Building the Bridge from Big Ideas to the Sales Conversation 1 2014©DSG. © 2014All DSG Rights Reserved. What is the Sales Conversation Divide? You have everything in place... the strategy for growth, the branding, marketing messaging, and campaigns. There’s just one problem. How are you going to make it all reality? How will you connect your big ideas with what your sales team is doing in the field? Whether you are trying to get into a new account or reposition yourself in an existing account, you need to bridge the divide that often exists between strategy and what sales people actually say, do, and show. Messaging Growth Strategies What sales people actually say What sales people actually show Brand Strategy Campaigns The initial sales conversation really becomes a strategic moment and a great starting point for teams that want to achieve better messaging alignment. The marketing message has worked; it has created an identity that led to this first sales conversation. Then, how does a company translate that brand promise into the actual words the sales team uses with customers? That question creates energy within marketing and product teams around the possibility of consistency in first customer engagement. Sales can become energized as well when the focus is on the field being equipped with sales-ready content for early stage conversations. Research shows that sales reps create their own presentations. Without being equipped with the right messaging, sales will take ownership of generating the messaging. The “State of the Sales Rep” study by Brainshark (2013) shows that, of sales reps who receive content from marketing, 42% say that marketing “rarely” or “never” makes them part of the development process. Sales reps report that they end up creating 51% of the content they use on their own. Sales reps will say something in the sales conversation, and it can be either the right message to differentiate your company or not. The right message is in line with the vision of the company and how you want to position yourself in the marketplace—including all the competitive research provided by marketing. But, if the sales and marketing teams don’t work together to establish the right conversation messaging, sales does their own thing—makes up their own slide decks, tells their own stories, drafts their own whiteboards, and asks their own questions. 2 © 2014 DSG Consequences of Not Bridging the Sales Conversation Divide Missed opportunities for growth Lack of differentiation Inconsistency the “same old story” Opportunities are missed when sales stays focused on legacy products they feel more comfortable with or sticks with the “same old story” in customer conversations When reps start to talk about what makes your approach unique, the customer shouldn’t be thinking “Yeah, you and everyone else...” The divide can look like a lot of finger pointing. Sales, marketing, and product teams believe they are delivering, but the reality is that they are not on the same page and haven’t agreed on a common approach on how we go to market in an integrated way. I think that kind of misalignment is not uncommon, and it certainly isn’t healthy for a business. Dawn McPhail Sr. Director, Integrated Marketing 3 © 2014 DSG A geographically diverse sales team shouldn’t mean sales conversations are all across the board What Success Looks Like Step 1: Align on what Sales Messaging Is and Isn’t Sales Messaging [seylz mes-uh-jing] noun: The words and visuals for leading meaningful, customer-focused conversations. What sales reps will actually say and show during an in-person meeting or a virtual conversation. Complete sales messaging includes insights to share, smart discovery questions to ask, stories to create meaning, and visuals that make the conversation tangible. The words and visuals for holding a meaningful customer-focused conversation are the essence of sales messaging which is different from the high-level brand messaging and product messaging that positions a company’s solutions. There’s so much time and money spent at the upper portions of the messaging pyramid—on corporate strategy (where we are placing our bets), marketing strategy (how we go to market), brand messaging (how we position ourselves in the market), and product messaging (positioning individual products and services). The missing link is often the sales message—what to say and how to say it. The sales messaging content is what helps us balance the information we’re broadcasting to the market with what sales people are narrowcasting in customer conversations. By the time it gets down to sales messaging (what we say), everything else is more general, so you’re broadcasting information about yourselves, versus sales messaging which is the narrowcasting. It’s narrowly defining and communicating what you do and how you can do it in the sales messaging conversation. Broadcasting