For those of you who’ve read my “She’s right again” blog posts, you know some of the big lessons I learned around the “dot-bomb” era. But like all harsh lessons, just learning the negative is not enough. What really matters is what you do about it.
Well, since I wasn’t going to write new laws, solve world peace (no Nobel for me) or invent a new machine – I was left with looking at what I’ve been looking at for a long time: business models and go-to-market methodology (I know, sounds exciting!)….
From my experience, came a sincere desire to figure out “what happened?” and “what could be better?”
I wanted to discover and give voice to something new. A better way to bring “an idea who’s time has come” to the marketplace. I knew that the notion of “new”, “exciting” and “useful” as essential dimensions of a value proposition had to have operational implications. Nothing substantive would change if all that changed was a “tag line”– as important as that is.
Great ideas would still fail to attract an audience – money and energy wasted.
Not only money and energy wasted – but also an old way of doing things. What else needed to change? For over 50 years, companies involved in complex or big-ticket sales have dichotomized “developing the message” and “delivering the message”. Even companies that derive the majority of their revenue from their direct sales channel rarely ask their sales teams, “What’s happening out there?” – relying instead on traditional market research and industry experts.
Is this a wrong practice? Marketing experts are not typically sales professionals and the converse is usually true. That wasn’t the issue nagging at me. What was “off” was this: why not take advantage of the intense customer-facing resource that is your direct sales force for real-time market intelligence?
Marketing owned message delivery in all venues except direct sales. In other words, the marketing function “owned” the website, marcom and other communication vehicles, except that which happend in the sales interview. So – marketing contribute to the “what” conversation at the strategic level (as in “what are we? who do we serve? what makes us different”) and could shape a message – a value proposition statement – and control how it manifested in advertising, marcom and other public delivery – but stopped short of providing real and specific guidance for direct sales.
Salespeople usually have to synthesize and deliver the messages found in marketing collateral and given by corporate and product marketing to prospects.
I believe this state of affairs can be – must be – radically altered.
How would your go-to-market program look if message development – that is – identifying what is new, useful and exiting about your product – were purposefully connected with your sales team’s message delivery? Why should message design end before entering the sales department?
Likewise, why ignore the wealth of immediate and grounded marketplace insight – the thousands of hours of conversations between your salespeople and customers?
While these questions have been asked in other quarters – thay are not asked that often – and not enough to change common practice. I’ll take a deeper look at this in another post.
Meanwhile – what do you think?
Do your sales and marketing folk truly collaborate? Do they share insights and idea?
