Continuous marketing and sales alignment should always be the goal for B2B marketing, right? Not at all. A mentor once shared this with me: “Sales is selling what you have. Marketing is having what you can sell.” Successful marketers make those two statements align at critical points in time – but not continuously. Instead of marching in line with sales, marketers should use marketing arcs to their advantage for sales alignment.
Marketing arcs are the narratives connecting sales, competitive, and innovation ideas together. For this discussion, we’re assuming marketing at a growth-stage firm with defined markets, a product portfolio, and a sales force. There’s probably an established sales arc, often driven by a sales manager who blends information from marketing with tactical field knowledge. In moderately misaligned situations, the sales force may be unable to crisply describe corporate positioning or the product roadmap. They almost always head for the points of least resistance, which may not be the points of marketing strategy emphasis.
Positioning and enabling sales alignment
With the next product months or years away from launch, marketing first needs to focus on positioning and sales enablement – the “selling what you have” phase. Sales teams need a clear positioning story so they approach the best prospects, then they can playback strong product/service stories. PR can also use positioning and product stories for prospects searching online. Powerful competitive information woven into those stories highlights differentiators and helps smooth out objections.
Enablement efforts around sales tools, channels training, and content usually achieve sales alignment around the current product/service offering in short order. (It’s important to listen to sales managers when creating an enablement deliverable plan, so they are bought in and prepare their teams. If they aren’t on board, they won’t bring their teams on board, and the effort will stall.) When everyone sees momentum building, it’s time to let sales do their thing and move onto the marketing arc – stepping out of sales alignment for a while. Marketers need to maintain loose contact, watching where the sales arc is heading and helping with emerging use cases and competitive hot buttons.
That’s right: for B2B marketers, “having what you can sell” means getting out of alignment first to get in sales alignment later. On the marketing arc, you’re looking at how the sales arc compares with competitive arcs and innovation arcs. You’ll need a lot of information to help guide development teams in creating the next product/service and having it ready to sell with enablement deliverables when launched.
Exploration and soul-searching
The only way to get that information is to do some serious exploring, challenging existing assumptions and bringing strong data into the discussion. Talk with customers, sure, and ask tough questions to discover wants. (Do this without your sales team in the room if possible.) Sit down with prospects. Meet with lost customers. Interview channels partners. Get to know analysts. Talk to your developers. Ask your peers. Discuss ideas with industry organizations and open source developers. Talk to your post-sales support teams. Find out what people really think and do some soul-searching. Bake the ideas you can deliver into requirements.
Does the “without your sales team” part sound insane? During the enablement phase, early buy-in is critical, but on the marketing arc, buy-in from sales comes much later. Most sales teams share two characteristics. First, they ask what customers need and try delivering it, so if there’s alignment between those needs and your enablement deliverables, all is good. Second, they don’t waste one second more than necessary talking about stuff customers don’t “want”.
Customers tend to be selfish and that’s their prerogative. If they like their sales person and the current offering, they want more of the same. Change means risk in most B2B selling scenarios. The problem is customers who objectively monitor industry and competitive trends and assess gaps and breakthrough innovations for a next-generation product are rare. Always doing only what customers think to ask their sales team for is a great way to eventually “wake up dead,” as Tom Peters once put it.
With the right questions from marketing, however, customers can and will help define the marketing arc. Brutal honesty is a good thing. In some cases, you’ll discover you’re way short on one dimension of the competitive arc. In others, you’ll learn customers are seeing trends on the innovation arc but don’t think you’re positioned to respond to them. Both give insights into what the roadmap should be.
Bring the roadmap into focus
You don’t want your sales team constantly selling futures, especially that box in the upper right corner that never shows up when promised with the features discussed. (Google “the Osborne effect” to see what happens when the roadmap gets sold at the expense of existing products.) However, when the marketing arc points the way, the roadmap is the tool that prepares sales alignment to occur at the next launch point.
It’s a great day when you’ve built a solid strategy set with positioning, uncovered the right ideas, clearly defined a roadmap and requirements, guided the next box up on the roadmap through R&D to a firm feature set and launch date, and are ready to start telling the story. See where this is headed? A good roadmap shows currently available offerings, the next offering to be released backed by some detail, and future ideas that form the best-available thinking. Those new product introduction points on the roadmap are the sales alignment points on the sales arc.
With the next offering defined, marketing attention turns back to sales enablement. Now, instead of scrambling to get everything in place and helping misaligned sales teams, the marketing arc naturally produces sales enablement deliverables on time. When launch time arrives, sales alignment comes with it.
Wash, rinse, repeat the marketing arc
After a couple marketing arcs, the process of building these narratives should be familiar. Depending on the strategy, you can quickly close competitive gaps, or prepare for a breakthrough innovation. (Never say “disruptive innovation” is your goal out loud! That can only be judged in hindsight after years of customer and competitive decisions unfold. Declaring disruption early is an excellent way to mess up your credibility with your sales force and customers. Spotting the right trends and getting ahead of anticipated needs generate real wins from a marketing arc.)
To recap, there are two phases to using marketing arcs:
• The “selling what you have” phase where sales enablement dominates with content, sales tools, and channels training – if you’re aligned, you’ll have those ready at launch.
• The “having what you can sell” phase where you temporarily step out of sales alignment to explore market needs your R&D team can intercept at the next major launch point.
STRATISET has deep experience using marketing arcs in defining and launching high tech products and services. We can help your team evaluate market problems, product roadmaps, competitive analysis, and positioning. Developing content, sales guides, and channels training to aid in product launches or sales conferences is also an area of focus.
What are your biggest challenges in marketing and sales alignment? We’d like to hear your stories on what has worked and what hasn’t.