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Customers Don't Read the Yellow Pages Anymore

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At the top of every CEO agenda is growth but with the economy still sputtering, achieving it is challenging.  Not because there isn't need or budget or compelling business reasons, but because B2B companies are out of step with how their customers buy.  It's like trying to win "Dancing with the Stars" while you and your dance partner are following different dance routines. You're not going to win and you're likely to step on your partner's feet.

The popular culprit to blame is sales and marketing misalignment. These two groups have been traditionally unable to work productively and collaboratively since they were defined into different roles.  According to Forrester Research, only 8 percent of companies have achieved sales and marekting alignment and only 14 percent have actually defined the rules of engagement for how sales and marketing should interact.  No wonder growth is hard. And no wonder these dance partners can't get their routines straight.

Misalignment hurts the whole company. It lowers revenue, drives up expenses, makes reaching profitability harder, hurts customer relationships and can turn a healthy company culture into a toxic situation.  The statistics don't lie: Less than 50 percent of B2B sales teams achieve their annual quota and 75 percent of marketing assets go unused.  It's not hard to understand why misalignment is a multi-billion dollar problem.

Misalignment is actually a symptom of a larger, more systemic problem plaguing companies.  Companies do not understand the journey that buyers of their solutions take before they sign on the dotted line. Most companies are, or choose to be, blissfully unaware that buyer journeys have changed in the past three years. Sales and marketing tend to be inwardly focused and rely on past experiences to predict future outcomes. With buyers rating only 3 percent of sales interactions as positively worthwhile, the question not asked by sales or marketing leaders is 'how do buyers go about buying?'  Instead, when the numbers come up light, the CEO, sales and marketing leaders lay blame at each other's feet. If these groups could just step back for a moment, they'd see what's actually going on.

The buyer journey has been fundamentally changed by the Internet.  Today, 60 to 70 percent of the buyer's journey is completed before a sales person is ever contacted. that means that buyers have already researched their problem, potential solutions, and investigated the viability of those solutions.  They have evaluated the vendors, conducted reference checks via social media and even gone so far as to test the short listed solutions by visiting colleagues who are using the product or downloading free trial versons.  For the most part, all this happens without the company's knowledge. By the time the buyer contacts a sales person, they have a specific list of questions and a price they are willing to pay.  That leaves the B2B sales team with frustratingly little opportunity to influence the buyer's needs.

To solve this dilemma and drive growth, marketing and sales need to align to the buyer.  Aligning to the buyer's journey means proactively managing customer lifetime experiences.  Buyers expect consistency in tone, content, responsiveness, and branding regardless of the mode of interaction throughout the time of the product's use.  Consistency is crucial in establishing credibility and trust with buyers and needs to extend beyond awareness to post-purchase service and support.

Instead of trying to align sales and marketing with each other, alignment becomes a three-legged stool of sales, marketing and service/support aligned to the buyer's journey.

Marketing is responsible for understanding the buyer's journey and actualizing a strategy that ensures the company's actions are relevent during the entire journey.  It is marketing' s responsibility to be where buyers go to do their research, investigation, validation, reference checks and share their experience.  If Marketing isn't there or doesn't understand the steps in the journey, the stool misses a leg and can't stand up.

Sales' responsibility is to engage buyers that are active on the journey before they become a lead - where did the buyer go, what were they looking for, and what did they say online.  If a buyer company has repeatedly downloaded white papers, videos, demos, etc. but has not supplied a contact name (meaning, it's not yet a lead), use the behavioral knowledge captured by systems like Marketo or Eloqua and make a cold call. Armed with marketing's understanding of the buyer's journey, Sales should be able to offer the right information for the anticipated next step in the buyer's journey and influence the opportunity early on.

In aligning to the buyer's journey, Service and Support have a new, more strategic, role. In tight partnership with Marketing, Service and Support's responsibility is to proactively manage the lifetime customer experience. Uniquely positioned to hear customer feedback about their usage experience, Marketing and Service and Support should jointly own customer advocacy and reference programs, ideation social communities, up/cross-sell campaigns, social media 'listening' programs and customer ROI metrics.  By partnering with Marketing, the two teams can proactively manage the end-to-end customer lifetime experience by following a need-match-engagement model around target buyer outcomes.

The old adage of 'what got you to where you are today is not enough to get you to where you need to be tomorrow' is more relevant today than when it was penned last century.  Sales and Marketing must embrace Service and Support and align around the buyer's journey to deliver target business outcomes. That's the only way to grow. And it's the only way to stop stepping on each other's toes.