Rethinking Sales and Marketing

Have always been interested in how resources are delivered, and a big part of that is how the resources are organized and classified for useful application. 

Rethinking The Sales And Marketing Organization  By Dave Brock in Customerthink

We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy.

Classically, marketing’s focus is on creating interest and awareness, then driving demand.  The work toward MQLs, turning them over to sales, hopefully as SALs, saying “Good luck and godspeed!, we caught ’em, you skin ’em.”

Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them.

The overall marketing/sales assembly line takes customers through this linear process, all oriented to moving the customer through a buying decision.

Of course there are variants to this, there may be an account focus or orientation, there may be some sort of nurturing loop for customers that are not ready to buy, but as soon as we can we want to drop them into our marketing and sales assembly line.

Except our assembly line/linear customer engagement model doesn’t reflect how our customers buy.  Our customers aren’t engaged in a linear buying process, in fact, when we start mapping it, the process is very complex.  It’s a series of starts, stops, changes, reassessment, abandonment, restarting, stopping, going backwards, restarting, changing scope, adding new buying team members, more changes………

But we aren’t structured to be able to respond to the customer’s chaotic buying process.

How do we rethink things to have half a chance of intersecting the customer wherever they are at and trying to move them forward? .... "