In the spring of 2015 Alexander Group ran a series of four Chief Sales Executive Summits focused on the critical role of the sales function in both planning for and delivering sustainable growth. The importance of selling in the growth equation is obvious on the face of it. But the role that the sales organization must play in building a reliable growth engine has changed. To understand this better we asked Summit executives to consider this proposition:
Delivering more reliable growth demands a more tightly integrated relationship between Marketing and Sales, one where Sales has enhanced prominence, because today’s customer has:
The Summits explored how the Sales and Marketing team is evolving to better convince increasingly knowledgeable and cost conscious customers that products are worth buying, at a premium, if they can be shown to improve business results. To understand how this fascinating new “engine” operates, we discussed the following questions:
This blog article explores the answer to the first question … how is the partnership between Marketing and Sales changing? Subsequent articles will address the last three questions.
A New Marketing and Sales Ecosystem Fuels the Shift to Value
In what ways is the partnership between Marketing and Sales changing?
Said one executive, “We need to develop ‘market in’ thinking at all levels in our company.” Building on that, another executive commented, “We need to better understand where the buyer is going.” That means “getting insights from Marketing and packaging these in a way that sellers can use to influence the buyer.” To accomplish this, a new symbiotic relationship is emerging where Sales and Marketing co-discover customer needs and leverage mutual wisdom to find ways to meet them. Success in this new relationship hinges on how mutual wisdom is accumulated and cultivated. This begins by understanding what Marketing and Sales are uniquely expert in. As one executive put it, “The intellectual capital that Marketing brings to the table revolves around vertical issues and solutions. Sales brings deep insight into the issues and practices of specific customers.”
A balanced exchange of insight is achieved through more thoughtful and systematic interaction between the two functions. Executives told us this is achieved through a combination of processes, programs and structural approaches, as follows:
Processes; two stood out:
Programs; two caught our attention:
Structure; we noted three options of interest:
The intent of all the programs, processes and structural tweaking can be boiled down to one thing: get Marketing and Sales to combine their talents to better serve customers and improve differentiation from competition. One executive indicated that internally they had begun to refer to their new more closely aligned Sales and Marketing departments as “Smarketing.” In this new arrangement, Marketing creates the value props while Sales “fine tunes.” Together, a more “consultative marketing function” enables delivery of more consultative selling.
Learn more about building your Revenue Growth Engine on our website, and at this year’s Executive Forum.