Sales process - the missing ingredient for marketing ROI

Most marketers in B2B enterprises have never been trained on sales process. If I were running your marketing or sales organization this would be the first thing on my agenda. Why? Because without understanding sales process, marketing is essentially set up to fail. How can anyone improve or contribute effectively to something if they don't know how it works. It's like setting up your manufacturing to produce blue widgets but not telling your suppliers what parts you need for your particular widgets. So they ship you tons of blue stuff and hope that somehow it all works out. That's the position, to one degree or another that most enterprise marketing organizations are in even at some of the most advanced process-centric companies in the world. Largely because they have chopped up the customer creation process into a collection of departmentally independent activities. 

In a large enterprise with many products lines, business units and segments, there are likely to be a number of different sales processes. Marketing and sales resources should be aligned against these processes horizontally. This is the key to making the shift from a siloed command and control organization to a responsive, integrated customer focused one. Not only is it important to design around sales process, which should be designed around the buyer's journey, but it is important to design for change. Markets are dynamic and sales processes change.

Marketing automation systems, especially those that are integrated with the sales force automation or customer relationship management system, have begun to provide marketing with some clues to sales process. At least they can see what happens or does not happen when they deliver something to sales. But the data does not always explain why, and that's the critical part. Marketing needs to understand very specifically how Sales operates in order to optimize around customer outcomes. The alternative is for marketing to optimize around departmentally focused KPIs like the number of MQLs (ugh), or SALs, or worse vanity metrics like hits, sentiment, likes, etc. These metrics are useful indicators for some marketing activities, but not as business drivers for marketing investment.

Aligning marketing and sales around sales process is the first step to formulating an enterprise customer creation process that extends across all customer touch points, including: billing, fulfillment, service and support. At each stage of maturity, marketing, as well as all the other customer facing departments, gain much greater visibility and accountability to the whole process and its connection to corporate objectives for growth, market share, and margin. This is all necessary for a true picture of marketing ROI.

Your action items:

• Marketers: lobby your top executives to make regular sales process training for marketing a priority. 
• Sales executives: demand that marketing know how the different parts of your sales force work so they can more effectively develop prospects and serve customers. 
• CEOs: get smart about your customer supply chain by applying the same level of due diligence and process discipline to it that you have to your product and services units. As a result, you will make much more effective use of marketing investment and be able to hold your whole customer facing team accountable for its contribution to your strategic objectives.

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Using Data as a Service for Scalable Channel Enablement

The magic ingredient for successful channel enablement at scale is data. Imagine having the financial, operational, and behavioral data you need on partners to optimize new product launches, coverage models, and channel programs. Imagine being able to show partners — no matter how new or small or niche their focus — how other partners like them have achieved high return on investment (ROI) on their business with you. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model provides a stage-by-stage guide for advancing the organizational, process, technology, and data infrastructure necessary to transform your channel marketing and sales enablement operations. The journey along IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model is one of evolving from a publishing/transactional framework to a process-driven one.

IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model - Summary View

	Stage 1: Ad Hoc	Stage 2: Opportunistic	Stage 3: Repeatable	Stage 4: Managed	Stage 5: Optimized for Scale
Key characteristic	"Every product for itself"	"Portals grow like weeds"	"Consolidation but still stuck in publishing mode"	"Central control over process-driven approach"	"It's all about analytics (Data as a Service)"

Source: IDC 2013

The DNA for Success is in the Data 
IDC defines channel enablement as "developing the right competencies in the right partners to deliver the right solutions to the most profitable customers." Ultimately, the goal is to provide a scalable model to identify high ROI best practices and propagate them throughout the partner population at a very granular level. There are three ways in which manufacturers can capture the partner data needed to support the analysis:

• Contractual obligation: Requires significant time and effort from partner account management, is limited to the largest partners, and is periodic at best. 
• Operationalized data capture: The partner platform should be thought of as a SaaS offering that provides a wide range of functionality but also collects data on every partner interaction. The ideal platform will consolidate all of the interactions with partners by offering personalized access to content and transactional systems, as well as execution platforms for marketing, sales, and support. By virtue of this consolidation, it captures an increasingly large portion of partner interactions and thus provides a great deal of valuable data to inform channel marketing and management. 
• Data as a service: Externalize partner performance data and make it available to partners in a way that captures even more data from more partners. The level of detail they get depends on the level of detail they provide. As a result, they can get actionable insights on how to better manage their businesses and market, sell, and support specific solutions. The database is in a virtuous cycle of enrichment. They should be able to get insight into a wide variety of strategic and tactical questions such as: 
• How many people do I need in marketing, sales, technical, and support roles? 
• What level of skills and training should they have? 
• What marketing activities are most effective? 
• What sales methodologies and plays are most effective at what stage? 
• What manufacturer resources and networks should staff be utilizing most frequently? 

