Sales Trend 9 – Marketing technology for better sales results

Guest co-author: David Hubbard CEO, Founder and Revenue Growth Expert for Marketing Outfield, New York, USA

Sales Trend 9 from our  12 Sales Trends Report for 2016 is about using Marketing technology for better sales results.

Sales and Marketing Technology – Which Trends Should You Pay Attention To?

No wonder we are confused. The number of vendors providing Advertising, Marketing OR Sales technology “solutions” has exploded in the last couple of years with it becoming a large multi-billion dollar industry with revenues growing at double digit percentages annually. There are now over 3000 vendors (and more in the works!) and these technology vendors are very vocal and actively pitching their own spin on what we need.  We could be forgiven for thinking, with all the hype and speed of new apps and technologies, that we need to be doing everything and, if we are not we somehow are going to miss out on staying ahead of the curve.  However, as you will find from this sales trend the opposite is true. Less is more when it comes to technology with the lesson being that what big business does is usually not what SMEs should be doing and vice versa.

This Sales Trend focuses specifically on the impact technology is having on businesses large and small for good and bad and what technologies we should be paying attention to and what we should be ignoring.

Dave Hubbard is a specialist on this field and has been liaising with Barrett from New York from some time, and together we have looked at the trends in technology and their impact in sales and marketing success here in Australia, the USA and elsewhere. 

Dave has prepared a simplified summary of key trends and starting point for us to consider:

1. Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) integrated with the Sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Databases, are creating the basis of a company-wide revenue system. In the past few years Marketing Automation has been used to passing “leads” automatically to Sales. Some leads turn into revenue, but about 80% of these leads just waste Sales time. When Marketing focuses on just attracting leads, and Sales focuses on just closing deals, the 21^st century customer is left to figure out who to work with on their own,  (i.e. self-educated buyers leverage internet and social information). The successful marketers are doing the following:
   • Marketing is measured on the number of Marketing-generated leads that appeared on the Sales forecast, that were won and lost by Sales, and that generated real revenue, not just the number of “leads” created.
   • Sales is more receptive to Marketing because Marketing is focused more on moving the prospect throughout the entire buyer journey, not just in the lead identification stage.
   • Content Marketing and Personalization provide self-educating buyers with lots of compelling information that aligns to them personally and to their company’s purchasing process.
   • Social Media Marketing Automation and Mobile-ready Marketing platforms, to help cover more social platforms with less resource and appeal to 90% of buyers that use mobile platforms.
   • Progressive Profiling and Nurturing Marketing techniques help convert prospects into Sales-ready leads by using Marketing techniques that automatically send articles and messages to buyers moving through their decision process.

Get the above basics right, then predictive lead scoring can improve the quality of leads, marketing attribution can properly give credit to the most effective campaign/channel/content that had the best ROI for the company, and everyone has a vested interest to ensure CRM data is accurate.

2. Sales Acceleration and CRM. The CRM is becoming the database and “record of revenue truth”. In the past few decades Sales Acceleration software focused more on sales “efficiency” and management oversight, which unfortunately resulted in salespeople with just 39% of their week actually available for selling.  Fortunately, the focus is now becoming more about sales productivity and not wasting selling time when it can be avoided.  Here’s what progressive sales leaders are adding to their existing or future CRMs:
   • Pipeline Management which displays and structures data into visible sales cycle stages that mirror the buyer’s purchasing stages. This structure improves salespeople’s efficiency and forecast accuracy, allows Sales managers to dynamically update the Sales process with team best practices, provides Sales Managers with a highly effective coaching platform, enables Marketing to use the same Buyer decision process as Sales, and enables Marketing to share content within each Sales stage when it is actually needed by the rep (reducing information overload).
   • Incentive Compensation Management which enables management to not only reward quota achievement, but effectively motivate the right behaviors that will lead to increased future sales with more reliable forecasts.
   • Social Selling Platform to help salespeople effectively use targeted social platforms to research and contact potential targeted prospects. This is most effective if Social Media Marketing and Sales Selling are jointly focused in their efforts.
   • Automated or technology-assisted proposal and quote generators to provide more available selling time and less administrative errors.
3. Small Medium Business is becoming the David against the Big Bad Corporate Goliaths. Big companies are just too big to constantly change and be agile. In contrast, Small Medium Business are more attuned to their customers, do not have huge independent Sales and Marketing functions, and can’t afford to buy technology and hope it provides ROI.  SMEs have a competitive advantage, should they choose to exercise it.
   • Aligning Sales and Marketing to its evolving target buyers does not require major organizational re-engineering. It’s an evolution, not revolution.
   • Empowering Collaboration between Sales and Marketing is easier to initiate if done correctly with the right common objectives and additional team motivation.
   • Aligning Sales and Marketing strategies into an integrated, highly cost-effective, high-growth revenue strategy is less arduous because current functional initiatives can be leveraged across the company: Pipeline Marketing + Pipeline Sales + Pipeline Coaching/Management, Content Marketing and Sales Enablement, Social Media Marketing + Social Selling, Marketing Automation + Sales Acceleration + CRM, Sales Compensation + Marketing Compensation + Team Compensation, Revenue and ROI (sales + profit).

While there will be more technologies on the horizon for dealing with effective Sales + Marketing Strategies, Sales + Marketing Techniques and Sales + Marketing Technologies for the Small Medium Business and Big Business to exploit, smart company leaders, especially SME leaders, know that they have to move from confusion and indecision, to being motivated leaders and change enablers who choose their technology wisely to serve their sales and marketing strategies and not the other way around.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Co-Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au