B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

I love eBooks. I download, print, and read them during take off and landing when you can’t use electronic devices. Then I recycle the paper. Recently I read “The New Rules of Sales Enablement” by Jeff Ernst at Kadient. I know Jeff going back to his days at Fatwire — he’s a smart guy with loads of practical insight into how sales and marketing can work together better.

In his book, he compellingly argues that marketers should abandon old ways of thinking about the content they produce. Instead, they should focus on developing content that helps salespeople have conversations that advance customers through the buying process. This is consistent with Forrester’s research perspective on how marketing can engineer valuable sales conversations.  Before highlighting the four steps Jeff outlines in his ebook  for creating a successful sales playbook process, I want to point out 3 fundamental axioms marketers and sales should keep in mind:

1) Marketing’s job is to create content. Content is the foundation for brand building, thought leadership, education, offers, messaging, positioning, comparison, competition, and so on. All the things marketing does well starts with great content.

2) Sales’s job is to sell, close deals. Yes, they need great content to do that, but left to their own devices, content creation is not a strong suit among the majority of sales professionals.

3) Marketing scales sales. In tight economies firms forget this maxim when they forgo branding, advertising, and PR spend in favor of building pipeline in the short term. Firms that treat marketing more strategically — but spend with and eye to ROI — usually come out ahead when markets turn around.

In his ebook, Jeff contends “the most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.” Couldn’t agree more — customer centricity separates the best marketers from the pack.  Knowing what works in winning deals helps sales figure out what to do in similar situations, when to do it, and how to do it much faster and more consistently. Jeff favors capturing this information in sales-specific playbooks and making playbooks the main way marketing and sales share information. His four steps, paraphrased here, include:

Step 1: Assess — Identify recurring selling patterns where your firm wants to drive repeatable business. If you are closing a lot of deals in a specific industry, that’s a candidate for a playbook. Profile the winning sales engagements in these situations to learn about the specific information buyers need at different stages in problem-solving, which tools/materials reps used to best convey this information, and how reps overcome common objections — or bring in experts to help them do so.

Step 2: Build — Marketing should gather, organize, and make available the content, tools, and resources identified in step 1 in playbooks. I’ve called this a “sales portal” in prior research; a lot of this content will come from sales and existing customers. The main idea however is not to build a huge library of stuff, but  to focus tightly on what helps real reps be successful.  Then surround it with tips and coaching that helps other reps learn how to mimic successful peers.

Step 3: Launch — Marketing rolls out the playbooks to the sales team starting with a pilot group positively disposed to the playbook idea. Get opinion leaders in sales to support the pilot and make a concerted effort to collect and act on their feedback.

Step 4: Evolve — This is the hard part. Playbooks take on a life of their own and marketers must monitor usage and measure impact to know when to change a playbook, create a new one, or retire one that no longer produces results.

Here’s the key: Marketing must lead the process of defining which playbooks to build. Base this on a core understanding of the real market opportunity and on effective customer segmentation and targeting. That targeting must flow through to the go-to-market plans and messaging of the firm (or the various product lines in a large firm.) It must reflect a customer-first perspective, not a fixation with features, feeds, and speeds.  And lastly, it must be precise and specific. Which may seem counter-intuitive to growing market share broadly, but many technology firms create messaging that is all-encompassing, fails to attract a unique audience, or to stake a defensible claim.

Check out Jeff’s ebook or blog for more information — there’s a great assessment checklist on page 32 every marketer should take and use to start the discussion about “how well do we enable sales?” And feel free to post a comment with your insights, comments, and counter-arguments as well.