Marketing, sales, and "digital body language"

Several years back, I put some energy into "solving" the age-old conflict between marketing and sales. Or, at least trying to help clients and member companies in the B2B technology world (I was at ITSMA at the time) think anew about how best to align the two functions and get them working together more effectively. 

The gist of the argument is that global competition and online transparency give buyers the ability to control the buying process far more than ever before. As such, sales is less able to go it alone, and relies more than ever on strong marketing to gain deep market and customer insight, build reputation, provide focused thought leadership content to fuel useful conversation, and build relationships of tangible value. 

We've seen some useful progress across the industry in recent years with marketing and sales playing together more nicely. Account-based marketing is one of the more promising initiatives in this regard, bringing together marketing and sales teams to create a marketing-driven approach to building business with strategic accounts.

But it may be all for naught if companies keep reacting to the current crisis the way they have reacted to downturns in the past: namely, to slash spending on marketing and put all hopes on beefing up sales. 

Marketing blogs and journals are of course filled with warnings about the folly of cutbacks and the historical successes of those companies that stayed the marketing course even amid declining sales. But the marketing cuts keep coming, and I wonder how companies expect to maintain or even increase sales while hacking away at the increasingly essential support systems that make those sales possible.

Steve Woods from Eloqua hit right on this critical point in an interview with Chris Herbert about his new book, Digital Body Language:  

If you look back prior to the information resources of the Internet, people needed to connect with a salesperson to get their information on a product or service. As the salesperson was that conduit, they had an opportunity to read that prospect's body language - crossed arms, smiles, frowns - and understand what messages resonated, and where they were in their decision-making process.

Now that prospective buyers get their information online, they no longer need the salesperson as information conduit. This means that the challenge of reading body language now is on the marketer, who must read their Digital Body Language - what messages they respond to, what information they find interesting - and use that to better guide any communications with them.

The point here is not that companies should cut sales instead of marketing. Rather, it's that they need to keep up the effort to integrate the two in a more collaborative approach that provides real value to potential customers. Now is the time to accelerate the change, not fall back into the old ways that won't work any more.

Comments

[Steven Woods]

Thanks for the post Rob, you're right that cutting in the wrong areas can be dangerous. The good news is that many organizations have a great asset in their existing prospect relationships that they can leverage in these challenging times. If you have not yet put effort into understanding both the "who" and the "when" of scoring and qualifying a buyer, there may be a gold mine of prospects you talked with months ago, but were not ready to buy at that time.

By focusing on understanding the buyer's buying process, you can get a lot more out of existing investments in sales and marketing.