Does your company know your customer’s buying process?  Many companies are transforming their marketing and sales approaches based on understanding and documenting their customer’s buying process instead of focusing on company-centric sales processes.  When you do this, you will most likely discover that your marketing messages and sales tools are primarily geared to a sales process where the product or service requirements have been established and your emphasis is on “winning the competitive bake-off.”  Unfortunately, that’s not solution selling.  That’s transactional product selling.  By examining your customer’s true buying process, you will discover several key steps have already occurred by the time they identify a need for a product or service and your channel gets involved – steps for which you probably have no messaging, no tools and no training. 

Ask yourself these three questions:

1.  What messaging, tools and training have we created to help engage a customer when they are “untroubled and unaware” that they need to do something different?

2.  How much messaging have we created and how well equipped is our sales channel to help customers identify their objectives and articulate their biggest challenges and pains related to those objectives?

3.  Finally, do we have the messaging and tools to help develop those challenges into a “need” that we can efficiently and effectively show how we can meet?  With the proof points to back it up?

These are the key parts of the customer buying process where we need to be more active.  But, we can’t without the right words, tools, and training.

Several world-class companies are going to share their experiences implementing the Customer Message Management approach during an upcoming conference sponsored by the AMA and Rollins College’s Crummer Business School.  Representatives from Hewlett-Packard, Royal Bank of Canada and AT&T will share a case-study-in-progress as part of breakout sessions held during the 2-day conference (March 11-13, 2007) called, “Maximizing Marketing’s Impact on Sales.”  They will be willing to share the unvarnished truth about the process.  Here’s a link to learn more about the event and register if you want (http://www.marketingpower.com/aevent_event24776.php).

A couple former Gartner Group executives have brought the “analyst” business model from the world of IT to the world of marketing and sales integration.  The company is called Sirius Decisions (www.siriusdecisions.com).  They purport to provide benchmark data, analytic tools and best practices as part of three “research and advisory” services: 1) Executive Edge 2) Demand Creation and 3) Sales Optimization.  CMM Forum has signed up as a client and plans to explore this company and its services in more depth and offer our perspective on this portal.  It will be interesting to see if Sirius Decisions can get beyond the software/technology obsession that plagues many traditional analyst firms where they seem to think every problem can be solved with another application or tool.  If any of you have had experience with Sirius Decisions we welcome you to share it here too.

From time-to-time we get questions about whether CMM messaging and tools are best delivered to the field via an intranet or some sort or dedicated software system.  While we must emphasize that CMM is process-driven solution, not a technology solution, however, in response, we have identified six criteria for reviewing technology options and their applicability to CMM (chap 11 in our book):

1.  Single, Centralized Repository — one place where sales can go to get all of the necessary sales support and marketing content and tools; ideally this would be integrated with a sales-force automation or CRM system.

2.  Intuitive Interface Options — an online “situational interview” that enables sales to describe their client opportunity and the system automatically pushes them the most appropriate supporting messaging and tools.

3. Content Customization — dynamically-generated, customized collaterals, presentations and other documents, available on-demand, where the content and outputs are tailored to the client and their needs.

4. Best Practice Sharing — content is enhanced with just-in-time coaching information from subject matter experts, including notes, audio and video annotation; as well as an opportunity for the field to comment and share insights.

5. Online Community — content can be delivered to private portal websites that can set up for prospects and customers; moving the content from individual desktops to a virtual environment that is available to all participants 24/7 and ensures the sontent is always updated

6. Built-in Feedback and Analytics — ability to monitor sales person-by-sales person activity; tracking messaging and content use; linking content use by opportunity; instant email feedback loop for sales to provide comments.

If you follow the American Marketing Association at all, you can’t miss the promotional hype around MPlanet. (November 29-December 1, 2006 in Orlando) Get details at their website: www.mplanet2006.com. This is the AMA’s first attempt at putting on a national conference, to my recollection.  Everything else they do is typically on a regional basis.  From what I’ve been able to discern about the program content and approach, this will be a very strong event with unique opportunities to interact with peers.  And no shortage of big-name speakers. Unfortuntely, I haven’t noticed anything on the agenda that covers the Marketing and Sales alignment topic.  It seems like the MPlanet content represents some of the “usual suspects” when it comes to marketing topic areas.  CMM will be there with an exhibit. We’d be interested in knowing if any of you are going.  Please stop by and say Hi.  Check back to this blog for our review of the event…and add your own.