No, but that’s a good idea.
Me: That should be your first step.

Marketers love fancy tactics and new media, which is great, but sometimes forget about the sales teams. I think this is beause they are treated as silos in many organizations and perhaps marketing assumes what sales needs. But the fact is, if your marketing strategies and tactics are not assisting sales in some way, you should pack up your marketing bag and go home.

Having started my career in Business Development, I know first-hand what is valuable and what is garbage. A few years back a senior marketing executive with a large CPG company told me, “We don’t like sales involved in marketing because sales people don’t think out of the box”. Really?  And how effective are those out-of-the-box ideas at helping sales people generate revenue? I remember the wasted material we had at Frito-Lay on these cute ideas. Much of those great ideas ended up in wasteland. At another company (which I won’t name), I had several disagreements with my corporate marketing counterparts on the value of their ‘fancy ideas’. At the risk of being the naysayer, sometimes I would let it go and these ‘cool’ ideas were implemented. Guess what? The sales people would tell me in confidence, “What is that stuff? How much did we waste on that”? Thankfully, more attention is currently being placed on sales and marketing alignment.

Think about this: Utopia would be if a company had a live sales person able to go one-on-one with every customer and prospect. Since this isn’t financially realistic, companies need marketing to assist the process and break-down barriers.

What’s the point of this? My first recommendation to the B2B Company above was this: Good old target marketing with your client service team. Use the non-sexy marketing analytics first to help your client service team profile, segment and target the best client to the best product. Next, determine where the client is in the sales cycle from awareness to conviction and create talking points and offers matched to each step. This assists sales by providing focus and the best opportunity. You also become relevant to the client because you’ve done your homework by pinpointing a product/service they actually may need. Less noise in the communication. Then, using this information, marketers can help sales teams understand how to more effectively target prospects with this profile information.

Not rocket science, just a call out to marketers to ask yourself how every dollar you spend is assisting the sales process.

Let me know what you think.

Jackie