For most people that love barbecue, the number one rule of barbecue is, "It's My Grill!" That means hands off and keep your spatula to yourself. A challenging situation is cropping up for lots of people who are used to cooking up their own leads as salespeople, and someone (marketing) has swiped the spatula.
You've heard of the tiny house, now we have the couch office. What's the impact on B2B sales?
Over the last two years, the demands placed on customer service have created a pressure cooker for companies. For many companies, it was a significant customer service stress test, with extended wait times, dropped calls, and slow or non-existent follow-up.
The NY Times calls it the "age of anger", in which otherwise calm adults devolve into fits of rage over customer service problems. Industry leaders call it "a different level of mean." This challenge can seriously damage a brand.
Salespeople are the guardians of industry and customer insight - and that insight and focus is invaluable. But don't just picture those nearing retirement who are seasoned sales veterans. Salespeople age more quickly in their trade and often get their wisdom faster than other employees.
It comes from the push and pull of sales interactions, the pressure of quotas, and crafting winning deals, so it creates "old dogs" at a pretty young age. An experienced, veteran salesperson can be any age - we're really talking about people that learned to sell before the digital space took over.
In 2021, almost one-third of outside salespeople transitioned to inside sales - permanently. But as the pandemic restrictions ease, a new kind of sales is emerging. It's the hybrid sales model in which sales teams use the best of virtual and in-person skills to become more efficient and meet new customer expectations of speed and convenience.
The missing ingredient? Sales enablement fueled by Sales and Marketing Alignment - a big part of which is driven by shifting priorities in the marketing focus.
Alignment is a critical part of building revenue, that's why sales and marketing leaders, along with CFOs and RevOps teams, include an alignment system in their plan. While the benefits are appealing (reports of 30% revenue growth are pretty common following an effective alignment), they simply have to outweigh the costs, so you've got to nail them both down.
The bigger question should focus on whether the effort is really worth the cost.
Your prospects have questions that either move them forward toward a "yes", or hold them back. Some of those questions are posed directly to sales, but others lie under the surface or are only shared inside the buying committee. The way you address those questions tells the whole story about the status of your marketing and sales alignment - are you still living in a world of isolated silos or is the team working together for growth?
It's easy to place blame on sales or marketing teams when things don't go as planned. But more often than not, it's not a personality or performance problem- it's the lack of alignment.
Marketing and advertising have changed. Ads are blocked, Google is removing third-party cookies, and iOS is restricting email. But those aren't the biggest challenges faced by marketing, because they need something that only the sales team can provide: a real understanding of customer problems.
They do make strange companions. One is seasoned by thousands of customer conversations, while the other is focused on the latest digital communication tools. Alignment pairs the marketer who is just now mastering the details of the product or service, and the salesperson who knows every way to slice the product and solve a long list of customer challenges. The idea that they need to be aligned in the same workplace when they have different goals, different levels of experience, a language unique to each group, and even distinct pipelines can raise some eyebrows or lead to lip-service alignment.
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