and narrowcasting are very, very different. Narrowcasting is down at the 3-foot level, so you’re really specific and having conversations, while broadcasting brand messaging and above is more the 30,000 foot level. So it’s about getting from that 30,000 foot level down to the 3-foot level. Tanner Mezel, Principal 4 © 2014 DSG At the heart, connecting strategy and branding to sales messaging ensures compelling conversations are happening every day with customers. When messaging brings together high level strategy and dayto-day customer conversations, your organization’s big idea for growth or change turns into real results. I think the biggest challenge for marketing is in terms of delivering content and then effectively enabling a sales organization. As marketers, we’re great at developing messaging and we’re great at developing content, but what we often lack is a layer that can help translate that into something that is meaningful for a salesperson. So we’re building things for a market and for a customer, we’re not necessarily building things with the understanding of a salesperson and how they learn. Dawn McPhail Sr. Director, Integrated Marketing Step 2: Prioritize Messaging There is no one-size-fits all approach to sales messaging. It is important to identify the real requirements of the sales team and prioritize the types of messaging needed to make them successful. This could range from comprehensive to at-a-glance content and tools: Comprehensive Enterprise Story "At-A-Glance" Key Plays Partner • Key Plays • Solution – how to position an integrated solution or solution portfolio • Industry – how to speak to the unique trends, pressures, and opportunities within a vertical • Audience – how to engage key functional roles (marketing, finance, IT, etc.) • Partner – how to position a joint solution with a partner • Competitive – how to differentiate from named competitors • Offerings – how to sell a discreet product or service © 2014 DSG Competitive Offerings Solution • Enterprise – how to deliver the “umbrella message” across products, solution lines, or business units 5 Industry The Winning Mix for Adobe needed a way for their reps located across the globe to receive sales messaging guidance and tools for early stage discovery and positioning conversations. Asseem Chandra, VP of Product and Industry Marketing for the Digital Marketing division, supported his organization’s shift to an industry-specific messaging strategy by creating sales messaging playbooks for the worldwide sales team. The initiative revolved around the development of playbooks for each prioritized industry vertical, with a focus on telling the complete, enterprise story spanning the digital marketing product portfolio. Based on the initial success and momentum around industry playbooks, Aseem’s team transitioned to solution-level playbooks focused on connecting the dots between customer requirements and core Adobe solutions. The playbook structure provides Adobe’s global sales team with practical messaging guidance throughout the sales conversation process—from preparing to meet a customer executive through actual delivery of the messages and sharing insight. Essential tools within each playbook: a visual framework for telling the story on a whiteboard or via interactive web meeting, trends and insights to establish credibility, talk tracks by customer audience, and competitor selling guides. Step 3: Agree on a Common Playbook Structure To bridge the sales conversation divide, organizations should focus on the what salespeople need for their next sales conversation. What’s your structure for building, packaging, and deploying messaging tools? An approach that’s gained a lot of momentum in recent years is the concept of a sales playbook. We’re finding playbooks that provide the what to know, what to do, what to say, and what to show are meeting the needs of sales people and driving utilization: What to Know Providing the knowledge required to understand the customer’s world. • • • • Sales Strategies Trends Audiences Priorities & Pain Points What to Do Guiding the team on actions to take in the field • • • • What to Say The actual words, stories, and insight for leading a conversation • • • • Customer Stories Insights & Provocations Discovery Questions Proof Points Buying Process Map Discovery Conversation Plan Sales Tactics What to Show Using visuals to create dialogue and make your message memorable • • • • Quick Videos Animated Models Pictures Whiteboards The playbook is a great way to leverage what we previously provided as static content. And it is more appealing to our team in this format. Our salespeople want this type of interactive content because it’s more intuitive. Robbie Traube VP Industry Strategy and Sales Marketing 6 © 2014 DSG Current Alignment Efforts Center on Meetings “What things have you done to align sales and