Have we made any progress in marketing & sales alignment?

Over the past five years that I've been speaking with CMOs as part of my work here at IDC, sales alignment continues as one of the top priorities on every CMO’s to-do list. The increasing maturity of the technology sector accompanied by significant consolidation will only increase the importance of marketing and sales working in unison as part of the customer creation process. In a recent study, we asked marketing and sales folks to rate marketing’s effectiveness at optimizing sales’ worldwide efficiency and effectiveness (1 = not effective, 100 = very effective). Marketing executives rated marketing’s contribution to sales higher than the ratings provided by sales executives: 62 versus 57, respectively. The key message here is not that marketing gave itself a higher grade but that, more importantly, both scores remain low relative to the importance of this alignment to the success of the organization; and with an average of 15% of revenue, or more, being invested in sales and marketing, this alignment remains a process in disrepair.

What are sales and marketing leaders intending to do about this problem?

1. Better alignment of sales and marketing IT infrastructure.
2. Better alignment and integration of (what should be) joint processes (e.g., planning, budgeting, forecasting, market segmentation, go-to-market strategy, lead management)
3. Better alignment/utilization of performance measurement or metrics

Here are some actions sales and marketing executives should take to accomplish these objectives:

1. Integrate marketing and sales operations. This can be a "soft" merge, which would involve alignment of the goals and responsibilities for the marketing operations personnel and the sales operations personnel who report separately and respectively up through the marketing and sales structures. It can also be a "hard" merge, which would have the sales and marketing operations functions incorporated into a single organizational position.
2. Leverage and dedicate field marketing to develop and deploy marketing strategies/assets in collaboration with sales. Dedicated field readiness managers (sales enablement managers) can ensure that globally based enablement "teams" understand sales’ knowledge gaps, while soliciting their strategic input around the overall sales strategy. Field marketing needs to act as the "center of gravity" for development and execution of the local marketing and sales strategy in collaboration with sales.
3. Align sales and marketing with the needs of the customer in mind. In the words of one of our clients. . . "[We have] marketing and sales define and map customer needs, customer acquisition and retention processes along with definitions of key roles, hand-offs, inputs/outputs, and organizational structure required to support such processes."

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Retail Knows When Your Time Has Passed.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Welcome To The Underwhelming Economy.

Walking past the Nokia Store, Regent Street - that inspiration for so many blogposts - I peeked in to check that I had not been unfair with my previous comments. But no, it was empty again and yet, as this picture shows, not devoid of activity.


I've no idea who the Bananarama tribute act are, but I do know that this is not what is meant by the experience economy. They danced and sang perfunctorily, the staff were as disconnected as before and customers remained a rarity. What were Nokia thinking? Who knows? But no-one seems to have remembered that for the "experience" to be worth the name, the customer must find it engaging and/or relevant.

And it's just Nokia's bad luck that they chose to do it today. I would have written the same post even if they hadn't because two hundred yards down the street, at the Timberland store, I'd already encountered this.


Now, Ashley Hicklin is a far more talented performer, but he too was being ignored (and in a shop window no less) while London's masses thronged past. As Iain Tait says of the online world, "When you’re doing distributed stuff, never forget the importance of clear signposts." It's just as true offline. Otherwise what you get is some insiders recording the event - no doubt so they can show how cool and innovative it had all been - and very little customer interest.


As I wandered around, admiring some very nice merchandising (of which more another time), someone who looked suspiciously like a marketing guy announced to me with total sincerity that "We have free live music instore today." WTF? Maybe someone had read that "free" was the new black or had signed up for Reboot? Maybe there's been some recent seminar that identified instore performance as retail's killer app? I really don't know. Can anyone explain it to me?

Welcome to the underwhelming economy.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Should Advertising Lie?

Well, of course, there are regulations to prevent false claims, but the question came to mind when I saw an advertisement for the genealogy website genesreunited.co.uk that features film of a small group of elephants walking single-file through a dry river-bed. The voiceover informs the viewer that they are searching for the Elephants' Graveyard.

The trouble is that the Elephants' Graveyard is a mythical invention and furthermore I'm pretty sure that the footage (which frustratingly I cannot find online) has been taken from a recent documentary about desert elephants. Their hunt is not for ancestral grounds, but for new sources of water in the face of a severe drought.

Does that matter? I don't know, but in an age of ever-increasing transparency it makes much more sense to be completely sure that you're telling the truth because once you're caught in a lie (even an inadvertant one), everything else you say will be open to doubt.

The fact that genesreunited.co.uk is owned by the country's biggest commercial television network is just an added irony.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

What Does It All Mean?

A live ad that generated huge coverage here and lots of brickbats. I felt short-changed because regardless of the skill involved I was expecting a much bigger team of sky-divers simultaneously spelling out the Honda name. I then started wondering why the chutes weren't branded so as to reinforce the sponsor in my mind in the frankly boring last thirty seconds.

Now, many people will rightly point to the undeniable expanse of free media that resulted from this "event" , but there's clearly a danger that such a media cicrus leads to the heinous sin of under-delivering. If I'm being this picky, does that mean it's a bad ad? Does it mean that I wasn't wowed by something that had been over-promised. Is it all about the advertising industry and not much about Honda?

Addendum: Couldn't they have spelled out Honda with canopies along these lines?

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Prefix Marketing.

A quick reminder. We don't need another marketing prefix.

Marketing is strategic. It's a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development).

If there's a prefix, it's indicative of a tactical subset of marketing and not of a new paradigm. Promotion/advertising is a subset of marketing, albeit the one that is most often referred to as "marketing" by people who don't know better. So is viral marketing. So is direct marketing.

If one of those tactics is discredited, that's all that has happened. There's no need to create a new prefix. Unless of course, you've got a book or presentation to flog. Here endeth the lesson.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More

Why Customer Relationships Aren't.

Shirley Hazzard, the eminent Australian author discusses the difference between love and "relationships".

Love is, I suggest, a very unfashionable subject. “Yes, I know that. People don’t love each other any more, it’s too much trouble... In my books, they have to suffer. They’re not calculating, ‘Is it worth it?’ It’s inevitable. And they know that if they’re ever going to get deeply into something, it will be this. It’s a kind of inevitability. You can’t cold-bloodedly say, ‘I’m not getting into that.’ Well, a million times it might be like that, but if we are talking about somebody really living, and having to weigh their impossible circumstances against that or think about their future, then it becomes very serious.”

She hates the contemporary word used to cover all such matters. “That word ‘relationships’ – these ships, we have to sink a few of these ships. A relationship is an abstraction, it’s something everybody has, it’s a common denominator – ‘Oh, we have a relationship.’” She waves her hand, impatiently dismissive.

It's not about connection, it's about connectedness.

Gudang grosir baju anak murah - harga pabrik !!
www.gudanggrosiran.com Read More