Stop justifying your B2B marketing actions
What is with all this measuring and justifying in B2B Marketing? Complaints from the sales team, that’s what.
Marketers are sometimes in a no-win situation; if the company has a great quarter the Sales group gets the credit. If sales are down, marketing gets the blame. Sound familiar?
Want to know how to fix it?
Let me pose a question: As a marketing person, when was the last time you met directly, one-on-one, with the top sales producer in your company?
Never? Why not? Many marketers insist on relaying information at the VP of Sales level and are missing an opportunity. Remember that the VP of Sales depends on his team to look good so you should focus there too.
Try this.
Step 1: Seek out the TOP 3 sales people in your organization and set up a one-on-one meeting with each of them.
Step 2: When you meet with each top performer, ask them about one, specific action they would like from you and then do it. Don’t worry about “strategy” or “position”; find something tactical and direct that you can do just for them. Get them to a point where they will ask you for help in the future.
Why will this work?
The simple answer is that the top performing sales people lead the sales organization and they are listened to closely. Think about how a sales organization works; the top performers are never asked to quantify their call rates and fill out ridiculous account plans or measure statistics. Their results speak for themselves. The sales people that get hammered for statistics and reports are the non-producers.
Take a lesson B2B marketers…
Stop trying to justify your actions and instead look for ways to DIRECTLY impact the TOP sales producers of your organization; ignore the noise at the bottom of the ladder. If the top dogs sing your praises you will spend a lot less time justifying your marketing budget.
Bingo! You are right.
Feedback from salespeople about my marketing impresses my boss more than any bar-chart or ROI analysis I can give him.
This is great insight! It is all about marketing, and the whole organization, enabling sales to have better conversations with prospects. I actually work at SAVO, a sales enablement technology company and day in and day out we focus on making sales be more successful. Feedback is so key! If marketing is creating information in a silo, then there is no value to sales the majority of the time! Fun stuff!
Excellent observation!
It’s hard to believe how many marketing teams miss the critical interaction with sales staff. The sales etam is typically in the field, face-to-face with prospects and customers.
Nobody in an organization knows the target audience like the sales team — they represent the marketing team’s best resource.
Agree.
A companies sales team is at the forefront of many successful businesses.