Tag Archives: sales & marketing integration

July 10, 2023 · 12:00 pm

How to Grow Your B2B Firm by Making Every Employee a Sales Rep

Providing all employees with basic marketing and sales skills can help your B2B firm to grow and succeed. From the front desk to the corner office, “Every Employee a Sales Rep” should be fully ingrained as part of your company’s operating culture.

Many B2B firms – in legal, accounting, technology, financial services and consulting disciplines – employ at least one rainmaker, typically a founding member, who brings in the lion’s share of new business. But that “outside / inside guy” dynamic puts a company at risk, because rainmakers can depart unexpectedly (by choice or by ambulance), and the firm’s growth rate is always limited by their energy, motivation and availability.

More importantly, this business development model fails to leverage your firm’s “inside guys,” whose individual and collective business relationships, skills, experience and credibility should be harnessed to drive consistent revenue growth and to scale the company.

Regardless of their title, job description or capacity to work the room at a social event, every B2B firm employee should be given training, tools and ongoing support that empowers them to:

Manage Their Personal Brand – Clients hire individuals, rather than a firm, to help them. To showcase their credentials, every client-facing employee should maintain a complete and up-to-date biographical profile on the company’s website and on LinkedIn. To expand their visibility, they should also participate in at least one activity unrelated to employment, whether that’s membership in the local chapter of a professional trade association, their daughter’s soccer team, or a fly fishing club.
Articulate the Firm’s Value Proposition – Many employees, even at the senior level, do not have a clear understanding of what makes their firm different from the competition, and are at a loss to provide a compelling reason why someone should engage them. Every employee should know their firm’s “elevator pitch,” and be prepared to recite it whenever someone asks, “So…who do you work for?”
Nurture Their Professional Network – Every employee has a network of current and former clients, associates in other disciplines, friends, relatives, neighbors and individuals they’ve met at conferences or social events. Business contacts are often included in the firm’s CRM system, and may receive quarterly newsletters or other communications issued by the company. But client-facing employees should also maintain direct and regular contact with their entire personal network to nurture and expand those relationships, because referrals are driven by casting a wide net.
Drive Top-of-Mind Awareness – The marketing challenge for most B2B firms is making the short list of candidates called in for an assignment. To increase the odds of getting that call, your firm must constantly sow seeds with clients, prospects and referral sources, driving top-of-mind awareness regarding its capabilities and credentials. Employees who possess the firm’s intellectual capital should play an active role in generating relevant content that can keep the firm in play.
Sell Intrinsically – The “inside guys” who deliver services and solutions are best prepared to demonstrate to prospects and clients your firm’s capacity to add value, which is its most powerful sales tactic. Intrinsic (or “consultative”) selling is what converts prospects to clients, and not including those practitioners in the sales process can handicap your firm’s growth potential.
Seek Cross-Selling Opportunities – The practitioner assigned to an account is the steward of that relationship. As a trusted advisor, your employee has an in-depth understanding of their client’s current needs, as well as insight into what additional services might be of value. Based on that 360° perspective, those employees are in the strongest position to recommend new services or an expansion of existing work. But many practitioners fear this solicitation will compromise their professionalism, or put the client relationship at risk. Those obstacles to increasing account penetration should be addressed with proper tools, training, and coaching.
Ask for Referrals – This is a tough task for most employees. However, if they’ve nurtured their network, gained confidence by learning how to cross-sell to existing clients, and have rehearsed the referral request process, then they can make this a painless routine.

“Every Employee a Sales Rep” will not be achieved simply by establishing firm-wide mandates. The program must be driven by internal disciplines – consisting of written guidelines, worksheets and in-house training – that provide employees with proper guidance, support, feedback and motivation.

Combined with a senior-level commitment to change the culture, and firm-wide acknowledgement that the transformation will be difficult, your B2B company can harness its sales and marketing potential, and reap the benefits.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Facing Professional Culture Clash

quote-i-don-t-like-that-man-i-must-get-to-know-him-better-abraham-lincoln-17-61-18 The most recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) shows that not much has changed over the past 10 years. CMOs continue their struggle to make the connection between marketing activity and company performance, and they continue to shift the blame for their failure.

