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Marketing Room: Sales

	The Customer Centric Approach: Marketing & Sales

	How can you get sales and marketing to effectively work together? This issue still plagues many organizations - particularly in the sales-driven transporation industry, where oftentimes these teams view each other with suspicion or sometimes hostility. Mike Bosworth offers TMCA and its marketing and sales executives six steps to healing this rift: 1. Acknowledge the real issue. Usually the disconnect is a structural and training issue, not a personality conflict. Simply replacing one or both vice presidents does nothing to solve the problem. “The key to tying separate silos together is process, not personalities,” says Bosworth. “Most people do want to work together, they just don’t know how. If you can show them how to have a meeting of the minds and agree on what their sales people really need, the conflict quickly disappears.” After all, marketing wants to be relevant. They want their collateral to be used. Sales certainly wants to get good leads and close business. So the motivation is there. 2. Redefine Marketing’s Role. “Marketing should be the first step in the sales process, not the last step in the development process,” suggests Bosworth. “The key is to work back from the customer, instead of ahead from the product. That’s why we call it customer-centric selling, instead of the normal productcentric approach.” This shifts marketing’s emphasis from research and strategic planning to more tactical efforts, like creating demand for today’s products today. Bosworth admits his process deals only with tactical marketing. 3. Agree on what makes a lead. Leads are the most common touch point between sales and marketing, and the biggest sources of conflict between the two. It will defuse a lot of bad feeling to get the two groups to agree on what precisely constitutes a lead. 4. Reframe your thinking about selling. “At the core of integrating sales and marketing is reframing the concept of selling,” says Bosworth. This is where “customer-centric selling” comes in. By this, Bosworth means, “helping a customer visualize using your offering to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need.” 5. Prepare sales-ready messaging. Remember our definition of a lead? “Sales-ready messaging” creates a framework for steering the conversation with any lead. Knowing the buyer’s title or function, along with their interest in a particular result achieved in another company, the salesperson can match what his offering can do with that lead’s business issue. Bosworth’s advice is to ask yourself: What predictable conversations do our salespeople need to have to sell, fund and implement our product or service? Then start planning how to steer those conversations. 6. Reconsider everything else you do. Adopting a customer-centric selling model isn’t a quick and process. It will likely mean reconsidering everything else your company is doing in sales and marketing. For instance this approach may work well for a one-on-one meeting with an executive, where you listen for his problems and tailor your message specifically for him. But what about advertising, direct mail or the Web, which are by bound to be more generic? No problem, says Bosworth. After generating your EQPA formulas for different job titles, marketing can use the very same goals, problems and needs to go fishing for prospects. You can use this approach for any type of lead-generating system: direct mail, email, advertising or your Web site. So how would you create an advertising campaign to reach transportation managers who are likely prospects for your company? “With the help of this approach, you could run advertising that goes something like this: “The top three issues we’re hearing from transportation managers are these...” and then list them. ‘If you want to hear how we helped our clients deal with these issues, visit our Web site,” says Bosworth. “If you’re fishing for curiosity and they’re curious enough, you lead them to a Web site. Once marketing gets this idea of customer-centric selling, they naturally go back and re-examine all their existing collateral, Web sites, white papers and sales training. And then they re-do them.”
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