Any Given Sunday, in Sales.

It's a cliché, I know, however, sport generally, in all different guises is used as a way to highlight how business leaders, in fact, all of us should think when it comes to performing at peak levels.

Sales is no different. I wrote an article back in 2017 about how the modern sales & marketing function need to think like a Formula 1 team. In short, the driver is the sales person, everyone else in the team is playing the role to help the sales person win - be it sales enablement / effectiveness & marketing - including all ancillary supporting roles such as social media teams. And beyond.

Fast forward to 2022. Nothing has changed in the concepts of sales & marketing needing to be a team effort. Yet everything has changed.

We have seen the rapid rise of Sales Engagement Platforms, such as Outreach & SalesLoft vying for the sellers attention. Call listening, recording and analyses with platforms such as Gong and Refract. The automation of data capture, relationship intelligence and CRM augmentation with tools like Introhive & Ebsta. Microsoft is now playing in this space, wanting to capture it all, underpinned by Viva Insights and Viva Sales Insights. Layer in tools such as Sales Navigator, especially at scale with their TeamLink and TeamLinkExtend offering - they even have the word Team! We then add intent data from the likes of 6sense and Bombora to help move us toward the world of predictive sales & marketing. Finally, your CRM - where there is a narrative playing out, certainly in Saas sales world, do you even need a CRM? For another time.

With all the above in mind, all of these platforms need to be owned by a team / person / business unit to ensure that they are running as they should. You also have the salesperson who will be using them to help generate pipeline of conversations, which converts to sales opportunities and ideally closed / won business.

All of this against a backdrop of a hybrid/remote working models, meaning that we are having to operate in different way, yet maintain the sense of working as a "team" not only amongst your immediate teams, but more broadly across this business.

That's just how we operate internally.

We then have to take the prospects and clients into consideration. And the world they operate in.

Go back almost 20 years, when I was in recruitment, it was pretty straight forward - just make calls. That was it, at it's bare bones. Yes one had to manage the candidates through the process and help with salary negotiation etc. We didn't really talk to marketing, because, well, we didn't have to. Not because we didn't want to, there was genuinely no reason for us to.

Back to today, and we still see the narrative of, in the round, sales and marketing still operating in silo's of each other. HBR goes as far to say "Sales & Marketing are becoming Obsolete" authored by Brent Adamson :

Long the elusive objective of virtually every B2B commercial team, the time for sales and marketing “integration,” has passed. Instead, the most progressive B2B commercial organizations are completely reconfiguring commercial operations to better address today’s deep misalignment between how suppliers sell and how buyers buy.

Is it therefore time that we need to take a long hard look at our existing playbooks - are they fit for purpose for the modern sales & marketing world we find ourselves in? Are they based on a time, when the way we bought, and sold for that matter, was different.

If we are going to sell in a digital first world, we have to review the end to end buying journey a client takes, both in the push - outbound, and pull - inbound.

This is what the team at Smart Technologies did, as referenced by Brent in the HBR article. They were brave, bold and trusted each other.

This is an example output we did for a client through our Target Customer Experience approach :

Only when you truly understand the what, how and when your prospects do/go through during the buying journey, can you then start to build the roles and teams to support this. And breakdown silos.

If we go back to the sporting analogy, sport is no different in terms how it has had to adapt to technology, development in physiotherapy, science of nutrition, how data is used and more. This has also meant that they have had to adapt and develop their playbooks if you will, as well as having new roles born out of this. However, what has always remained true in the world of sport, especially in elite sport - every single person understands how their role fits into, and is part of, the wider team, to help achieve the single goal of winning.

One might be bold and suggest that maybe sales & marketing has not followed this same trajectory as our friends in sport. If we are honest with ourselves, the technology, automation & now AI has outstripped the way sales & marketing operate - as I have mentioned, this "tension" between sales & marketing is nothing new - it has however become much more complex, due to the advancement of the aforementioned technology.

Whilst I respect, and believe you all understand what your role is and how it all plays into the bigger picture - do you really understand what your colleagues do and how it fits into the overall customer journey / experience. And how you fit into what they do.

Based on informal conversations I have had in the round such as "a marketing lead being frustrated with the SDR team for not following up on MQLs" - my response was, when was the last time you went and spent a day with sales, ideally in person and listened into their calls - even make a few calls. " We have never done this". Vice versa, sales spending time with marketing, rather than allowing this us & them to continue. This is how you start to break down silos. And created more connected teams.

Another angle to consider is how are you working with, and learning from your clients and make them part of the team as it were. A simple solution is win/loss reviews. When you win a sizeable deal, get an independent team to go in and take the process apart with the client to understand why you vs the competition - the same goes to those deals that you lost, don't accept a close second on price. Also use this client listening as a way to keep a pulse on what they are seeing, what the like / don't like - maybe run a quarterly session with 5-10 of your best clients.

Use this data and insight to a) help marketing understand what is / isn't working b) prove or disprove what sales activities are working vs no working c) help you redesign your playbooks based on these learnings.

Learn and iterate, almost in an agile way if you will.

This is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It requires bold leadership, trust from the C-suite, that this new world order is necessary for sales & marketing functions to adapt to how buyers want to buy - if research is to be believed that most would prefer a seller free buying journey.

However, you can use this as a reason to reposition the way your sales & marketing functions interact with your prospects & clients. For the better.

I will leave you with this clip from Any Given Sunday (NSFW if you are playing this in an office or with young people in earshot!)

In the spirit of team work, a friend and mentor of mine Steve Wills completed the Lands End to John o' Groats cycle for raising money for the wonderful Charity, Chance for Childhood. If you feel so inclined you can donate here , they are at ￡65k so far! as well as learn more about Steve's journey here .

Links

HBR : Traditional Sales & Marketing are becoming Obsolete Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete (hbr.org)

Podcast : Interviewing Jenna Pipchuk and how the redesigned their Sales & Marketing business.

Podcast : Interviewing Brent Adamson on the death of sales.

PA Consulting Target Customer Experience