Institutionalizing the Two-Way Street (And Other Tips for Making Playbooks Work)

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February 2011, Issue 84

Demand-Generation Best Practices

Institutionalizing the Two-Way Street (And Other Tips for Making Playbooks Work)
Q&A from The Essential Sales Playbook: How Marketing Can Align with Sales to Increase Conversion from Lead to Closed Deal, originally presented February 9, 2011.View the on-demand Webinar.

On-demand Webinar: The Essential Sales Playbook

A well-crafted playbook can have exponential impact on Sales' ability to engage and close prospects—a win for both Sales and Marketing.

In this Webinar, sales enablement experts Bill and Christian share the essential components of an effective sales playbook, including where and how sales playbooks are used for the most impact on closed deals, and specific playbook examples from some of the most successful BtoB companies.

View at your convenience.

In a recent live Webinar, Bill Golder of Miller Heiman, and Christian Patrik of Bulldog Solutions, shared the essential components of an effective sales playbook, including where and how sales playbooks are used for the most impact on closed deals. You can view the on-demand Webinar at any time.

Bill and Christian answered some audience questions at the end of the event. Their responses are below, along with a few bonus questions they didn’t have time to answer during the live event.

Question: The success of any playbook in aligning Sales and Marketing relies on a solid understanding of customer buying behavior. How can sales and marketing teams combine to build this knowledge?

Christian Patrik, Director, Solutions Architect, Bulldog Solutions: For our most successful programs, we require that Sales and Marketing both align in the same room, where we hash out what our ultimate customer is. If we look at just Marketing, Marketing's going to say, "It looks like a Ferrari." And Sales is going to say, "It looks like a Honda." Through this conversation, and actually looking at historical sales and actual archetypes, we've come to a great understanding about what both Sales and Marketing are looking for. And that understanding comes only from both of them sitting at the table in open dialogue.

Bill Golder, Chief Sales Officer, Miller Heiman: When you look at the pipeline and get in a room and talk about, "What are the actions that both the seller and the customer are taking on the client side?"—that's where Sales has the opportunity to be really specific about what they're seeing at each stage of the process in terms of buying behavior. So Marketing learns from that.

And then, we're seeing things like "lead huddles," where Sales and Marketing are getting together on a regular basis to review the leads that are being lobbed over, and talking about which ones are indeed scoring the way they should be scoring, and revisiting those that need to be revisited and getting on the same page, making sure that there's accountability on both sides.

Lastly, we see win/loss reviews as a rigor within the organization. And again, both Sales and Marketing participate in those. It really helps both sides understand, "When we win, why do we win?" It typically leads to insights like: We're pursuing the right kind of customer and there are certain actions that happened that aligned with the buying process that made sense. And we also find out that when we lose, we sometimes are pursuing the wrong kind of deals and the wrong kind of customers.

So I think getting Marketing aligned with Sales and joined at the hip, not only initially to put playbooks together and set strategy, but ongoing, this tempo of working together in lead huddles and refining the funnel stages is really critical.

Question: If the sales playbook helps transfer accumulated knowledge from Marketing to Sales, how do you see the knowledge that Sales gains from its customers making its way back to Marketing for revitalizing and improving marketing assets? How do you institutionalize this two-way street?

Bill Golder, Miller Heiman: Well, I think the answer is the same, which is making sure that there's some established routine between Sales and Marketing to share what happens when we win and what happens when we lose, and what are the steps I'm having to take as a salesperson based on buying behaviors to win deals? And also sharing those observations such as: What tools did I use to help me? What tools are not useful or need to be updated? That kind of regular tempo of meetings to talk about real deals, real sales meetings, with regular milestones established, whether it's monthly or quarterly, to have those conversations, allows Marketing to get the voice of the customer through the eyes and the mouths of the salespeople.

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: I couldn't agree with you more, Bill. I discussed that in larger organizations, we've seen the rise of the sales enablement role. In the past we've probably seen some people in Marketing who have acted as "interlopers" in Sales, a kind of Marketing "inside person." Having Sales and Marketing work together on a revenue committee or having Marketing come to sales forecast meetings on a weekly basis is a great way to start. Being able to view where opportunities are within the funnel—how they came in—makes it easier for Marketing to reverse-engineer tactics to get more of those people who are falling deeper in the funnel after first or second touches.

Bill Golder, Miller Heiman: This can't always be accomplished by getting people on phone calls and in meetings, and of course there are some organizations that are so large, with a large volume of leads to manage, that I think technology has to play a critical role. And that means Sales will have to step up and use it. Salespeople have to input what they’re doing at each stage so that that information can get used and leveraged by Marketing. It's a two-way street. Salespeople are often reluctant to use the CRM systems to their full advantage, but when they do, Marketing can use that data in a powerful way.

Question: What are some dynamic ways to stimulate sales adoption and usage of playbooks and maintain that as well? Do you have some advice for adoption?

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: A couple points. The first is to keep it simple. We showed a slide where we've added in a couple technology pieces within the CRM. You don't want to make things too complicated because there will be no adoption. Start small. Add a little piece here. Add a little piece there. And if you can get a focus group of one or two salespeople to help you test and measure, then that's even better.

At the end of the day, if you're going to be gauged on revenue, you're also going to be gauged on the usage of the tools that are part and parcel of your job. It's your responsibility to update your contacts; it's your responsibility to help the organization. And in some cases we've seen organizations cut their salespeople off from new opportunities just because they've been staunch against having to update the CRM or "the darn database."

Question: Can you recommend group and/or individual performance goals that encourage cooperation between Sales and Marketing and avoid conflicting priorities?