While data is the crown jewel, there are significant people, process, and technology prerequisites for success. To find out more please see IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model or contact me at gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

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Connectedness - The Missing Metric for Sales Enablement

Enablement programs for B2B sales and channel resources tend to focus on activities – trainings, certifications, portal visits, most popular assets, most posts per person, ratings, etc. These are all indicators suggesting enablement resources may have been consumed. But they don’t do a very good job of measuring one of the most important objectives of enablement - changing behavior. New platforms that integrate publishing, process, and social capabilities are making it possible to track behavior patterns in the context of specific business processes. Hidden in this data are the daily habits that differentiate our best direct and indirect sales resources. Sales enablement professionals need to find this data and share it with the rest of their sales audience.

This is a particularly crucial for the on-boarding process. Regardless of whether you’re training a new/replacement sales rep or bringing on a new partner and their employees, connectedness is a key metric that you need to capture and track. It is the only way to continually optimize behavior. You can capture financial and operational data with most of the content management, CRM, and marketing automation technology out there. But these systems are not explicitly designed to capture patterns of behavior. Even those with social networking capabilities are not being used effectively in this regard.

Sales enablement professionals need to use social networking as a basis for propagating best practices. The measurement should span not only person to person networking, but also track community membership, links to all manner of resources from internal portals, as well as communication with subject matter experts, peers and mentors. To be most effective, this capability should be deployed within a process driven platform for sales enablement, as opposed to an old school portal based on a publishing model. These new platforms go beyond simply providing access to content. They are process driven and deliver content, sales plays, transactional capabilities, and more all in the context of the company's go to market strategy. In addition they have or are easily integrated with enterprise social networking capabilities which are crucial to facilitating and capturing how people interact with all the great resources they contain. 

There are two key dimensions the connectedness metrics should include – the number of connections to the right resources and the cadence of communication. For example:

•          Which internal portals/systems do they log into – how often?
•          Which SMEs do they interact with – how often?
•          Which internal communities have they joined – how often do they visit and contribute?

This data can be invaluable in helping new reps and partners become more effective faster. What behaviors do our “A” reps and best partner reps exhibit? The intention is not to gratuitously boost hits and visits to marketing collateral, but to find the right level of connectedness for different types of reps. Being able to show other reps and partners that they can boost performance by making simple behavioral changes like subscribing to certain resources, joining communities they didn't know existed, or increasing the frequency of communication is the path of least resistance to effectiveness.

Today many large high tech companies report it takes a year to get a sales rep fully up to speed with the pipeline needed to meet quota in the following year. Clearly there can be a lot of process, product, market, customer, competitive, etc. knowledge that needs to be transferred. But don’t neglect to transfer the behaviors that will help them  best utilize the resources the organization has offer.

For more information on IDC's sales enablement research, please contact me: gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

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Start Operationalizing Your Buyer's Journey

I was surprised to hear so much talk about the 'buyer's journey' at a recent Sales 2.0 conference. More talk than I often hear at marketing conferences! Having said this, it was clear that many people who talked about buyer's journeys did not know what the term meant.

A hesitant raise of hands at one sales enablement panel showed that a little more than half the room thought that their company used a buyer's journey framework. The panelists didn't buy that answer. Sniffed one, "Most companies lift the sales stages right out of their CRM system and call that a buyer's journey."

What isn't a buyer's journey? It isn't a sales methodology. It isn't build rapport, uncover needs, identify options, propose solutions, and close the deal. It isn't a product life-cycle. It isn't development, launch, grow, mature, decline. It isn't marketing stages. It isn't build awareness, create interest, engage, and persuade. All of these processes can be useful to guide an important function. However, they all describe vendor's journeys – not buyer's journeys.

So, what is a buyer's journey? A buyer's journey is a framework that describes the cognitive process each buyer must personally traverse leading from Apathy (Do I care?) to Commitment (How can I buy this?).  IDC's Customer Creation Framework highlights three simple stages of this journey: Exploration, Evaluation, and Purchase. You can break these stages into sub-steps if you like.

In the simplest terms, a buyer's journey is really nothing more than a list of questions.  Buyers have different questions at different steps of their journey.  If buyers get their questions answered clearly, positively, credibly, and with relevance, they will take another step. If they do not, they stall or abandon their quest.

