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Aligning Sales with Marketing

Chip Terry, VP & General Manager of Sales Intelligence at Zoom Info, explains that by understanding who your customers are and what segment you’re going after, marketing and sales can focus their efforts to be more useful to each other. Too often, he says, each department feels ignored by the other.

Speaker: Chip Terry, VP & General Manager, Sales Intelligence, Zoom Info

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Tags: Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Marketing Research, sales, marketing, salespeople, leads, calls, closing, segment, customers

 
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  •  
    1

    kovatchd

    03/19/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    Really, really general piece. Not much here that's useful, really.

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    2

    moon-moni

    03/19/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    ENTERPRISE IS A TEAM. I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS THE PERENNIAL PROBLEM BETWEEN SALES AND MARKETING AREAS.

    MARKETING MUST PROVIDE TO SALES DEPT. WITH THE LEADS (AS YOU SAY) OF MARKETS AND MARKET BEHAVIOR DATAE -AMONG MUCH MORE INFORMATION-, THEN, SALES KNOWS WHERE, WHOM AND HOW TO "CLOSE" SELLS, BESIDES SALESMEN MUST GATHER CURRENT INFO AND DELIVER IT TO MARKETING.

    PERSONALLY I THINK THAT WHOEVER THAT DECLARES TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE "NEXT DOOR" DEPT. IS NOT ACKNOWLEDGED WITH THE "SYSTEMIC" MARCH OF A BUSINESS.

  •  
    3

    PhilDarb

    03/20/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    This is a really weird piece and I'm not surprised that the interviewee is American because when the rest of the world thought the diversified sales and marketing perspective was dead, it was in fact still alive, well and being worshiped in the US. But this is really old news.

    Part of the problem here is that both the partcipants when referring to "marketing" are actually talking about something else.

    Marketing is the process of aligning resources to market needs - nothing more or less. Marketing is the core of any modern organisation, basically it runs the show. Sales is the final process in the chain of events that is defined by marketing.

    While the sales department has a two-way function - one one hand representing the face of the brand and sorting out the details of the end-game (which involves selecting the appropriate information to highlight to which client as Deon says) and on the other, feeding intelligence back to marketing, the sales should always be pretty well a done deal before the sales guy faces up to the customer.

    The point is that I can't remember the last time I had a client who didn't get this years ago!

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    4

    vmorgan@...

    03/20/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    Those of us who have been actively engaged in marketing and sales, and perhaps consulting on these topics, understand the need to identify the target market(s) as the first step. As a Guerrilla Marketing coach who caters to small business owners, I find that most are not clear on exactly who they are best suited to serve. Add to this the fact that marketers are typically not good sales people and vice versa. This results in a 'throw it against the wall and see what sticks' mentality. There is no alighment. More often that not, long-term success is merely a dream, not reality. Knowing one's target market is step #1, a fact that so many small business owners and entrepreneurs simply don't recognize. Sadly, in my experience, this is especially true of people who have graduated from college market, MBA, and large corporate experiences. This sounds like a harsh statement, but having counseled and taught thousands of businesses owners since 2001, this is exactly what I've encountered....no exaggeration here!

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    5

    randychan83

    03/20/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    As much as this may seem like some general information, we often fail to see the importance of aligning the sales & marketing team. And i believe this is a good reminder. It is good to go back to the basics to re-think through the whole work process.

    Without intentionally bring this 2 departments together, where is the ROI for the organization. How to go about the strategy and without reasonable profits, hows the shareholders gonna feel?

    I thought the interview was powerful....

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    6

    anshulc

    03/21/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Aligning Sales with Marketing

    Hi everyone, just to add on the above discussion, i woulod say, sales is the face of the organisation in front of the customer and marketing is the brain behind it. Whenever your mind thinks different and your facial expression is different it means sales is not alligned with the marketing or vice versa, things go wrong as in human body. The only way to treat this is by 'managing the previous process', as we say in six sigma, means marketing dept must always think that the sales dept is there actual customer and sales dept must also treat the marketing as there vendor.

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Aligning Sales with Marketing

Chip Terry, VP & General Manager of Sales Intelligence at Zoom Info, explains that by understanding who your customers are and what segment you’re going after, marketing and sales can focus their efforts to be more useful to each other. Too often, he says, each department feels ignored by the other.