Bill Golder, Miller Heiman: Instead of objectives around the volume of leads being created on the Marketing side, more and more we’re seeing objectives aligned around lead conversion, as on objective that Marketing and Sales own together. What comes along with that is a healthy amount of pressure on both sides. Are we attracting the right kind of business through our Marketing efforts? And then there’s a healthy amount of pressure on the sales side to make sure we are moving through the sales stages and understanding the buying behaviors appropriately to close those deals.

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: There are three dials you can use: One of them is to get more of the opportunities you want. You can base goals on that. The second one is that you can increase the time it takes to get from a contact to a closed deal. So you can have a financial incentive in there tied to reducing sales cycle time. And the last one is the size or volume of the deal.

All of these things come from the proper utilization of the sales funnel definitions, the conversion rates between them, and by getting the right information to the right audience. If you're reaching out to the right audience with the right message at the right time, you should be able to a) reduce your sales cycle, b) be able to sell a solution rather than a product, and c) be able to get more of the right people in there. So incenting on those three things for both Marketing and Sales really helps to tie things together. They're very salient, common goals.

BONUS Q&A
There wasn’t enough time to address all audience questions during the Webinar. Christian and Bill have answered the remaining questions below.

Question: How can you introduce a playbook for a new product launch? Do you err on the side of the value prop around the product?

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: The value proposition and the playbook really are separate in this case. Your playbook should contain the how-to, the "why" and the "what," as in what platforms or applications you're using. And then the plays should be about features and benefits and pain point relievers as they relate to the customer. So when you're introducing a playbook for a new product launch, you want to be able to give your salespeople 1) a brief understanding of the product, and 2) the five (or six or whatever number) plays that are most applicable for each vertical market or for each audience type. For example, if you have a product with five features and benefits, one of them might be more applicable to healthcare than to banking.

So, you utilize the value proposition within the playbook, but the playbook should contain plays. It should not be used as the primary tool to educate your salespeople about the product. In a playbook, salespeople need to know what the pain is, what the product fit is, what their initial retort should be, and what the best solution fit is for that customer.

Question: Alignment costs money. Is there a correlation between size of company and alignment implementation?

Bill Golder, Miller Heiman: Certainly, any time you make a strategic decision to invest in an area, you have to weigh your intended ROI. Our annual research study suggests that this is one of the more frequently deployed strategies by organizations who are outperforming their peers. The size of the organization is likely in proportion to metrics such as deal sizes, number of clients, volume of leads, etc.

Organizations who have invested little to nothing in sales and marketing alignment will no doubt see positive impact from even basic investments in establishing collaborative development efforts on lead definitions, key sales tools like playbooks and win/loss reviews. Organizations who have invested in sales and marketing alignment will need to evaluate the investments made against the business results produced. Establishing key metrics you intend to impact for both departments to align around will be critical to ensure that the alignment efforts are tied to actually producing results for the business and generating a return on that investment.

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: The correlation isn’t between the size of the company and the alignment implementation; it’s about the size of the program—and its cost is inversely relative to the gap between Sales and Marketing. So if you don’t have a gap, it doesn’t cost that much money.

As I discussed in the Webinar, every program needs to have sales enablement dollars associated with it. The cost will depend on the complexity of your program and how unaligned you are. If closing the gap between Sales and Marketing is something you don't currently budget for, consider budgeting 5-10% of your overall marketing budget to go to sales enablement via Marketing. Sales enablement is more than just playbooks: it's technology integration, it's training, it's FAQs, toolkits, everything that lives in the area between the SAL to the SQL.

Question: One of our biggest issues is that Sales does not do anything with qualified leads in a timely manner, so leads that were warm become cold before anyone from Sales follows up on them. How do you get Sales to buy in and agree to a timely follow-up so that this doesn't happen?

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: One idea to consider is that Sales simply isn’t placing value on the opportunities. I would recommend going back to closed/won deals and looking to see what kind of impact Marketing had on them. If there’s not a lot, then your salespeople are simply doing things independently of what you’re doing as a marketer, and you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

There are three ways to address this. One is to pull back leads from Sales and tighten the aperture on what goes over, making the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead much stronger. The second is you have to redefine the stages of the sales funnel and get Sales' buy-in. The third way to is to utilize automation and build a buyer’s journey nurture campaign.

Bill Golder, Miller Heiman: The first step is to ensure both Sales and Marketing are aligned on a common lead definition. The biggest issue here is often tied to a gap between what Sales and Marketing would call a "sales-ready" lead. Once both organizations are in agreement, then establishing a frequent process (a lead huddle process) that involves both Sales and Marketing leaders to review active leads is key. The intent of the lead huddle is to provide a two-way feedback forum for both Sales and Marketing. For smaller organizations, this can be accommodated via either a meeting or conference call among the key stakeholders. For larger organizations, the interaction and insights can be captured within CRM and/or technology-driven lead scoring capabilities.

Either way, it's important that this is an ongoing process, as the dynamics of the marketplace are always changing. When Sales and Marketing are in constant collaboration on lead effectiveness, these changing dynamics can be addressed more quickly and allow the organization to capitalize on key trends as opposed to being surprised by them.

Question: If using a playbook for a mainly static library of products and services, how do you best deal with iterations/updates?

Christian Patrik, Bulldog Solutions: So you may have a library of products that don't change much in terms of features and benefits, but your approaches are constantly changing. What worked last quarter and the quarter before may not work well now. You can leverage changes such as titles, jurisdiction, bundling, pricing, competitive landscape, recent wins, etc. in your iterations.

To watch the on-demand Webinar, The Essential Sales Playbook: How Marketing Can Align with Sales to Increase Conversion from Lead to Closed Deal, you can access the archive here.

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Original Q&A has been edited for clarity and consolidation.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, an online marketing agency that changes the way BtoB companies define demand-generation strategy, engage prospects and convert leads to customers. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, VP of Marketing.