Sales and Marketing Process Integration

The following symptoms are good indicators of sales process problems:

·         The sales team consistently misses forecasts

·         The pipeline is full of late stage deals that just won't close

·         There is lack of clarity or even worse, conflict, around roles and responsibilities in the sales process

·         Key resources (e.g. proposal generation or use of executives) are a bottleneck to deal flow

In this area of my practice, I rely primarily on my strategic relationship with Market-Partners.  When I discovered them in the summer of 2002, I was struck by the depth of their work in this area, and how well it aligned with my own experience and philosophies.  I am certified with Market-Partners as a senior consultant and business developer. 

Over many engagements, Market-Partners has discovered that fewer than a quarter of the common issues impacting sales effectiveness are directly actionable within the sales organization. They involve business strategy, marketing strategy and key resource and information flows interfacing the sales process from elsewhere in the enterprise.  Market-Partners' approach is built on the premise that in order to truly understand and design an effective sales process, a firm must take a holistic approach to understanding their end to end sales and marketing system.  As the first step in each engagement, Market-Partners will assess the completeness of strategy vision and process integration across the entire sales and marketing system.

Market-Partners helps their clients understand and sort out integration issues with their sales process.  They systematically examine those key linkages and make recommendations which result in a more seamless flow from business strategy to marketing strategy to sales program execution in the field. With early stage companies, they use their experience to help the client understand what those linkages, resource and information flows should be, and help them design an optimal sales process from that perspective.  

A significant additional benefit of this process design is the creation of sales process metrics which enable the client to measure, manage and optimize those processes once deployed. Market-Partners uses their many years of sales and consulting experience to achieve significant results in weeks, not months.  The resulting business impact of this approach is that the sales team acquires new customers faster and at lower cost.

A typical engagement begins with the initial assessment.  We spend time with between 15 and 20 professionals in all areas of the organization to really understand their sales and marketing system.  We then present an impact and opportunity analysis to the client with our findings on what is working well, and where we have discovered opportunities for improvement.  For a full engagement, deliverables might include some or all of the following:

·         Initial assessment and creation of an impact and opportunity analysis

·         Sales process design, resulting in a sales process architecture and a process roadmap for one or more specific sales processes

·         Development of a sales process playbook which provides the sales team additional resources to execute each of the steps in the roadmap

·         Sales management process design, including development of key performance metrics, a sales management roadmap, and a sales management tool kit

·         Skills gap analysis and appropriate skills development planning