marketing that have succeeded?” ACTIVITY ROLE Marketing Director “Have marketing participate 100% in weekly sales meetings and annual sales revenue summit.” CMO “Meetings in-person or via Skype (monthly) bring open issues to the surface.” VP of Sales/Marketing “Annual joint meetings.” Marketing Director “Collaboration between sales and marketing in the planning process.” Marketing Manager “Including sales/marketing in each others’ planning cycles.” VP of Sales “Marketing is invited to, and actively participates in, sales team cadence calls.” VP of Sales “Invite marketing to customer calls.” VP of Marketing “Involve sales in marketing projects at an early stage.” Director of Marketing “Joint pipeline reviews.” Marketing Manager “Members of each group attend each other’s meetings.” Marketing Director “Collaboration on development or marketing collateral.” Marketing Director “Marketing people involved in sales work; salespeople involved in marketing work.” Sales Director “Quarterly campaign planning with action items and owners.” VP of Sales/Marketing “Weekly meetings to discuss campaigns, materials, and follow-ups.” CMO “Weekly sales/marketing meetings.” Base: 66 marketing and sales leaders Source: October 2010 Marketing and Sales Alignment Survey; Forrester Research, Inc. 7 © 2014 DSG Field Actions for Aligning Sales & Marketing Thomas Marks, Sr. Director, SMB Product Marketing, North America at Concur Technologies, outlines some steps his team in marketing has taken to understand sales needs: • Ride-alongs with the sales team, where marketing joins a sales call as an observant party • Call observations are captured so that marketing can analyze the types of questions sales is being asked and the difficulties they face in the sales process. This tunes marketing in to sales’ needs, leading to the ability to shape the sales messaging content and tools. • Practice groups that enable marketing to foster collaboration between field-marketing, client marketing, and channel marketing • Series of meetings designed to connect marketing with sales as a team that is collectively responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of a prospect—from curiosity all the way through to becoming a customer—and making sure the customer experience is the best it can be Step 4: Build, Deploy, Sustain Build Almost as important as having a messaging playbook to equip the team is the actual process of creating the tool. By assembling a team of the organization’s top thought leaders, you gather the best practices and insights that may otherwise only exist within the heads of your top people. Extracting best practices and insight from your team can happen in four steps: 1. Assemble the Team – select thought leaders across sales, marketing, and product 2. Facilitate a Collaboration Session – gather a cross-functional team for 1 to 2 days to ideation and debate around a specific message and the associated tools (focus on a solution, an industry, a “sales play,” etc.) 3. Create a Playbook – build out a playbook based on workshop outputs and focus on organizing content around 4 areas: What to Know, What to Do, What to Say, What to Show 4. Create videos for each section of the playbook – capture video of your top sales people and thought leaders sharing insights and demonstrating best practice role plays for each section of the playbook From a marketing leader’s perspective, I think the biggest takeaway is the process for creating the Sales Messaging playbook and training. Going through that creation process and training is as important, if not more important, than the content itself. The creators and the writers in marketing often feel very close to their content, but if you really want to affect the behavior of the people on the sales team and the product/ service team, it’s really important for everyone in sales, marketing, and product to go through the process together. Jim Karrh - Consulting Principal Deploy Where are you reading this brief? On your mobile phone between meetings? On your tablet while waiting in an airport lounge? As our work becomes more mobile, so must the way we equip our sales teams to have compelling conversations. With most of your team in the virtual world, you don’t have the luxury of the local branch office where everybody congregates around the water cooler to share sales stories. For increasingly virtual teams, how do you work with them in a way that ensures consistency in Sales Messaging delivery and helps sales work faster and smarter? To successfully deploy the playbook, companies should build the expectation that the playbook is the single source of best practice, sales conversation content, and practical tools. Deployment and ultimately sales mastery through use of the content comes down to getting it right in 3 primary areas: Sales Conversation Training - If a playbook is to become the single source of best practice, it’s imperative for the team to be trained around how to integrate the messaging into conversations. Long-term use of the messaging is best initiated by training that allows the team to practice and plan the real conversations they will have within opportunities they are working. 