Despite the fact that financial results are rated as the most important factor in a CMO’s performance-based compensation, executive recruitment firm Korn Ferry’s CMO survey found that the majority of senior marketers claim they cannot make a direct correlation between their efforts and company performance.

The reason CMOs give for the disconnect? Nearly a third of the survey respondents suggest that their CEO “doesn’t understand the CMO role.” Specifically, they feel their boss fails to understand the complexity of brand building; the importance of a customer-centric approach; and the correlation between marketing and revenue generation.

Averaging job tenure of just 4.1 years – the shortest of all C-suite positions – CMOs are unlikely to win either sympathy or contract renewals from CEOs (with average tenure of 8 years), who are increasingly impatient with CMOs’ lack of results and accountability.

Tactics and Tools Fail CMOs

An oversimplified description of the CMO’s role is to promote the brand, and to generate viable leads for the sales team. To accomplish those necessary goals, and create some tangible evidence of their contribution to their company’s top line results, CMOs continue to rely heavily (or exclusively) on a large and growing inventory of marketing tactics and tools.

In addition to traditional methods such as advertising (a/k/a “paid media”) and public relations (a/k/a “earned media”), the marketing tool kit now includes everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs and Marketing Automation software, to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), which is the latest shiny object promising to deliver ROI Nirvana to CMOs.

Unfortunately, as the complexity of the tools and tactics increases, they become more difficult for CMOs to manage (and explain), and more likely that their CEOs will believe that marketing is disconnected from what they believe is most important…which is revenue generation.

Attitude Adjustment Required

If the most measurable portion of the CMO’s role is lead generation; if the sales force is an essential asset to convert those leads into clients or revenue; and if clients and revenue are what’s used to determine CMO compensation and tenure…then why does “marketing / sales alignment” continue to be a significant challenge for most companies?

The simple answer is that there is a longstanding culture clash between marketing and sales professionals. Sales reps believe that marketers are disconnected from customers and marketplace realities, never get their hands dirty, and provide them with leads that are worthless. Marketers believe that sales reps are self-interested, don’t understand the company’s strategy, and waste the leads and tools they are given.

In this ongoing tug-of-war, marketers will always stand to lose, because revenue trumps branding in the corner office, and because sales reps can more easily claim direct responsibility for revenue generation.

Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, studies people and teams seeking to make a positive difference through the work that they do. Her research suggests that fixing this marketing and sales professional culture clash starts with an attitude adjustment, and requires a new way of working together.

Lessons from a Chilean Coal Mine

At a recent TED conference, Professor Edmondson explained the concept of “teaming,” where people come together to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges. At many companies, sales and marketing teams are strangers to each other.

Here are three key points from Professor Edmondson’s TED presentation (well worth 13 minutes to view) that CMOs should consider in any serious effort to work effectively with sales professionals:

It’s difficult to learn if you believe that you already know the solution to a challenge or opportunity. Situational humility – simply acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers – is a necessary starting point for effective teamwork.
We need to be genuinely curious about what others think and bring to the table. The key to success in building an effective team is learning the strengths of others, and conveying what you can contribute to the effort.
Society has conditioned us to view each other as competitors. To wit: for me to succeed, you must fail. This underlying cultural bias needs to be eliminated, in order for sales and marketing teams to work together effectively.

There are no simple solutions to the challenge of marketing and sales alignment. But it’s more likely to be improved within a company by focusing on the hard work of listening and communicating, as Professor Edmondson suggests. CMOs need to begin that journey by looking inside themselves, and not to outside providers of marketing technologies.

Quick Fix for Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Blame the CFO

According to BtoB magazine’s coverage of last week’s SiriusDecisions Summit 2011 held in Scottsdale, sales must be “pulled into the fold” by marketing, to better understand alignment and sales enablement. That was the overriding theme delivered throughout the event and reiterated on its final day.

“It’s not a question of adding systems to fix sales and marketing alignment, but rather a challenge of leadership,” according to John Neeson, SiriusDecisions’ managing director, at a wrapup session Friday. “It’s about two leaders—the heads of marketing and sales—fixing things together.”

Another common thread at this year’s summit was the need to gain C-suite buy-in for these evolving sales-marketing initiatives. Several case studies presented during the week detailed resistance to proactive sales-marketing alignment.

“One major theme here is how CFOs must begin to think about marketing, not so much as an expense but rather as an investment,” Neeson said.