Let's take the example of some questions on a buyer's journey towards a new car:

• Exploration: Is my current car headed for a problem – how do I know? Are there new cars that I would like better? What cars are new this year? What do I really need?
• Evaluation: Which cars offer the best value? Which do I find most attractive? Is this supplier trust-worthy? What do the experts say? What do my friends think? How can I test drive?
• Purchase: How much can I afford? Should I buy this now? Do I find terms acceptable?

Operationalizing a buyer's journey

 

1) Collect a list of questions.

 

Start small. Select just one of your products and its most typical buyer. What questions does this buyer have about the problem? About alternative solutions? About acquiring, adopting, and using products like the one you offer? Finally, what questions might a buyer have specifically about your product?  Most companies will need multiple question lists for multiple situations. But don't boil the ocean at the beginning.

Where do you get these questions? Ask your buyers! Ask the people in your company who talk to buyers – sales people, customer support, systems engineers, etc. Listen to social media chatter.  My experience has been that you can collect 95% of the questions you need after you have talked to about 30 people who have a broad range of roles and backgrounds.

 2) Answer the questions.

 

If your company has EVER sold a product, then somewhere, someone has the answers to the buyer's questions. It probably isn't the marketing team – but that's okay. Go back the same people and places from which you gathered the questions.  Some questions can be answered easily. Others will be thorny.  Some questions will have happy answers. Other questions will be evil.

Do not avoid the thorny and evil questions!  I like this quote from Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through."  Every unanswered question is a place where prospects can get frustrated and where leads will stall or fall out of your pipeline.

You can collect both the questions and the answers in a spreadsheet or an FAQ document.

 3) Put the answers on your website and give them to your sales team.

 

Keep your initial content super simple. Make sure the answers to all the important questions are easily found on your website. Make sure that your sales team has easy access to all of the answers.

 

 4) Improve

 

Later, you can explore the best way to deliver your answers to buyers – how should the message be voiced? What content types and media work best at different steps and with different buyer personas? How do I best map the buyer’s journey steps to the sales process?

 But these are secondary issues. If you don’t first have the answers that your buyer needs, all these secondary questions are a total waste of time.

 

 

 

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Lead Distribution Scoring - a key differentiator for B2B marketers

Lead scoring is a well established technique for marketers to translate digital responses into levels of qualification for next stage outreach. For companies with no direct sales or sales cycles of 30 days or less lead scoring methodologies can be rapidly optimized around purchase behavior. For long cycle B2B sales processes, the optimization process goes only as fast as opportunity development which for many high tech companies can be 18 months or more. This is a crucial time for B2B marketers and they need to be just as exacting in how they manage the post-lead qualification journey as they are in getting prospects to the starting line.

B2B marketers need to segment, message, time, and target their communications with their direct sales reps just like they do with external prospects and customers. In my previous blog post Six Key Table Stakes for B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment marketers were tasked with three things:

1. Treat the sales force like a market segment
2. Market collateral (and leads) like solutions
3. Take an account-centric approach to lead generation 

Lead distribution scoring touches on all three. Lead distribution scoring is a second stage scoring process for marketing qualified leads that enables marketers to "get the right information to the right sales rep in the right format at the right time to move an opportunity forward." This is IDC's definition of Sales Enablement and is a fundamental concept that should govern how marketing markets all of its output to direct sales (leads, campaigns, collateral, etc.) The days of posting to a portal or flowing and forgetting MQLs into the CRM are over. Lead distribution scoring incorporates dimensions such as:

• What type of rep is this contact going to? 
• By segment 
• By tenure
• By region
• By product line, etc.
• Does the rep need many leads or a very limited number of leads? 
• What account is the lead associated with?
• Is the sales rep meeting with this account in the next four weeks, next two weeks?
• How is this contact connected to others in the account? 
• Is this contact interested in the same solution as other contacts in the account?

Using a lead distribution scoring methodology will bring sales and marketing into much more direct alignment on a one to one basis. It can be applied not only to leads but to collateral, campaign training, and more. Marketing output can be "made to order" for sales reps so that it is not only highly qualified, it is also has high immediacy and relevancy to the reps' call sheets. If the relationship between marketing and sales so bad that accessing call sheets is a non-starter, then look for friendly reps who might be willing to give a little more to get a little more from marketing.

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Six Key Table Stakes for B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment

The IDC CMO and Sales advisory services held their most recent client leadership meeting in Santa Clara on June 5th. One of the key topics of the day was sales enablement. The ensuing dialog between the sales and marketing execs in the room was as impassioned as it was ineffective. Many of the usual themes were expressed (in the nicest possible way): "marketing leads are crap", "sales doesn't follow up", etc. etc.

