Managing the Sales Prevention Department

Recently I was having a conversation with Margaret Johnson of Oakwood Systems Group about the importance of removing roadblocks from the customers’ purchasing journey. She alluded to a term I really liked; she said every time we ignore removing all the roadblocks from our customers’ overall experience with our firm we essentially assign them to the Sales Prevention Department.

How true! There is such a ghostly abyss as the Sales Prevention Department. We send our customers there without even knowing unless they have the enough mojo to raise their voices and tell us what went wrong. They simply disappear into “thanks, but no thanks” land.

So what can we do to abolish this Sales Prevention Department? One simple and clear strategy is to ensure sales and marketing work in alignment. Easier said than done, right? But here is a perspective that can help us all understand each other. Sales is a transactional function so they are looking at everything in terms of numbers and quantifiable items. Marketing on the other hand is a world of perceptions, compelling messages and persuasion. I look at it as gas and motor. You can have the most sophisticated motor (sales) but without gas (marketing) it will just sit there.

As my friend Margaret pointed out mapping out the purchasing journey is not enough. We should be focused on the entire engagement process. This way each inquiry, each conversation, each download, every web visit or blog comment has a value. Perhaps not in terms of dollars and cents but in terms of business results. After all we are not working to achieve only this quarter’s sales objectives but rather for the achievement of overall business results.

End of the High School Football Season, the Thanksgiving turkey, inbound marketing and the rhythm of life.

As I sit here in front of my computer, my son is getting ready for the last football game of his sophomore high school football season, our Thanksgiving turkey is happily thawing out on kitchen counter and I am in a very Zen mood, thinking about rhythm of life, changes in the marketing industry and how all this change reflects on the way I make my living.

This time of the year always puts me in a reflective mood. This week there were few blogs I read that sort of tied it all together for me. The first blog I want to mention is this week’s Marketo blog. Jon Miller offers a very succinct and poignant summary of how marketing evolved in the last three decades…from mass communication to internet search dominance to contemporary social media brand building. He suggests that marketers are now focusing on social media, search and content marketing to build brands. Jon states:
…”More and more information is available off the official corporate website and on social media sites ranging from LinkedIn and Twitter to YouTube and SlideShare. As buyers tire of “marketing speak” and over-aggressive marketing tactics, they search social sites as part of their research, and interact with other prospects to get and share word of mouth recommendations”.

The next blog that I want to note is posted by Shannon Sweetser to Inbound Marketer’s Blog. Shannon states:
…creating meaningful content such as whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts that “concretely describe solutions to problems” is a much more effective way to get found by your customers than sending an unsolicited sales message via email.”

Finally, one of my very favorite blogs, the Digital Buzz Blog posted a fantastic slide presentation by Aden Hepburn that talk about the Basics of Social Media ROI. The presentation is written in CEO-speak; smart, funny, interesting and very informative. Social media is not a transactional sales tactic that translates into immediate sales increases the same reporting period that you start implementing the strategy. That is like inviting people over to your house for drinks and whipping out the Tupperware catalog while people are engulfed in a conversation. Instead, what it will do is gradually enhance non-financial indicators like increased website visitors, WOM, social mentions, impressions, positive press, blog comments as well as an upsurge in click-throughs and perhaps more visitors to your brick & mortar sales floor. We just have to make sure we using the right tool and the appropriate time span to measure its effectiveness.

As I said, I am in a very reflective mood. I see the changes in our industry and I am excited for the possibilities ahead. Being a marketer and staying true to my principles as a human being sounds simplistic. But I firmly believe this is the authenticity era in marketing and I am happy to be part of it.

Happy Thanksgiving!