A Paradigm Shift in the New Digital Age

The classic terms should be reshuffled to Read “Marketing and Sales” instead of “Sales and Marketing.”

While most sales professionals won’t agree and many would declare that marketing professionals have a bias, the fact of the matter is that 70% of the buying decisions made by customers are made BEFORE they ever come in contact with a sales person.

Prospective buyers today, consumer and businesses alike, take to the digital world to conduct research; collect information; seek out positive and negative referrals (ironically, most will accept the opinions of complete strangers over experts and industry pundits!) The World Wide Web provides resources to get to answers that before were provided by Sales teams and outside consultants. The plethora of whitepapers; blogs; use cases; and 3rd party reviews act to provide armor and weapons to prospective buyers with the right questions to ask; the things they may not have considered in demanding of vendors; mistakes to avoid and more control over their own decision making criteria.

Far beyond a cliché, the approach to “Content is KING!” is the fulcrum that has driven this paradigm shift. Car buyers and home buyers approach a purchase with a vast wealth of information on pricing; values; deals; seller information and even tactics to get better deals. Businesses are no different. They press for better Service Level Agreements (SLAs); terms; discounts and allowances; negotiating tactics (most are trying to fix maintenance cost to the deal prices and not the list prices).

This places a greater impetus and reliance on effective marketing than ever before. Customers, by the time they reach out to Sales, already know they want to buy. It is less of a sales process and more of a “Help them buy what they know they want at the best value to both parties.”

Marketers are no longer able to get away with the nebulous terms of “awareness” and branding when so much counts on their efforts to bring willing buyers to their doors. The days when Marketing was there to simply generate leads and create sales collateral are over. (If you still look at Marketing in this way in your organization...you are missing the opportunity.) Marketing's role is to bring willing, ready and educated buyers to the sales table. Today this is their real mandate.

Contemporary marketers are no longer “artists” but have moved into science. The science of knowing the best target customers; know which messages resonate with them relating to their very real pain points; knowing what relevant content works; giving them the reference materials that help them justify their buying decisions inside the customer’s organization.

Proficient marketers can now establish an ROI for their spending and efforts. There are metrics now to see how Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) move to become Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and move through the sales funnel. The total spend of individual promotions and campaigns (adding sales costs) over the recognized incremental revenues (NPV) can provide a better insight into the Marketing ROI. To add still another dimension is to affix a timeline weight since some approaches (tradeshows, for example) have a much longer time to close in days than a customer requesting a RFQ/RFP or requesting a sales call.

This age of Digital Access has created a deluge of available data. Marketing analytics has taken on an emerging focus for large and small enterprises alike. Just like there are no standards for IOT and there are no standards for an enterprise to be considered being “Digital,” the movement to analytics is a full spectrum that sweeps from collecting data into spreadsheets and seeking patterns to full-fledged sophisticated data analytics driven my complex algorithms developed by mathematical genius.

The effectiveness of analytics places the outcome at the precipice of success or failure. If you recall how arduous a task it was to establish the enterprise Mission Statement and how everyone had something to input, no less energy and participation is needed to establish what does the enterprise need to know? why? And what to do with what they may learn? It is far too easy to settle for increases in revenue and profitability as a single gauge. Of course, these are critical factors but not THE key KPIs on which to steer an enterprise.

Each function in the business will have different things they want to focus on. Each function, if done poorly, can interpret the data to support the intuitive positions they are taking. Therefore, the cross functional development of what these KPIs are and what the appropriate executable actions will be when the given output is reached is critical.

In addition, every effort, like the Mission Statement exercise, should be made to make the effort concise – consistent- have significant relevant impact and distilled down to the most manageable package. Having too much data and too much output is almost as bad as having none at all!

What do you want to know? Why? What will this cause to happen in your business?

What are you measuring? Why? Are these elements of your business you manage?

What are you going to do with the data you get? Are the workflows and processes in place to pervasively change the way the enterprise goes to market – or does it fall into one department and they can do little to change things?

Are you asking the right questions? Are the questions key to the enterprise’s goals and objectives?

Is there top down and bottom up commitment to act on what is learned? Are there mechanisms in place to act?

Analytics have long played a key role in process manufacture. There is clear SOP for mitigating actions and get things back on track. It is clearly time that Marketing steps up to the science of contributing to the definition of what the enterprise makes (for whom) that delivers much valued features and benefits. This is how the enterprise differentiates itself in their respective appropriate markets. Marketing should be bold enough to bring the enterprise to appreciate what it shouldn’t try to do and which customers they shouldn’t try to capture. Accentuate what we do best and diminish the waste of funds and energies chasing opportunities for which the enterprise is not suited. Define the pain points your enterprise can address and the problems to which solutions we are best suited to deliver. Define the conversations we should be having AND with whom those conversations should be with. (It isn't a conversation about the product or service but about solving which of their problems, let them ask HOW!)

Marketing can make Sales more effective and the enterprise more successful. Today, the appropriate way the term should read is “Marketing and Sales.” (In my humble opinion.)