Whenever I hear this conversation it always sounds like the two sides are talking past one another. Neither really understands how to express their frustration in a way that has any meaning to the other. What's missing are some basic table stakes:

Sales 

1. Train marketing on sales process. It is impossible to effectively contribute to, much less consistently improve, an unknown process. No marketing team should be expected to deliver effective collateral or leads to a sales organization until they have been fully trained on sales process and methodology. In a large organization with multiple business units and product lines there will be many sales processes and the marketing teams charged with supported them must receive the same depth and cadence of training that the sales reps get.

Marketing 

2. Treat the sales force like a market segment. There are great variations in the needs of different kinds of reps in your organization and you must understand them on a rep by rep basis no less urgently than you do for your external marketing targets. The needs of an enterprise rep with two accounts are radically different than an SMB rep with 400 accounts or a territory where they may not know all the potential customers. Don't throw 10,000 leads a month at both of them. You get the idea. Nurture your sales reps like any other targets and tune the metrics accordingly.

3. Market sales collateral like solutions. Marketing tends to market its wares to the sales force like products whose benefits are self evident. Assets are often "published" or "distributed" generically with tags to help reps "find" them. Imagine what would happen to the funnel if that was the extent of external marketing efforts! Sales support assets should be marketed through targeted nurture campaigns. Once you get going on #2 above, you can start to address the needs of each rep and market your leads, collateral and other assets as solutions to the right sales problem at the right time!

4. Take an account centric approach to lead generation. Marketing is generally great at understanding the world in terms of segments and contacts. These are fundamental concepts for planning, budgeting, and executing marketing activity. However, sales reps think of the world in terms of accounts. Marketing needs to make leads more relevant to reps by delivering them in an account context.

Sales and Marketing

5. Define customer creation as an enterprise process. This is the most effective way to change the corporate culture and gain executive support for addressing the many alignment issues across all customer facing functions in the enterprise. The analogy here is supply chain. Before it was defined as an enterprise process the people, processes, technology, data, and budgets within it were managed on a purely departmental basis. Defining it as an enterprise process made it possible to optimize and continually improve the supply chain based on overall business performance. The customer creation process - from prospecting to closing to upselling - needs to be owned and measured in the same way.

6. Implement customer data as an enterprise service. Once customer creation is established as an enterprise process, it requires an enterprise approach to customer data management in order for the optimization and continuous improvement to take place based on core business metrics and not on a collection of disassociated departmental KPIs.

These six table stakes should be treated as urgent action items for all high tech Sales Operations and Marketing Operations personnel. Some organizations are doing some of these things, but no one has implemented all of them as organizational norms.

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The Customer Cloud: The Killer App for the Social Enterprise

The old two-step marketing and sales model for customer creation is dead. Today we have a three part model: Socializing, Marketing, and Sales – with socializing taking on increasing importance and marketing being redefined in the process. That’s a good thing for customers but it makes the market more competitive for sellers. Companies have to seek out and engage with both existing and potential customers in radically new ways outside of explicit business contexts with resources previously not thought of as customer facing.

This activity is going on today at a furious pace, but it is highly fragmented. With the introduction by Salesforce.com of Data.com and the social ready rebuild of Database.com at Dreamforce, as well their Chatter and CRM capabilities, customer interactions will come together in what is emerging as the Customer Cloud – the first killer app for the social enterprise.

The Customer Cloud will evolve into the source of record for all account and contact data because it can provide the Holy Grail of the customer creation process – the unified customer record. As a result, it will be the centering point for all customer interactions. It is definitive because:

• It is self-regulating – contacts update their own data via social tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. greatly improving data accuracy and timeliness
• It is real time – individuals have a vested interest in updating their social profiles asap
• It has practically infinite scalability and reach.
• It is equally available to all customer facing functions from marketing to sales, as well as fulfillment, finance, service and support, etc.
• It provides insight into relationships – account contacts can be sustained and expanded even in the face of departures, and corporate hierarchies can be better understood and tracked.

A unified customer record provides the basis for breaking down the discrepancies, decay, and dysfunction that currently plague (or prevent the implementation of) enterprise customer creation processes, especially in B2B. It offers companies the potential to coordinate all of their customer facing activities around a single source of information – the lack of which has been the Achilles Heel in all previous efforts in CRM, data warehousing, and other valiant attempts to unify customer facing functions.

Thus at Dreamforce, the announcements of Data.com and the social data readiness of Database.com are major strategic milestones for Salesforce.com. With the addition of the Radian 6 social monitoring last year, this neatly rounds out a very strong play for leadership in the battle to deliver the Customer Cloud and provide the customer facing infrastructure of the future that will be build upon it.

