Best of Marketing

How to ensure smooth sales execution with clear priorities

Often, sales teams are bombarded with projects or mini assignments from different departments. Unless there is a clear filter and a written priority list, the sales team will be pulled in different direction, wasting time on non priority projects.
There are easy filter and priority tools available to avoid this pitfall.

Aligning marketing and sales

Marketing and sales integration still offer significant potential for performance improvement. But aligning two disciplines that are lead by different leaders is a real challenge. Often, the marketing team does not find it necessary to involve sales and vice versa.

Recently, I organized a major debrief of some key consumer insights to a local marketing team. I requested that sales management need to be present as well. Both teams enjoyed the deeper insights and gained further understanding. Later the General Manager commented that he did not see the purpose of why sales needed to be there. Well, if you are a company selling consumer goods (and this was the case) then it is for me an easy win to give sales the access to the reasons why consumers buy or feel a certain way about their products. I think they are clever enough to translate the right meaning to their customers.

Here are some tips that might help you:

1. How often does the senior marketing and sales leaders come together to discuss how to improve the commercial approach?
- Often these two teams come oficially together for the annual planning session. Here a sequencial approach works well. First 2-day session is an information exchange where both disciplines provide their pov on opportunities to capture for next year and assessment of performance with key learnings of previous year.

- In addition team members of both parties should be part of ad-hoc meetings. This should become a structured approach, where it is clear to all parties when they should be part of each others activities.

Herewith some thinking on marketing and sales departmental meetings.
Invite key sales reps into marketing brainstorming sessions and/or department meetings. Ask them what’s going on up on the frontline, and what they need from marketing to help develop, maintain, and close business opportunities. Let the marketing department show current project ideas, and get direct feedback.
In return, the sales department should open its meetings to marketing so that this group hears about the day-to-day experiences, what customers expect, and how the products and services are performing. This information will be used to develop campaign concepts and messages, as well as call-to-action strategies. It can also ensure that all potential markets are being reached and addressed with appropriate messages.

Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

With the right training sales people should become a natural source for first hand consumer insights. They need to look at two elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- interpreting formal consumer performance data

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is of course the biggest and easiest to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weakly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Interpreting formal consumer performance data
I found that this element is underutilized. Firstly there is not a natural tendency for sales to consider these infos. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
What also helps is translating the insights into channel meaning. So linking consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers. Also there needs to be a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.