It is all about customer centricity

How marketing and sales (and, indeed other customer inter-faces) are structured needs to be, today, very different.  We see three main reasons.

First, people communicate very differently today compared to 10 years ago, using more channels and, suffering from constant distractions and information over-load, through much shorter attention spans.

Second, for a modern SME it is essential that the customer is placed at the centre of everything the business does.  This enables your team to better understand your customer’s needs and preferences; why they are engaging with you; and why they are excited by your products and business’ activity.

Third, at the centre of any great business lies great customer communities and these are only achieved by the business employing a set of customer centric processes.

Accommodating these three factors will create substantial value for any SME.  The first step is to build a strong degree of alignment between your marketing and sales activities.

For many SMEs, a big issue is that they employ a conventional structure where sales and marketing are not fully aligned.  Carrying out any form of re-structuring, at this stage, would be in many cases difficult and, possibly, counter-productive.

The good news is that:

• things can be done, including the ten key elements listed below
• for large companies the position is much more difficult to resolve.

Therefore, by successfully tackling this issue, SMEs gain four big benefits:

• there will be an abundance of low-lying fruit to be picked and quickly converted into sales
• you will start building, and over time achieve, a great, dynamic customer community - we promise you that the benefits will be seen quite quickly

• your branding and credibility will be quickly enhanced

• gain a significant competitive advantage especially over bigger enterprises active in your marketplace.

Ideally, marketing and sales need to be working as a single team.  However, in many cases that is not viable.  So, below we provide a guide as to how you can start building the required degree of alignment whatever the size and structure of your teams.

Ten Key Elements

The list below provides a guide to building this alignment.  To be successful, processes need to be carefully designed and implemented around each of them, ideally so that they satisfy our 5M test.

1:   using your Common Purpose, encourage your teams to innovate and co-operate for the greater good of the whole business and agree an urgent programme to build the required alignment 

2:   include disciplines that might, at present, sit outside marketing and sales but provide important inter-faces with the customer, such as customer complaints, delivery communications, post sales communications and your referral programme

3:   agree objectives for the respective teams and what is expected of them and develop specific commitments and KPIs

4:   review and agree on the optimum target audiences and the channels through which you are communicating with them and how the effectiveness of each channel is being measured 

5:   review your customer profiling and segmentation to establish whether these can be better designed and how everyone can contribute information into that profiling

6:   review and update the customer journey and at each stage build clear processes including specific measurements for regular tracking of customer progress and, from that, feedback on the effectiveness of each stage

7:   using your Common Purpose, develop and communicate Core Messages across all activities within the business that can be used when inter-facing with the customer

8:  at every opportunity in the alignment process, emphasise the benefits to everyone from working together

9:   build campaigns where both teams are involved, have a common set of goals and can both equally celebrate success 

10:   set out an incentive plan which encourages each team to achieve their (agreed) key targets and enables them to properly and fairly participate in success.  

Some of this alignment can be achieved quickly, other parts will need time.  The degree of success will be determined by the way in which both the strategy and the processes are, at first, designed and communicated and, then, the ease in which they accommodate feedback from everyone involved.

Technology will be a key factor because your success will require a series of automated communication and measurement.