8 © 2014 DSG Interactive, Digital Playbook - A Sales Messaging Playbook can exist in multiple incarnations—whether it is accessed through your LMS, an internal portal, via Salesforce.com, or a web app opened in a browser. To achieve consistency between the “big idea” for strategic direction and Sales Messaging, sales teams need a messaging tool that’s built for where they live—the virtual world. The most important part is that the playbook becomes a mobile asset that can be accessed easily and updated frequently. Sales Leadership Buy-In and Accountability - The success of a Sales Messaging Playbook is largely based on active involvement by sales leadership. When leaders are held accountable to coach the field in the adoption of new messaging, the speed and results generated dramatically improve. Sustain A simple way that sales and marketing can stay aligned over time is through partnership around the playbook. The playbook becomes that practical daily use tool for the sales team. If sales and marketing are both invested in improving it and making it an “evergreen” playbook (where the messaging gets better over time), that will truly keeps sales and marketing aligned. One of the things we hear unilaterally across the sales team, is that when they see frequent updates to a playbook, it really reinforces the feeling of, ‘I’m well prepared. I have the latest, greatest messages and stories.’ Sales teams prefer frequent updates even to large quarterly releases; they feel they are more informed by last week’s conversations—the more confident they feel, the more motivated they are to use the playbook tool. Matt McClendon - President The best playbooks are informed by the latest insights. Insights from the marketing team including: what the competition is doing, where the market is going, what the analysts are saying, and what the research is saying. In parallel, sales is leading sales conversations, learning from customers, and seeing what competitors are doing. Harvesting and packaging these insights from both marketing and sales is crucial to the ongoing usefulness of the playbook and results in a truly “evergreen” playbook. Increased alignment should be expected throughout the Sustain phase and will typically bring marketing and sales into tighter alignment over time. Keep in mind that the templates and structures will probably need to evolve and this is part of the process of keeping your strategy, marketing efforts, and sales pursuits in sync. Always be evaluating: Do we need to add new content? What tools are missing? Does the existing content need to be improved? 9 © 2014 DSG The Sales Conversation Aligned Key to Success A way we prompt the right level of discussion with sales and marketing groups is by asking a series of questions. Would the customer be willing to pay for that initial conversation? Is it truly consultative enough? Is there enough insight? Are you telling them something that they didn’t know prior to that meeting that they would be willing to pay for based on the value of that conversation? Matt McClendon – President If your sales team is not delivering the kind of conversation that customers would pay for, then the Sales Conversation Divide has not yet been eliminated. Focusing on the initial conversation and the insight that the customer would be willing to pay for is an excellent starting point for aligning sales, marketing, and product teams. I think the key to our success was having sales and marketing be equal stakeholders in the playbook and the messaging. Contributors: The program wasn’t conceived • Matt McClendon – President, DSG as a sales initiative or a marketing • Tanner Mezel – Principal, DSG initiative. It was truly a joint • Jim Karrh – Consulting Principal, DSG initiative. • Heather Easterday – Consulting Principal, DSG • Bruce Scheer – Consulting Principal, DSG • Dawn McPhail – Sr. Director, Integrated Marketing, Desire2Learn • Thomas Marks – Sr. Director, SMB Product Marketing, NA, Concur Technologies • Robbie Traube – VP Industry Strategy and Sales Marketing, Adobe 10 © 2014 DSG Thomas Marks, Sr. Director, SMB Product Marketing, NA Next Steps Web Meeting with a DSG Consultant - We can share examples of conversation-ready content and tools, real playbooks, and relevant stories from clients who have bridged the sales conversation divide. Reach out to schedule a web meeting: info@dsgconsulting.com Jean Tanner 1-877-371-2328 Tega Further Reading - For more B2B Sales Enablement insights go to: dsgconsulting.com/insights @JustAddDSG DSG Consulting 11 © 2014 DSG. DSG All Rights Reserved. Matt