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Market Intelligence on the Move


Transformation continues to sweep its way through the marketing function and no "department" within the function is exempt from change. For this month's CMO Advisor newsletter, we are now focused on the market intelligence area.


Compared to its peer departments, Market Intelligence (MI) enjoys relative stability, as measured by the steadiness of the job description, job security and tenure, and budgets. But there is a groundswell of change -- or at least an expressed desire for change. In a recent survey of MI professionals, IDC observes that MI executives are seeking to increase the value they deliver to the organizations they support, and to deliver that value with greater efficiency.

Indeed, it is the sentiment of executives that IDC interviewed that "The market intelligence organization will change more in the next 3 years than it has changed in the past 10 years". That is a bold statement. To peel it back, here are the top areas of change that the MI profession is seeking to transform.

• MI executives want to transform their client engagement model and become more "proactive". In IDC's opinion, this sentiment stems from MI's traditional challenge of being a demand-driven organization that is constantly working in "response mode" to numerous requests from their internal customers.
• The MI area seeks to increase its contributions to corporate strategy and sales enablement.
• From a process and technology standpoint, MI would like to improve the information "value chain", from data sourcing to information delivery.
• MI seeks to provide greater support for long-range business planning.
• MI seeks to demonstrate more visible / tangible business value for its work output.

Our sense is that MI professionals have a good future vision of their role; one where they are highly efficient, driving strategic as well as tactical business value, and are highly valued by their internal clients across the organization for information and "insights" that positively influence business outcomes.

There are two areas that I believe are the best place for MI Transformation steps to begin. These are echoed by my colleagues at IDC and also validated by our surveys with MI executives. I will describe these and also take a bit of "analyst license" and provide some operational suggestions.

1. Improving support for corporate strategy and long term business decisions. I think that MI professionals would love to get out of the heavy load of short-time, fast response calls for bits and bites of data. What they would like to do is be involved in longer term, meatier analysis that is served at higher levels in the organization and that support important business outcomes. But MI is constrained by their people and processes.
The process changes I would suggest would be first; provide more technology and training for self-service for the run-rate of short and tactical requests. Second, consider greater off-shoring or right-shoring of the "back office" analysis roles within MI, and thereby create more roles for higher level "management – consulting" type MI personnel who can interface with executives for the longer-cycle, more complex projects.

By the way, on the right-shoring of MI tasks (moving the non-client facing anayltical tasks to lower cost countries), many of the largest tech vendors are on this march right now.

2. Sales Enablement. In IDC's many surveys of Selling Productivity, we see that very high salaried sales executives spend a large amount of their time searching for or re-creating information that will support their preparation. OK, so what function in the organization that is NOT the sales function is good at finding and organizing and delivering information? Market Intelligence! I think it would be a natural for the MI area to provide greater and more cost effective support for many sales-preparation activities. As an example, almost every MI function has a portal for serving and managing information assets. Why couldn't those same portals – or a version thereof – be used for sales assets? The time spent on searching for information assets is one of the most wasted and most common activities of salespeople.

Recently, I have been writing on similar transformations in related business units such as marketing operations, and we are also seeing some related changes taking place within sales operations. For every part of the marketing organization, the pressure is on to be efficient and drive positive business outcomes. IDC believes that there is a bright future ahead for MI leaders (and their teams) that understand the transformation that is under way and can begin that journey with concrete and bold new steps.


Rich Vancil

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An Ice Cold Bucket of Reality - The Challenge of Selling to Today's Harried Buyer

Savo held their annual user group meeting in Chicago on October 26th and 27th. Two hundred people working on Sales Enablement (SE) attended and a number of very interesting keynotes and customer presentations were given.

Jill Konrath provided a very entertaining and sobering take on the challenge of marketing and selling to today's harried (understatement of the year) buyers. The centerpiece of her talk was an improvised role playing exercise in which Jill played a sales executive that was a key target for a fictitious company. The point was to show what everyday life is like for our prospects before we ever try to contact them. It was the start of her day and she had to get a presentation ready for the quarterly board meeting that afternoon.

The CMO is the first to walk into her office to complain about sales not following up on marketing leads and they have the "marketing leads are crap" argument. "You were in our lead scoring meeting you have no excuse." "You didn't listen or take any of my ideas so the leads are still crap." "Sounds like we need to go over the lead scoring again, do you have time today or tomorrow?" "No, I'm totally booked - wait a minute. OK, let's do something late tomorrow." "Fine, I'll send an invite."

Thirty seconds to restart on the board presentation.

