A Revised Marketing-Sales Relationship for the Digitally Dominant Era
In this digitally dominant era, a salesperson is lucky to get 5% of customer attention during the buying process, according to Gartner Research. Is this the death of sales? No. But the role of human agents has changed, and companies must reconfigure sales and marketing with this in mind. Gartner’s Brent Adamson offers a view on the revamped organization.
A New Role for Salespeople
The role of human agents in the commercial process has shrunk and narrowed. At one time salespeople conducted the full range of education and persuasion activities. Now, 83% of purchase activity, consisting of independent learning (mostly online) and internal consensus building, happens without sales intervention, says Adamson in this Harvard Business Review article. Given the typical B2B scenario where a customer negotiates with three potential vendors, each salesperson gets only a tiny fraction of the customer’s remaining time. As artificial intelligence increases in capability, the human component is likely to further erode.
Rather than depending on humans for all information tasks, customers need human help only when the degree of customization in their buying process gets too high for digital to perform. This can happen when they need difficult problems solved or social-emotional skills including consensus-building or trust-building. As one technology buyer described it to me, “It’s like Home Depot. I want to walk around the aisles by myself. But when I can’t solve my problem, I want the guy in the orange apron to instantly to appear and he better know what he’s talking about.”
Fortunately, the sales profession is guiding its practitioners in the direction of assuming these important roles of problem-solver, trust-builder, and guide rather than the old tropes of the solution-seller or high-pressure combatant.
Humans and Digital Must Work Together Through the Entire Journey
The challenge for sales is real. In the current process, they are placed at the end of race where they are responsible for outcomes they increasingly have less control over. Adamson quotes one head of sales as saying, “We have very few ‘at bats’ to actually influence customer buying behavior.” Marketing’s typical role is to use digital to drive customers down a funnel to increase the number of sales “at bats”. But is sales “at-bats” the right goal anymore? Does this serial, baton hand-off of first-digital-then-sales still make sense in this digitally dominant era?
Customers today prefer a buffet of information channels. Customers want the ease and autonomy of selecting what they need, when they need it rather than being dictated to by a vendor’s rigid process.
Image by Spencer Davis via Unsplash
With this buffet of information in mind, customers may choose the valuable human capabilities of salespeople at any point in their journey. Sales participation isn’t just for the end game anymore (granted that high customization needs are more likely to occur in the purchase journey’s final stages). And the need for digital doesn’t end when a salesperson enters the conversation. How many times have you been on a company website or an independent review site and longed to just ask a question of a human being and have them help you, then go back to working on your own? Digital capabilities must infuse 100% of journey support.
The more complex the purchase, the more this bouncing back and forth between digital and human ensues and therefore the more human and digital information channels should integrate. The first-digital-then-human linear funnel (aka first-marketing-then-sales) is antiquated.
What Does an Integrated Team Look Like?
With the reality of digital dominance and an evolved role for sales in mind, Adamson advises making customer information requirements the guiding design principle for the commercial process rather than serial, baton-like process towards the finish line of a sales interaction.
An information-centered approach requires a tighter integration of people in the edge teams (marketing, sales, and service). Alignment is insufficient. Alignment means “you stay in your box, and I’ll stay in mine while we try to agree on how we manage the borders.” Integration goes much farther and requires two significant shifts from the traditional model.
Reconfiguration into multi-disciplinary teams. The traditional functional silos of marketing and sales must disband and reform in a more useful configuration.
Development of true multi-channel communications. Important as it is, sales (human help) must be viewed as a peer-channel to digital, not dominant. Customers should be able to access either type of channel when needed.
Read about how you may be more ready for integrated teams than you think.
Adamson offers a case study about Calgary-based SMART Technologies, a hardware and software solution provider for educators.
SMART’s sales and marketing heads (or former heads as they now call themselves) noticed the growing misalignment between how they were selling and how customers were buying. They believed this chasm resulted in missed opportunities. Also, the traditional organizational silos caused costly duplication in messaging, analytics, and technology.
Their solution was to dismantle the legacy silos of sales, marketing, and service and reconfigure the 250 staff into five integrated “Unified Commercial Engines (UCE)” that mapped to the most typical customer-centric buying jobs (Learn, Buy, Order/Install, Adopt, Support). Each UCE contained the necessary experts from the legacy silos. The UCEs were globally deployed in regional “pods”. Supporting these UCEs were three centers of excellence that consolidated data and analytics, customer insights and positioning, and creative and digital experience. A shared UCE dashboard spanned traditional marketing, sales, and service. After 18 months with this organizational configuration lead volume increased 50%, lead acceptance by 35%, and year-over-year growth was 48%.
Benefits to an Integrated Approach
The SMART Technologies outcomes are impressive. Here’s why I think they got results:
Customers had better experiences and were happier. Customer got their information buffet. Exemplary concierge service includes a heightened sensitivity to the customer’s needs; along with a personal touch, a warm, friendly attitude, and a low-pressure approach to selling.
Multi-disciplinary teams work better in complex environments. The celebrated icon of the lone hero salesperson is ludicrous in the era of digital domination. Lean, integrated teams containing the array of necessary skills improve speed of responsiveness, intelligent decision-making, innovation, and customer experience.
Shared infrastructure is more effective. Increased information transparency, common objectives, and faster access to needed support led to improved execution and customer responsiveness in all roles.
Integrated teams at the company’s edge where it meets its customers is one of the fundamental success factors in what I call Complexity-wise Marketing. Linear, serial, waterfall business processes and functional silos belong to an older version of the marketplace. Ditch the baton. Soften the silos. Integrate into a network of customer-centric teams. That’s the future of marketing and sales in this complex digital era.