Tuesday, January 20, 2004
STRATEGY: Bridge the Gap Between Product Marketing and Field Sales
The Factory and Sales do not understand each other. These are not just departmental silos within a company, they are completely different farms. The Factory (composed of product groups, operations, and even corportate marketing) do not speak the same languare as Sales (composed of channel sales, direct sales and field support personnel.) The COO of a Regional Bell Operating Company once told me I was the first and only one to ever satisfactorily explain channels to him. Another senior software engineer friend often quips “What do you channel people do anyway? And, do you really expect us to show up at that 8:00 AM meeting?” Let’s face it, The Factory and Sales may as well live on separate planets.
In the last few months I sat through several sales team sessions where The Factory (product team) came out to the field to tell them about the upcoming products. Even face-to-face the sales people checked out, nodded off and/or SMSed others. Virtual sessions via videoconference or teleconference were even worse. Despite the expense of taking the sales people out of the field, flying product people around the world and developing reams of PowerPoint, the message was poorly communicated. This is not a case of poorly trained or inexperienced sales people. This is a case of bad implementation and poor execution.
Product launches fail most often because of lack of coordination between The Factory and Sales. The Factory fails to change Sales behavior and Sales fails to fully leverage new Factory capabilities. This type of miscommunication is compounded when you have even one layer of channel provider involved. Almost no amount of advertising can recoup the momentum lost when the field is not adequately prepared. The Factory fails because the information is not positioned correctly, there is no clear call to action, there is a lack of an on-going management process and there is little measurement of results or accountability besides sales out (when it is available). Just as the RBI is a flawed metric for measuring a batter’s performance (See my December 4th, 2003 review of Michael Lewis' "Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game"), sales out data may overstate a sales persons true contribution because of the economy, product availability, end user demand and/or legacy relationships.
Product groups have asked me to help prepare coursework translating the material that comes out of product marketing into customer-centric sales pitches. Although my clients are looking for a single course, “How to explain (insert your proprietary technology acronym here) to the Channel,” what they need is a process to take Factory messages and deliver Sales readiness. This means translating Factory messages, researching customer requirements, developing sales materials, training sales personnel, communicating the product positioning, and measuring individual results.
The key word here is process. What is needed is a process to improve sales execution, not just annual sales training or market research. The process does not take the place of strategic sales training, such as Executive Focused Selling for Channels, Executive Conversation’s business acumen program which I frequently facilitate. Nor is it a replacement for product positioning or collateral design work created by corporate marketing, branding or marcom teams. Instead it is a bridge between two very different organizations.
It does not matter whether the VP Channel Sales or the Product Group VP/GM initiate the initiative. Both have a responsibility to increase the productivity of the massive corporate investment in field headcount.
Scott Karren, The Channel Pro
The Factory and Sales do not understand each other. These are not just departmental silos within a company, they are completely different farms. The Factory (composed of product groups, operations, and even corportate marketing) do not speak the same languare as Sales (composed of channel sales, direct sales and field support personnel.) The COO of a Regional Bell Operating Company once told me I was the first and only one to ever satisfactorily explain channels to him. Another senior software engineer friend often quips “What do you channel people do anyway? And, do you really expect us to show up at that 8:00 AM meeting?” Let’s face it, The Factory and Sales may as well live on separate planets.
In the last few months I sat through several sales team sessions where The Factory (product team) came out to the field to tell them about the upcoming products. Even face-to-face the sales people checked out, nodded off and/or SMSed others. Virtual sessions via videoconference or teleconference were even worse. Despite the expense of taking the sales people out of the field, flying product people around the world and developing reams of PowerPoint, the message was poorly communicated. This is not a case of poorly trained or inexperienced sales people. This is a case of bad implementation and poor execution.
Product launches fail most often because of lack of coordination between The Factory and Sales. The Factory fails to change Sales behavior and Sales fails to fully leverage new Factory capabilities. This type of miscommunication is compounded when you have even one layer of channel provider involved. Almost no amount of advertising can recoup the momentum lost when the field is not adequately prepared. The Factory fails because the information is not positioned correctly, there is no clear call to action, there is a lack of an on-going management process and there is little measurement of results or accountability besides sales out (when it is available). Just as the RBI is a flawed metric for measuring a batter’s performance (See my December 4th, 2003 review of Michael Lewis' "Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game"), sales out data may overstate a sales persons true contribution because of the economy, product availability, end user demand and/or legacy relationships.
Product groups have asked me to help prepare coursework translating the material that comes out of product marketing into customer-centric sales pitches. Although my clients are looking for a single course, “How to explain (insert your proprietary technology acronym here) to the Channel,” what they need is a process to take Factory messages and deliver Sales readiness. This means translating Factory messages, researching customer requirements, developing sales materials, training sales personnel, communicating the product positioning, and measuring individual results.
The key word here is process. What is needed is a process to improve sales execution, not just annual sales training or market research. The process does not take the place of strategic sales training, such as Executive Focused Selling for Channels, Executive Conversation’s business acumen program which I frequently facilitate. Nor is it a replacement for product positioning or collateral design work created by corporate marketing, branding or marcom teams. Instead it is a bridge between two very different organizations.
It does not matter whether the VP Channel Sales or the Product Group VP/GM initiate the initiative. Both have a responsibility to increase the productivity of the massive corporate investment in field headcount.
Scott Karren, The Channel Pro