In comes the CEO. "Hi Jill, do you have a few minutes?" "What? Sure." "Congratulations it looks like the eastern region is doing well and the west is coming back nicely, great job." "Thanks." "But what's going on in the Midwest, we're really underperforming there." "Yes, I know, we have some weak reps out there and I have a plan for addressing that." "Oh great, let's discuss it after the board meeting." "Umm…" "Once you get the board presentation done, just write up your plan for the Midwest and we'll get that situation fixed." "OK, when is this?" "Right after the board meeting, in my office."

Twenty seconds to restart on the board presentation.

The HR person comes in. "We have to get the first round interviews done this week if we want your new reps in the field for next quarter." "I don't have any time on my calendar for this." "Well, you won't be fully staffed next quarter if we don't get these positions filled." "OK, OK, I'll see if I can juggle some stuff around." "Great! Oh, did you see what the new girl in accounting was wearing today?" "Come on, I don't have time for that." "It's a funny story…" "Honestly, here let me walk you out."

Ten seconds to restart on the board presentation.

A phone call from her sister. "Hi Jill, I'm at the supermarket and I'm looking at turkeys for Thanksgiving. Do you remember if Mom likes the free range ones or was it something else last year?"

Harried. Distracted. Under-resourced. Over-pressured. Completely frazzled. And she hasn't even checked email or voice mail. Work and life are constantly bombarding our key prospects, and we're part of that bombardment. The chilling fact of the matter is that we have absolutely no chance of getting this person's attention unless we have intimate and immediate insight into what's going on around her. Is she going to respond to a generic email or phone pitch? No, never.

This is a crucial point for today's marketing and sales professionals. IDC has seen this message come through in our surveys of CIOs. And we heard a less dramatic but equally poignant version from the CIO panel at our CMO and Sales Advisory board meetings a few weeks ago. The gist of which is summarized in the following figure.

Marketing and Sales Models Not Aligned
with Buyer's Purchasing Models

Source: IDC, 2010

The message IDC is hearing from customers is loud and clear: Solve the business problem that's killing me right now even if it doesn't involve your solution and you'll transform the nature of my relationship with you from sales rep to trusted adviser and your company from a seller to a strategic partner. If I have that relationship with you, I just might call you for help with my problem in the Midwest. But if your competitor is in that position, you are a snowball in a very hot place.

The Buyer's world has changed dramatically with the economy. Approaches that proved themselves when times were good cannot be relied upon when such a radical shift has taken place. It takes managerial courage and organizational fortitude not only to admit we have a problem but to do something radically different to address the new set of challenges. As a result, IDC strongly recommends you consider the following fundamental questions as you embark on enabling your sales force.

• How are you going to get your Sales People to become "Trusted Advisors" when they are being trained and compensated to sell?
• Is that the difference between your top performers and rest that struggle to make quota?
• Have you properly defined the act of "selling"?
• Do you understand the full scope of the "buying" process?

How you answer these questions will profoundly affect your customer relationships and your approach to sales enablement. Customers are calling for radical change and your Sales Enablement implementation may be just the catalyst you need to get started down a new path.

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Channel Marketing Automation – When CRM is not Enough

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel.

With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped?

Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions
These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with significant indirect revenue. A recent IDC study of large IT companies found that on average channel revenue was $2.4B. It was generated by 34 channel marketing staff managing 8,500 active partners. That equates to $45 million of revenue per channel marketing staff member but only $1.2 million per partner. The dirty little secret – there are also on average approximately 19,000 inactive partners!


Source: IDC’s 2010 Best Practices Study in Channel Marketing (n=13)

A Better Way

Your CRM and SFA are not going to answer any of the critical channel management questions – although many companies think their CRM system is where they should be "managing partners". In fact, a partner management system fulfills a role more like an SFA – it tracks all the activity that occurs after the lead is generated. It should also facilitate the process of lead distribution – managing all the partner credentials and accreditations need to qualify for a particular lead. Then there's deal registration where the partners accept the lead so that it is not poached by another partner or … ahem … the direct sales force. And when you consider some of the other requirements of partner management, the CRM fallacy becomes clear:

• Recruitment and on-boarding
• Training and development
• Business Planning and Reporting
• Compensation and Incentive program management
• Marketing and Sales support

Are these capabilities that your CRM can provide? Your SFA? Would you even want them to? The answers should be no, no, and no. Don't be thrown off by that last bullet – the marketing and sales outreach your partners require is very different than the corporate outreach that marketing operations is doing. They rebrand, reschedule, embed, and otherwise repurpose marketing content, making a direct translation from corporate marketing to partner marketing wholly inappropriate.

