Marketing Sales Alignment - Success mantra for B2B

When your firm is targetting enterprise customers, B2B marketing becomes a lot challenging as it requires much more alignment with sales. Traditionally sales and marketing teams, I would say, are 'loosly coupled' and thats mainly due to lack of binding commitment to other's success. Around 80 % of leads passed to sales are dropped and 90 % marketing collaterals are uunused. 80% of enterprise technology deals are not influenced by marketing at all. It gets further tricky by the fact that marketing is not only about revenue generation but also has to manage brand and other marketing strategies. How many times you have heard CEOs calling marketing a 'Cost center". Well almost all the time. How can you make a cost centre integral part of revenue generation engine, which is sales. A part of this attitude towards marketing is to be blamed on marketer themselves. Marketer tend to sweat on web hits, leads etc and get lost in smoke of information instead of focusing on critical but simple things which can impact Revenue. So it becomes really important for marketer to track metrics like 'marketing influenced pipeline' and 'marketing influenced revenue' as a multiple of 'marketing budget'. This will demostrate their effectiveness and help correct the perception,often incorrect, towards marketing.
So how do we align sales & marketing. For marketers its really important to understand key objectives and challenges during each stages of sales cycle. During early sales cycle, market communicatin and content should be targeted enough to keep customers engaged. Towards end of buying cycle, customers tend to worry about failures and hence marketing should work with implementation team to create collaterals which displays risk factors across the timeline and ways to mitigate them.
Sales & marketing need to create sort of structure where boundaries and interaction points are clearly defined. We can do small things like creating a dashboard on Salesforce giving insight into leads/opportunities patterns, revenue/market insights. We also also start using some sales languages like marketing-qualified leads and sales-accepted leads. Apart from CRM tools, Marketing campaign management tools like Eloqua & Marketo and Search marketing firms like Enquiro can play a huge role in bridging the gap. Once a structure is established, Alignment is done by engaging both teams in taking active roles in each other's work and then alogning their compensation based on revenue, customer renewal and customer satisfaction.

Wake up SId

Sid has always been a smart consumer who does his research before buying anything, from electronics to daily usage items. He gets the best value of his money more often than not. But what Sid doesnt take into account is the real price he pays. He doesnt take into account the carbon footprint of items he buys.

The best way to understand green consumers is by segmenting them based on Psychographics than demographics. Lot of research has indicated that LOHAS, Naturalites, drifters & unconcerned are the main segments of green consumers. Lohas and Naturalites are most likely buy green products and pay premium but marketing to these consumers is really tricky as they are well informed and connected. Deception doesnt work with these consumers.

Each gallon of gasoline in US typically emits 8.7 kg of CO2 which is 3.2 kg per litre of petrol. People like Sid should look at the carbon footprints of their purchases by looking at green information sharing platforms like carbonBulls.com and try to offset it not only by making better choices in terms of price & environmental impact but also by contributing to carbon offset projects through firms like terraPass. You can buy 1 year flying carbon offset for $50 or you can buy 4 person-year family carbon offset for $370 which include driving, flying and home energy.

Sid needs to step up and start looking for all these information at carbonbulls.com and not only make good value of his money but also make this world a better place.

What would David Do

In 60s, whole talking point for businesses was 'made in america', in 70s, quality became imp like electronics from japan, in 80s companies focussed on branding like nike, coke, in 90s technology become imp. Current period is all about being green and gonna be a huge factor for businesses for at least next 15-20 years. David, a marketing manager in small firm, is working on to market some green products his firm has come up with. What would David DO?

Best way to market green product is viral marketing. Try to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into sales people. There are some wonderful sites like carbonBulls.com where all these firms can provide all the information about their products which will help potential consumer get all the relevant information. He should also try to get some certification through various eco-label programs.

Deception doesnt work. Be honest with your consumers. Say for example, a box of aluminum foil is labeled with the claim "recyclable," without further elaboration. Unless the type of product, surrounding language, or other context of the phrase establishes whether the claim refers to the foil or the box, the claim is deceptive if any part of either the box or the foil, other than minor, incidental components, cannot be recycled.

web platforms like carbonBulls.com are ideal places to share those information.