I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This is the third excerpt from my interview with Mark Burton, former VP of sales at MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and adviser to numerous software companies.
Anneke: What were your “failures,” or things that didn’t go as well as they could have? What would you tell another executive about what not to do, or what to learn from your past experiences?
Mark: Failures: We’ve had lots of them. Processes and systems are so important. It took us a long time to work with a team to figure out everything we really needed to manage this environment. Marketing tends to be more positioning- and messaging-oriented, and more about just putting it out there. That whole idea of what a qualified lead is, and having something that ends up in the hands of sales that they want to deal with — it’s a big chasm between those two functions.
Get a very objective and measurable set of definitions, processes and systems to do some system-oriented scoring, and then have a very clear and written description for what becomes a sales lead. Get the marketing organization on board with forecasting and measurement of conversion rates, and make sure this is an activity that is worked monthly to continually pursue conversion rates that drive the company to profitability. This is a big change for most marketing and sales organizations. I wouldn’t call it a failure, but I will say it takes a long time to make sure everyone understands this end-to-end process, and what is involved in managing and measuring it. That was hard work with a lot of iterations and false starts.
Anneke: I see that changing rapidly, though, in many Sales 2.0 companies, where success depends on marketing and sales being aligned and collaborating. Do you see that working? How are companies bringing sales and marketing closer together?
Mark: It’s still a challenge for many companies. One of the first thoughts is, “Great, we’ll just give sales and marketing to the same person.” It’s unusual to have any one person who really understands sales and marketing well enough to add value across both functions through the Demand-to-Close process. There also aren’t many CEOs who really understand it. I would say this is still developing. My suggestion is to get advice from others who have successfully implemented the new model. This can be accomplished through a combination of outside consulting and benchmarking with companies that have successfully implemented such models.
Read the full interview with Mark Burton in the Resourcessection of this website.
Anneke: thanks for bringing Mark’s insight to the forefront. Organizations need to fundamentally re-think how they need to organize and what systems they need to build to deliver the outcomes customers want–easier said than done.
Start with breaking down legacy organizational impediments. Marketing versus sales friction began with nebulous or uncommunicated goals, followed by siloed departments, partitioned budgets, information hoarding, and the inevitable inter-departmental mistrust that leads to protecting turf and one’s back.
I’m wondering if companies might be better served by re-shaping Mark’s idea of “Demand-to-Close process” to a broader “interest-to-revenue” process or better still, from the customer’s point of view, to an “interested prospect to a ‘barking-dog-excited’ customer” process.