Starting in the right end – marketing and sales collaboration

As usual I have been reading up on what is going on and I came across this blog post: Marketing Bingo – You Might Be Playing And Not Even Know It. I have never been part of working within Marketing, so there might be something I’m missing, but for me Kyle makes a good point. Work from the outside in…

I started to think about how I percieve marketing, wich is more inside out: Who are we selling to? Is this changing? Can we see any trends? What precision can we expect in the conversion from Lead to Opportunity? How do we segment the market? How do we process the leads when they come in (different approaches based on segmentation)?

From a B2B sales perspective, the marketing actions need to create leads or make the lead creation possible. In order to give the sales organization a fair chance to sell, the leads need to be half decent or the customers need to be interested. There needs to be a common approach on the pipeline effeciency, in my view this is Gross Margin, taking all costs in account.

I made a model (probably exists but I could not find it anywhere) I would like to get some feedback on:

If Sales and Marketing create a plan that does not reach the intended market they have an “Ineffective Strategy”. If Marketing reaches the market, but these recipients never come in contact with sales, then we get “Uncaptured Lead”. If Sales work the Market in order to reach the quota and land prospects without the support of the Marketing we have a “Lead Deficit”. When Sales and market work the market in the same area we hit the “Sweet spot”.

Companies need to find a way increase the collaboration between sales and marketing to get better at targeting the sweet spot. First of all you need to have a common picture of what market looks like, what you want to achieve and how this transforms into customers.

An example

If we look at how this can be done, let’s start with a segmentation of our customer:

Let’s say that S1 is Low price/Low complexity, S2 is Low Price/High Complexity, S3 is High price/Low complexity and S4 is High price/ High complexity.

If we study our customers purchase behavior the last 12 months we find that we have a strong tendency to land in the S4 segment:

Looking the Marketing we are targeting the following area:

Looking at this picture it is easy to see that there is untapped potential. What needs to be cleared out is if Marketing I over reaching / targeting the wrong market, or if Sales are missing out on Prospects because they have the wrong approach to the market. Wouldn’t you like to know why and correct the situation?

My thought is to try and move the circles by increasing the collaboration and  achieving a higher efficiency in the sweet spot = more results with less work:

Stay tuned…a blog comming up on the topic of “Lead Profiling”, how to increase the “sweet spot”…