Music Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Chip Terry. He is general manager and vice-president customer intelligence with Zoom Info. Welcome Chip. Chip Terry: Welcome. Thank you, thank you for having me. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Tell us about the need for aligning sales with marketing. I thought that sales was a silo and marketing was a silo and they're not supposed to talk. Chip Terry: Yeah, this is the -- it's sort of the classic, you know, thing. It's like, you know, who's your VP of marketing? I don't know. I never talk to him. Who's your sales guy? I don't know. It's some guy who plays a lot of sports. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: You know there are so many cliches... Gerhard Gschwandtner: And they're forgetting the customer in the process. Chip Terry: Yeah, and for getting the customer -- you know successful companies particularly in the b-to-b space align sales and marketing and this is the tough thing. There's lots of talk about different ways to do this, but ultimately I think it comes down to three things. First of all, you got to align it around a single database. An understanding of who your customers are, who you should -- who should be your customers and who you're going after. You should align around process, so what is the process for bringing a new customer onboard from the very first touch on through the opportunity to closing. And three, you need to align the people. You need to have people that work together, that respect each other, that trust each other and that are aligned around this. Gerhard Gschwandtner: And so, let me give you a practical example. How about you and I run a company and you are the sales VP, I'm the marketing VP and we're around this table and we need to define what is a lead? Where do we start at? Chip Terry: You know I... Gerhard Gschwandtner: Because in marketing -- to me a lead is a market segment. Chip Terry: Yeah. Gerhard Gschwandtner: And to you, the lead is a person. Chip Terry: It's -- that's a big, you know important topic that everybody needs to agree on. I would actually start first, which is who should our customers be? Who is our buyer because that helps a lot. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: You know, is your buyer the VP of marketing at technology companies. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: If you guys agree that that's the segment you're going after, VPs of marketing at technology companies, you've made a big step. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: Then, the next question is, what is the handoff? Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: Because you're right, a lead for marketing is often very different than a lead for sales. And the challenge is for marketing people, the sales is always like, well I don't get enough leads and by the way, the ones I get, they suck. And marketing always says, you know I deliver you all these great leads, look at all these wonderful leads and you never follow up. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. So, also how many leads am I supposed to generate for you in sales and how many leads are you going to generate on your own. Chip Terry: It depends on the company, depends on the segment. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Alright. Chip Terry: You know, top performing companies who are really marketing driven will be, you know 75% of the leads will be coming from marketing. Different companies, different segments, it will be 20 - 25%. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: It varies by company. It's -- you know, what's your strategy. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: How you're going to work together. Gerhard Gschwandtner: And as the sales manager you want to know what happens to the marketing leads. Percentage-wise how many matured to actually a close and then how many fall out at the waste side and marketing wants to know, what do you do with the leads? Chip Terry: Yeah, and you know I used to be -- prior to joining Zoom Info as the VP of marketing in another company and I used to do these great campaigns, you know. I'd like -- I put together awesome creative, I'd pull a perfect list, I'd have a great offer. I'd send it out, I do, you know multi-touch and they have offline and online, etcetera and I get all these leads and I've walked over to the VP of sales and say, hey look at this I got all these leads, 10,000 leads, you know... Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: Follow up, go wild and the VP of sales, he'll say, that's great Chip, good job. Make me a little pat on the back and said, but the reality is only a hundred of these are the companies we are already calling on. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: Because we hadn't aligned the segments properly. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Okay. So, the alignment has to happen with the data first, so they look at the same database or everybody has the visibility and then they need to agree on the process what is those sales problem, what does the pipeline look like, right? Chip Terry: Exactly and you got to have agreement on both the marketing and the sales side. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Okay. Now, the most difficult part I think is the people. How do I get people to talk so, like we are talking so that everybody says this is the score card and this is the objective? Chip Terry: You know, it starts from the top, but people have to take the effort -- you know they are incentives, you know if you have marketing and set it on sales, as well as sales and set it on sales, you're going to get a lot better results than if you have marketing and set it on, you know, leads-generated and sales and set it on, you know deals closed because you're going to get things that are off. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right, right. Chip Terry: And then -- you know, it's management -- you know when your executive team meets together, you better have sales and marketing in the room together... Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Chip Terry: Talking the same thing, they better understand each other. And just align them around the customers. It's -- you know for me the most critical things your marketing people to do is go and talk to customers. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Well, Chip I agree. I'm in total alignment with you and I want to thank you for sharing the information of what like you to watch this with you on marketing managers, so you can create a team that's valid around the customer.

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