If you have (or want to have) a significant amount of revenue going through the channel, you need a dedicated partner relationship management (PRM) system to automate more than just marketing and sales activities. Don't look to your CRM, SFA, or even the newer marketing automation vendors to provide you with the full set of capabilities necessary to effectively manage channels. Those solutions are focused on a very different set of requirements. They may have slideware and inch deep functionality, but that's typically it. Do ask about integrating a PRM with these systems as reporting should roll up easily across direct and indirect sales.

A number of key capabilities to consider when implementing a platform channel marketing automation:

• Manage partner profiles and contacts
• Deliver and track training, certifications, etc.
• Set business rules for lead distribution
• Handle deal registration
• Provide a single system of record for partner and channel management
• Provide detailed performance reporting (12-month rolling review)
• Track partner outreach campaigns
• Manage market development funds (MDF) and co-op spend

With these issues on the table, it should be clear that automating channel marketing requires a dedicated, purpose-built solution. It will be costly and painful and meet substantially lower expectations otherwise.

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The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework

Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well.

However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles.

The Need for Alignment
The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule: IDC research shows that up to 80% of the content marketing generates is not used by Sales, even though a lot of it is specifically created for Sales and Channel enablement. Additionally, customers say that Sales reps are insufficiently prepared for their initial meeting 50% of the time. Clearly a massive disconnect is at work.
IDC's Framework for Sales and Marketing automation is, therefore, focused on the tight alignment of key Sales and Marketing processes. This framework represents only those processes that must be coordinated (potentially integrated) between the two organizations. It is not meant to be a comprehensive map of all the processes in which each organization must engage to be successful – there are many activities on each side of the dynamic that do not have a corollary on the other.
Each high level process in Sales that has a counterpart in Marketing must share:

• A common set of definitions for inputs and outputs
• Proportional allocation of budget and resources based on overall business objectives
• Phase-appropriate performance metrics
• An integrated IT ecosystem

Source: IDC, 2010

Implementation
IDC recommends that sales and marketing automation efforts be tightly coordinated across both organizations so that the customer experience and lead management processes are handled seamlessly by all parts of the infrastructure. Even if a marketing implementation will have no sales users and vice versa, the data definitions and flow will be critical for both organizations. IDC recommends that:

• Senior marketing and sales leaders meet regularly to plan, review, and asses automation projects
• Marketing operations and sales enablement teams are especially critical, they should have representatives from both organizations with senior level sponsorship.
• Marketing needs to be very cognizant of how leads and lead details will flow into the SFA/CRM environment.
• Sales needs to be diligent in making sure marketing is capturing the high priority prospects and the high priority details so that lead acceptance criteria is routinely fulfilled.

Next Steps
One of the key issues for automating sales and marketing is establishing a shared automation road map. Upcoming research from IDC will help you: prioritize your plans based on business impact and implement best practices to be most successful.

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IDC's Sales Enablement Framework

Sales enablement continues to be an area of opportunity for marketers to improve their credibility in the organization and their impact on the bottom line. IDC defines Sales enablement (SE) as: "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place. . . to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward."

I'd like to invite Rich Vancil, VP of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, to share with you the sales enablement framework that our team (Rich Vancil, Lee Levitt, Seth Fishbein and me) has developed:

"Thanks Michael.

Sales people are knowledge workers and their preparation time is all about building their knowledge so that they can have the most effective interactions with their customers. We like to refer to these interactions as 'conversations'. A sales-person's conversations can be actual or virtual; written or oral; one-way or interactive; one-dimensional or multi-media. IDC's definition of SE centers on making these sales conversations more intelligent and engaging.

For early-stage management initiatives and emerging job roles, frameworks are helpful. Here is the IDC Sales Enablement Framework:

Starting on the left side of this Framework: IDC suggests that managers think about SE as starting in the marketing area (including Marketing Operations); and then moving to the Sales Operations area; and then into the actual selling functions.

Within the sphere of marketing activities, IDC research has found that over 40% of all marketing assets are not in use today, with some sales organizations reporting that as much as 90% of the assets created by their marketing peers are never used by sales teams. This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects, and current customers. The top reason that assets are not used or that they are under-used, is that end-users are unable to access or locate these assets. Based upon anecdotal feedback from recent survey participants, the key root causes include: "too much material," old content and assets, and poor processes and technologies. The lack of relevance of content and assets is also cited as a reason for lack of asset utilization.

Sales enablement - from marketing's perspective - is more than simply using a content management system to get collateral and PowerPoint presentations to sales. It is the complete life-cycle management of content and marketing assets, including: content development; leveraging that content across the organization in a one-to-many fashion; collaboration with Sales Operations and the selling entities for the subsequent distribution and delivery of that content to sales (internal and external sales/partners); and the feedback loop from sales as part of continuous improvement.

