The Roles of Sales and Marketing

Music Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Michael Scher he is the founder and president of Frontline Selling. Welcome Michael. Michael Scher: Thank you, nice to be here. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Why is it Michael that sales and marketing are so far apart in their thinking? Michael Scher: Well, that's nothing new Gerhard. It's been like that since the beginning of time seemingly. I can certainly speak from our experience right. We help companies identify, access, engage with target executives, those companies that sell high value, generally, higher ticket type solutions. And what we find is that sales and marketing are on certainly two different -- not only two different pages but maybe reading two different books altogether. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So sales is on Venus and marketing on Mars? Michael Scher: Exactly. Exactly. There are lots of reasons for it. One could be how they're measured and compensated; the other could be just their educational backgrounds, for example. You know, marketing tends to be much more metric driven right. I need to produce leads and, you know, the more the merrier. And then sales, they get compensated for results and they fight over this four letter word called a "lead". And marketing is generating these leads and looks at sales and says, you know, you couldn't convert a lead if your life depended on it. And sales on the other side looks at marketing saying, well, you wouldn't know a qualified lead if you tripped over it. Well, the reality is, is that sales and marketing both have a role and there needs to be a co-dependent level of responsibility between what sales can do and what marketing can do in the process in terms of identifying net new opportunities. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So how do you help companies unite sales and marketing in an intelligent, collaborative way? Michael Scher: Sure. One of the things we do is we're an outsource provider of demand generation services and help companies identify, access and engage with targeted executives. And we've really taken the process of demand creation and broken it down into two parts. There's one part, which really talks about, you know, how do we gain access to a senior executive. And then the second part is who's best at executing once you have that access. So we actually deliver our meaningful interactions, especially, in the beginning of an engagement as 30-minute telephone conference calls. And we attend each and every one with the client sales reps. And not only do we attend each and every one to kind of facilitate some of the logistics, but what we also do is we provide a transcript or a near transcript of that dialogue between the sales person and the key player, the prospect. And this all gets fed back to sales, sales management, and marketing because sometimes it's the message, sometimes it's just your market place, sometimes it's really your messenger who's not delivering the right message at the right time. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So let's say in one scenario it's the message and the other scenario it's the messenger. How do you fix it? Michael Scher: If it's the message, there's two ports of entry on the message. One is does the message resonate enough to secure -- to pique somebody's interest to secure the meaningful interaction? Okay. The second part of it is we have the ability to go and we conduct what we call these recap review sessions where we go through the transcripts with the client and say, are we targeting the right people, are we asking the right questions, are we uncovering the right types of business inaudible in these first conversations? Now, if it's the messenger, we look at, you know, how effective did they prepare for the conversation. As a matter of fact, we have a best practice for how to prepare for and execute these meaningful interactions, we call it vision lock because what we're attempting to do is get the key player to lock onto our vision for how to address a need or solve a problem. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Obviously, you're doing a good job because people are coming back and they're buying more services from you. Michael Scher: Yes, that's -- Gerhard Gschwandtner: So you're sort of the ambassador that mediates between the two countries. Michael Scher: Exactly, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to live right at the intersection of sales and marketing. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Well, for anybody who wants to get more information, tune into www.frontlineselling.com. Thank you Michael. Michael Scher: Thank you, my pleasure.

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