Marketing contribution is often overlooked when marketing is thought of as a cost center. It takes time and effort to demonstrate the real contribution to profits.
Sales
Charting an end-to-end revenue cycle
When we chart intermediate conversion steps through the end to end revenue cycle, we can see trends that help us with improving the overall sales process. Regardless of stage or team that is interacting with the prospect.
Is your Sales Admin also a Salesforce Admin?
All too often, when a company uses a tool, such as Salesforce, the education and responsibility for administrating the tool is kept with to the IT people in the company. While the front-line super-users, the functional administration staff, tend to be overlooked as either not needing training or are restricted from doing things.
Don’t want Marketing and Sales silos in your Startup? Don’t create silos in the first place.
A lot has changed over time in terms of company business organization. Traditionally Marketing was about lead generation and collateral production. Basically inputs to the sales process. Sales was all closing deals and achieving quotas. Marketing had the long view, trying to please all Customers. Sales had the short view, trying to service a specific Customer today. Marketing had indirect exposure to Customers. Sales owned direct relationships. The turf wars in existing companies grew naturally about these very different mandates and responsibilities. A real life “best of times and worst of times” saga.
Who else would benefit from this conversation?
This week I attended the TPMA (Toronto Product Management Association) monthly meeting: Are Your Sales Teams Truly Enabled to Sell Your Product? The speaker this month was Nicki Weiss, founder of sales effectiveness consulting company Saleswise. At the end of the meeting, Nicki left us with a challenge. Explaining that the most effective business relationships are actually triads, she challenged us to look at ways to include an additional person when we set up one-to-one business meetings.
Do you have an OLA between your Marketing and Sales teams?
A written OLA can be used as an input into a requirements document of any Marketing Automation tool / Sales Automation tool interface project. All too often, these two departments use different tools that are more tailored to their specific functions. In order for information to pass easily between them an actual technical interface is typically required. If the operational process is understood and the necessary information to be passed between the teams is documented, then building this interface and setting up appropriate reporting tools can be done more effectively.
MailChimp for Salesforce – Generate Leads from subscriptions to your newsletters
MailChimp for Salesforce is an App created by MailChimp and available for free in the Salesforce.com AppExchange. I recently installed the App in my Salesforce account in order to sync subscribers of our weekly into Salesforce Leads and contacts. I’ve been so impressed with this integration that I decided to focus this week’s blog post […]
Business organization by customer focused layers
The traditional business model of separated teams, or silos, for marketing, sales, development and support simply is no longer working for B2B companies. This business model is prone to a waste in resources, duplication of efforts and poor internal communication. On the other hand, a product focused business model can lead to not recognizing opportunities for additional sales opportunities to an existing customer base. So what is the alternative? To borrow and adapt a quote from the 90’s – it’s about the customer stupid. Though these independent functions are still necessary, the best organization is to align business operations and teams with a focus on a customer segment.