Moving to the center of the Framework: this is Sales Operations' involvement in SE. An effective sales operations team should be ensuring that process excellence for SE is institutionalized for the entire selling organization. Sales Operations should seek SE best practices from all selling entities and share those practices company-wide. The sales operations team should take the lead on defining goals and objectives for SE; create and manage the processes and systems to meet those goals; provide overall execution over-sight and process governance; and then provide the measurement systems and reporting to track how SE progress is being achieved. As mentioned earlier, a key success factor for sales enablement is for strong collaboration between sales operations and marketing.

The final part of the SE Framework (right side) is the consumption and deployment of the content assets by Sales. The sellers should receive the benefits of the process and infrastructure groundwork that been built by marketing and sales operations. The first part of this is probably the most critical process-area of the entire Framework: How easy is it for the sales person to find the right content (in the right format), at the time that they need it, to help with a given sales conversation? The answer to this is one of the key levers in the Sales Productivity equation. More time in searching and seeking means less time in actual selling. As part of the reporting and metrics that Sales Operations is tracking to understand SE improvement, monitoring of this "searching" time should be an active metric - to reduce!

Effective SE also means that the content that Sales now has in hand, exists in the format or media that is appropriate for the conversation they wish to have. Does a PowerPoint presentation have all the content that the sales-person seeks, but the task of converting that into a Word proposal falls on the shoulders of the sales rep? Again, the definition of SE excellence has to include: "right time, right place, and right format".

Finally, the last step in this Framework is the sharing of SE best practices among the peer sales-people. This is perhaps the key litmus test of SE success. Sales people are smart and resourceful and seek expediency. If the marketing and sales operations elements of this Framework have been successfully deployed, the sales people will likely grasp and exploit it very quickly. Usage will become "viral" as SE best practices become quickly shared across the ranks."

Thanks Rich. Please feel free to email Rich directly at rvancil@idc.com or provide your comments below.

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Sales Enablement and The Year of the Sales Rep

I've spoken about sales enablement quite a bit in this blog, and I'll continue to do so as marketers improve their ability to better enable the sales process from an internal as well as an external perspective. With this in mind, Clare Gillan, IDC's SVP of Executive and Go To Market Programs, will share some of her insights in the sales enablement area. . .

Thanks Michael. At IDC's recent annual Directions event, I gave a presentation titled "The Year of the Sales Rep." In response to The Year of the Sales Rep notion, an SVP of sales asked me, "Why does this year have to be my year?" "Precisely," I responded. Let me explain. . . . never have we more needed our sales reps to be successful and never have they needed us more — those of us in sales, marketing, and executive management.

The crisis in sales is driven not by the economy alone but by an evolution in how buyers buy. Sales organizations, in general, have not kept up. The economy heightens a need for change in how the IT industry "sells" — better mapping to how buyers buy.

For nearly 10 years, sales organizations have emphasized the desire to become "trusted partners" with their B2B customers. Nearly every sales organization has been through "solution selling" programs of one form or another. However, only one in five buyers will tell you that he/she is generally approached by sales reps prepared to discuss solutions. Too often, the sales engagement continues to be product led. Further, buyers will tell you that the pre-purchase experience is becoming a more important indicator of post purchase value. Buyers increasingly consider "relationship ROI" as well as product ROI. And, buyers will tell you that, in this economy, they no longer have tolerance for uninformed vendor representatives who come through their doors. The sales rep must come to a meeting prepared to discuss the buyer's specific business — yet 31% of sales reps are not prepared with even a basic level of Web available information before taking a buyer's valuable time. Only 16% are extremely prepared — these are the reps positioned to take share for the companies they represent.

The technology purchase decision is rapidly moving from a product decision to a relationship decision. Buyers can generally find a number of products that can do the job and within the same price range. They will select the vendor that will make them successful over time even if the vendor does not offer the very best up-front price. The shift from product-led selling to relationship-led selling calls for a significant transformation of sales — enabled by a transformation of marketing.

This transformation requires marketing to gather intelligence and create assets that better map to what buyers value and then make the intelligence and assets "accessible" at key points along the go-to-market chain for use by sales and partners. This requires researching buyers (and I stress--from the buyer's point of view), auditing program investments against what buyers value and other related investments your company is making, creating strong content assets (and then making these consumable in a variety of formats), and, finally contributing to a sales enablement process developed in partnership with your sales "partner".

Thanks Clare! Contact me at mgerard@idc.com for a free copy of a recently published report by Clare entitled "Sales Enablement 3.0: A Transformation of Sales Enabled by a Transformation of Marketing".

More to come from IDC's CMO Advisory Practice on the emerging practices in this area of Sales Enablement.

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