Sales and Marketing is BROKEN!

Joseph Orlando, TorchLite Group 1 | P a g e
The classic terms should be
reshuffled to Read
“Marketing and Sales”
instead of “Sales and
Marketing.”
While most sales
professionals won’t agree
and many would declare that marketing professionals have a bias, the
fact of the matter is that 70% of the buying decisions made by customers
are made BEFORE they ever come in contact with a sales person.
Prospective buyers today, consumer and businesses alike, take to the
digital world to conduct research; collect information; seek out positive
and negative referrals (ironically, most will accept the opinions of
complete strangers over experts and industry pundits!) The World Wide
Web provides resources to get to answers that before were provided by
Sales teams and outside consultants. The plethora of whitepapers; blogs;
use cases; and 3rd party reviews act to provide armor and weapons to
prospective buyers with the right questions to ask; the things they may
not have considered in demanding of vendors; mistakes to avoid and
more control over their own decision making criteria.
Far beyond a cliché, the approach to “Content is KING!” is the fulcrum
that has driven this paradigm shift. Car buyers and home buyers
approach a purchase with a vast wealth of information on pricing;
values; deals; seller information and even tactics to get better
deals. Businesses are no different. They press for better Service Level

Agreements (SLAs); terms; discounts and allowances; negotiating
tactics (most are trying to fix maintenance cost to the deal prices and not
the list prices).
This places a greater impetus and reliance on effective marketing than
ever before. Customers, by the time they reach out to Sales, already
know they want to buy. It is less of a sales process and more of a “Help
them buy what they know they want at the best value to both
parties.”
Marketers are no longer able to get away with the nebulous terms of
“awareness” and branding when
so much counts on their efforts
to bring willing buyers to their
doors. The days when Marketing
was there to simply generate
leads and create sales collateral
are over. (If you still look at
Marketing in this way in your
organization...you are missing the opportunity.) Marketing's role is to
bring willing, ready and educated buyers to the sales table. Today this is
their real mandate.
Contemporary marketers are no longer “artists” but have moved into
science. The science of knowing the best target customers; know which
messages resonate with them relating to their very real pain points;
knowing what relevant content works; giving them the reference

materials that help them justify their buying decisions inside the
customer’s organization.
Proficient marketers can now establish an ROI for their spending and
efforts. There are metrics now to see how Marketing Qualified Leads
(MQL) move to become Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and move through
the sales funnel. The total spend of individual promotions and
campaigns (adding sales costs) over the recognized incremental
revenues (NPV) can provide a better insight into the Marketing ROI. To
add still another dimension is to affix a timeline weight since some
approaches (tradeshows, for example) have a much longer time to close
in days than a customer requesting a RFQ/RFP or requesting a sales call.
This age of Digital Access has created a deluge of available data.
Marketing analytics has taken on an emerging focus for large and small
enterprises alike. Just like there are no standards for IOT and there are
no standards for an enterprise to be considered being “Digital,” the
movement to analytics is a full spectrum that sweeps from collecting
data into spreadsheets and seeking patterns to full-fledged sophisticated
data analytics driven my complex algorithms developed by
mathematical genius.
The effectiveness of analytics places the outcome at the precipice of
success or failure. If you recall how arduous a task it was to establish the
enterprise Mission Statement and how everyone had something to input,
no less energy and participation is needed to establish what does the
enterprise need to know? why? And what to do with what they may
learn? It is far too easy to settle for increases in revenue and profitability

as a single gauge. Of course, these are critical factors but not THE key
KPIs on which to steer an
enterprise.
Each function in the
business will have
different things they want
to focus on. Each
function, if done poorly,
can interpret the data to support the intuitive positions they are taking.
Therefore, the cross functional development of what these KPIs are and
what the appropriate executable actions will be when the given output is
reached is critical.
In addition, every effort, like the Mission Statement exercise, should be
made to make the effort concise – consistent- have significant relevant
impact and distilled down to the most manageable package. Having too
much data and too much output is almost as bad as having none at all!
What do you want to know? Why? What will this cause to happen in
your business?
What are you measuring? Why? Are these elements of your business
you manage?
What are you going to do with the data you get? Are the workflows and
processes in place to pervasively change the way the enterprise goes to
market – or does it fall into one department and they can do little to
change things?

Are you asking the right questions? Are the questions key to the
enterprise’s goals and objectives?
Is there top down and bottom up commitment to act on what is learned?
Are there mechanisms in place to act?
Analytics have long played a key role in process manufacture. There is
clear SOP for mitigating actions and get things back on track. It is
clearly time that Marketing steps up to the science of contributing to the
definition of what the enterprise makes (for whom) that delivers much
valued features and benefits. This is how the enterprise differentiates
itself in their respective appropriate markets. Marketing should be bold
enough to bring the enterprise to appreciate what it shouldn’t try to do
and which customers they shouldn’t try to capture. Accentuate what we
do best and diminish the waste of funds and energies chasing
opportunities for which the enterprise is not suited. Define the pain
points your enterprise can address and the problems to which solutions
we are best suited to deliver. Define the conversations we should be
having AND with whom those conversations should be with. (It isn't a
conversation about the product or service but about solving which of
their problems, let them ask HOW!)
Marketing can make Sales more effective and the enterprise more
successful. Today, the appropriate way the term should read is
“Marketing and Sales.” (In my humble opinion.)

Sales and Marketing is BROKEN!

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Sales and Marketing is BROKEN!