Its all about managing goals.
Recently there was a great blog post in PSYBlog by Jeremy Dean about why, when we all know the nuts and bolts of seeting goals, we still fail (read about 11 Goal Hacks: How to Achieve Anything). He talks about how imprtant it is to know your final objective, to start committing to them today, to stop fantasizing about the process and result and start acting now. All of this seems familiar to anyone who regularly seeks to accomplish certain tasks and sets out a road map to do so. But it is interesting how often we fail to really understand what it is we are doing, day by day, that prevents us from achieving what we have set out to achieve.
This is particularly interesting in the context of the sales and marketing process of companies.
A sales process is event driven. We have our revenue targets, a plan for our territory and the forecasts we set for our selves or for the company as a whole. This is broken down into to a manageable set of processes by segmenting our target markets, identifying our ideal customers and spending more time on opportunities that will pay off than on those that wont. But this is easier said than done. As sales people we still need to manage our pipelines, bringing the universe into focus through groups of prospects that we qualify and engage with further, moving them through the sales cycle. Day to day, this is time spent either engaging with, educating or closing customers. And this day to day process is highly fragmented, with new inputs constantly changing our focus.
On the other side are the marketing folks. On the surphace, their objectives are the same as the sales people - to close more deals and drive more revenue. But their day to day responsibilites are certialnly not the same. Marketers have to consider brand devlopment and management, lead generation and management, channels of distribution, competitve pricing, database management, segmentation, campaign management, creative and a host of other marketing functions. It is precisely because these functions are supportive of, and not directly tied to revenue generation that marketing gets labeled a cost center. And this supportive function leads to the age old adage of sales people complaining about marketing's inability to provide quality leads, and conversely why marketing complains the sales people aren't able to close the great leads they have.
But this is a mistake. Marketing is not simply a supportive function. It is a key part of the over all "revenue generation cycle" - something companies like Marketo or Eloqua are trying to communicate and enable with their software. So why do these two revenue generating parts of the whole work as silos and not as one machine. Goals. Or more accurately, the misalignment of the two functions goals and how you go about synchronizing them.
Back to Dean's post on goal management - His is more of an individual's approach to achieving success. But marketing and sales organizations can learn alot from this perspective. Dont view your function as a silo - see it as a process. Understand that your day to day activities should support very definitieve goals that improve the overall revenue cycle. Segement leads in a territory more efficienlty and nuture the leads more effectively so that the sales team can close more of the opportunites - because in the end they are better opportunites. Dont make that time consuming demo to a prospect because you know that it isnt really a prspect anyway and doing so doesn't match the goals set.
Synchronizing and aligning very real long term and short term goals, and their respective processes, between the marketing and sales groups will improve the quality of leads delivered, will shorten the sales cycle and will drive more revenue.
How you do that effectively is what I will discuss in my next post.
