Aligning Sales and Marketing to Become a Customer-Centric Organization

Make your go-to-market organizations work smarter, not harder

Imagine a world where 50% of your new business revenue comes from inbound lead conversion. Your prospects can find information on demand, and your customers’ online/offline experience is consistent. Chances are your organization doesn’t resemble this picture, and is instead burning through millions in profitable revenue.

Research by the Miller Heiman Group suggests less than 30% of B2B sales and marketing executives had a common definition of a lead, meaning their sales and marketing organizations are not aligned. This lack of alignment means the rest of the customer-facing teams aren’t in alignment — creating a significant impact on your bottom line.

This misalignment not only impacts net revenue but also drives up expenses. An aligned sales and marketing process could drive up to 10% in top-line revenue and reduce SG&A operating expenses conservatively by 5%. Why the drastic shift?

To put this into perspective, a company with $500 million in top-line revenue and SG&A at 25% the total impact would be:

The evolving buyer’s journey

Buyer expectations and demands have rapidly evolved. Recent research indicates the changing nature of how buyers want to engage with B2B brands:

· 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally

· 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles versus an advertisement

· Only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment

· 82% of B2B decision makers think sales reps are unprepared.

As the research reveals, B2B buyers have different expectations as part of the buyer’s journey. Potential buyers don’t want to be sold, they want to be helped. They expect a combination of subject matter expert, industry expert, problem solver and concierge. As you consider these statistics, think about your own channels:

· Are your website and social channels allowing your prospects to find information easily or are you making them call you?

· Cold calling is really expensive and highly inefficient. If you are generating more than 15% of your new business revenue through pure cold calling or appointment setting your cost of sales is much higher than it needs to be.

Creating a customer-centric organization

Most organizations take a vendor-centric approach to sales and marketing, asking, “How do I optimize my sales and marketing processes?” They should instead become a customer-centric organization that asks, “How can I align the buying process for my potential customers?”

To become a customer-centric organization, consider the following 4-prong approach to driving alignment:

1. Customer Alignment: You may think you understand your customer but if you don’t have conversations with them, you probably don’t. Any alignment needs to start with the customer.

· Conduct a customer experience analysis: Ask recent customers to describe their overall buying experience and onboarding process, from first engagement through delivery. Talk to them live, not through email or web surveys. You can use a third party to conduct the interviews or use a neutral internal resource.

· Conduct won/loss analysis: Interview both new customers and prospects that didn’t buy from you. The real insights lie in the reasons your prospects did not buy.

Impact: While this work will drive top-line revenue growth, the customer experience analysis could identify inefficiencies in your GTM processes and lead to cost savings.

2. Messaging and Positioning Alignment: Ensure your GTM messaging is consistent and aligned with what your customers and prospects are telling you.

· Value Driver Framework: Identify your differentiators and value drivers for each of your products or services based on input from the customer insight analysis, your leadership, and frontline employees, as well as competitive differentiation. This will become your alignment around messaging and positioning, and should be based on the value you are providing the customer.

· Messaging and positioning audit. Examine your online and offline customer touchpoints to identify any inconsistencies compared to the updated Value Driver Framework. If your messaging and positioning are not consistent, customers are 15%-25% less likely to buy from you.

Impact: This exercise will predominately drive top-line revenue growth. It will improve your lead conversion rate and minimize dropout of prospects in the sales process.

3. Investment Analysis: Calculate each of these key metrics to determine whether they align with your business model and identify areas of opportunity.

· Cost of Acquiring Customers (CAC): Many companies calculate the cost of sale, but fail to calculate the total cost to acquire a customer. This would include the demand generation portion of marketing, inbound and outbound lead gen reps and sales reps. Be sure to include technology and leadership in these functions.

· Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): This number will drive how much you can spend to acquire new customers (CAC). Depending on the financial goals of your company, the CLTV will help you identify areas to reduce acquisition costs and improve profit margins.

· Cost to Retain a Customer (CRC): An overlooked but key metric, the CRC allows you to understand how much it costs to retain your customers. Include onboarding, customer success/account management, customer service, leadership and technology in these calculations.

Impact: This area can have the greatest financial impact. The older, more mature your organization is, the more likely you are to have misalignment not only with process but operating budgets and shared objectives.

4. Process and Asset Alignment: Based on the results of the financial analysis, process and asset alignment will indicate where you may have too many assets and areas that are underutilized.

· Workflow alignment with the buyer journey: The execution begins by mapping your buyers’ journey, followed by aligning your internal workflows with the buyers’ journey. This will trigger the need to update business and technology requirements.

· Asset allocation and coverage models: Once you have updated your internal workflows determine whether you have the proper resource allocation in each functional area. Older and more mature B2B organizations typically are under-resourced in demand generation and over-resourced in the direct sales organization.

Impact: Execution is critical in this step. Too many companies do the analysis but are unable to execute. The biggest stumbling block can be the functional silos that don’t want to cooperate. This has to be a top-down initiative that is driven by the c-suite or board of directors.

Failure to make aligning your GTM organization a strategic priority will have a negative impact on revenue, and SG&A expense will continue to accelerate. Aligning your GTM organization will protect your market share and prevent newer competitors from invading your space.