• Do you have a strong sales leader?
• Do you have an established sales process?
• Do you track your pipeline?
• How many people sell in your company?
• Do you have a mix of hunters and farmers?

It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult.  We just don’t want to waste your money and our time.  If you don’t have a good sales team, a clear sales process, and a system to process leads through your pipeline, then spending money on marketing is going to be a waste.  No deal was ever lost because a sales person didn’t have the right brochure.  And (to my knowledge), no deal was ever won because the buyer saw a data sheet and yelled, “Holy smokes, lets go buy this product based on how great this data sheet looks!”  (Although this would be really cool if it did happen.)

The role of marketing in a company is to generate leads for the sales team, make sure sales has the tools to do their job, and that people have already heard about your company before the sales person calls.  This makes marketing an integral part of the success of any organization.  However, sales is more important.  Ideally, you’ve got someone experienced in your sales process.  She’s been cold calling, making sales presentations, following up on referrals, generating proposals and closing deals. If you don’t have someone like this, then a better use of your marketing dollars is to go find and train a decent sales person.  Or two. 

Then make sure you have a pipeline tracking system.  It can be a simple excel spreadsheet or a full blown CRM system like ACT! or Salesforce.com. The bottom line is that your marketing team, whether it is inside your company or outsourced to someone like Zephyr, isn’t going to close your deals for you.  They can nurture the lead to a certain point and make sure your website looks great and your sales team has all the necessary tools.  They can communicate to the market and position your company as the subject matter experts you are.  They can wring every dollar of marketing spend and make sure the ROI makes sense.  But they can’t close the deal. Only your sales team can do that, and that’s where the money is.  Make sure your sales infrastructure is sound before you start expanding your marketing efforts.

Elements of BD

I often get asked if I know of any best practices on how to compensate sales and business development professionals. This topic has been a moving target since the first sale of anything ever happened! How do companies balance their need for more sales against the motivations and drivers of their sales and business development people in order to get what everyone wants?

You won’t get the silver bullet in this post, however, we’ve made observations worth sharing. Part of the problem is that the One-Size-Fits-All-Sales-People Compensation Program that companies adopt creates that moving target that makes you crazy. If the “one size fits all” doesn’t work, then a more flexible structure could be explored.

More

I think a sales compensation system could be based on two things (HR and accounting folks will cringe because this will require more work for them):

1. Strengths of each sales/business development professional
2. The specific business development activities they accomplish

Let me tell you what I mean by these. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Some sales and business development people are excellent at building relationships, others at qualifying leads and others at closing the deal. What if a company would pay their sales people to do more of what each sales person is good at?

See if the attached graphic explains what I mean. When we do an analysis of the Business Development Function for our clients, we use a fabulous graphic, designed by Lissa Levinson, to highlight the many activities needed to complete the “race” of business development. (download it here elements-of-bizdev-flyer ) Each one of these activities is worth something to an organization. Perhaps the organization places a high value on information and intelligence collected on prospects. The test to gauge how much value a company places on information is to watch how comfortable management feels when sales people leave with all the data they collected on prospects while on company time.

Or perhaps the organization doesn’t care as much for the contact data or even for relationships built but just wants the revenue numbers to grow. Period. In every case, the compensation structure for each sales person could be built around the specifics of what management truly values. Those specifics would then be married to the strengths of their sales force. Different compensation programs for different strengths.

Is there a company out there doing this? I’d be interested to hear what others think.