Customer On The Edge

You might have seen the May issue of CRM magazine that has an article proposing that marketing needs to think of themselves as feeding sales. I especially like the elucidation of the metaphor that claims that marketing is not exactly starving the sales function as much as it is causing malnutrition by feeding them junk food. Excellent stuff!

I like the use of metaphors to describe things and this led me to a variation that I think is also useful in understanding the relationship between these two business development functions. Lead generation is like a conversation and marketing is the speaker with sales as the listener. Think of all the other well known dysfunctional relationship types that are plagued with speaking and listening problems (all of you married folks in the audience know what I am talking about).

Back in a previous life, I ran an exercise in one particular workshop that helped illustrate a thing or two about listening. It went something like this. Two people had to draw a complicated geometric diagram, but without the ability to see – each had someone describing the diagram verbally – one person would serve as the speaker and one as the listener. However, the catch was that one of the listeners could ask questions and one could not.

What do you think were the results? You guessed it – the person who could ask questions would replicate the drawing almost exactly. The person who could not ask questions would make all kinds of bad assumptions about what was being said, and the drawings were horrid. The conclusion that everyone would glean from this exercise was that good listeners need to ask questions, give feedback, and in general be in control of the conversation – not the speaker!

So what - what could this possibly have to do with sales and marketing? Let me get to the point. Marketing is the speaker – they need to give stuff to sales – leads, messaging, market insight. Sales is the listener, but the problem is that they are not listening. They need to be in control of the conversation, but marketing mistakenly keeps control (there is no control, actually). However, with control comes responsibility, and that includes giving feedback and asking clarifying questions.

Getting back to the listening exercise for a moment; I would ask the listeners how successful they thought they were. The one with no feedback felt they did a good job, and expected to get a good picture in return. The one with feedback felt they did a bad job because there were so many questions, and expected the pictures to be poor. Of course we know the results were just the opposite.

Now, getting back to marketing, the measurement is the picture, not whether we think we are doing a good job of communicating. What should marketing be measuring to determine if the speaking and listening process is working? Well, the equivalent of the good picture in this case is something like lead conversion. If the process is working well, sales will convert a higher percentage of leads to opportunities. But the feedback needs to be there as well. Information about what leads are good and what are not must be returned back to marketing to achieve the best results.

So, marketing, give control to sales. Sales, take control, but don’t be apathetic – ask questions and give feedback. Let’s generate some business.