The Keys to the Kingdom

by David Parris and Susan Ellsworth

Like having a baby, it's easy to conceive and sometimes hard to deliver but absolutely doable and worth the time and effort. What is it?

It's aligning your company's marketing and sales agendas with corporate goals---and then growing success by supporting the company with business tools that meet those corporate goals.

Consider Sam's Custom Software Solutions. SCSS measures its sales team with quarterly and annual sales volume goals. They also measure profitability on each sale and will not accept a deal that falls below the baseline. The SCSS Sales group successfully signs up a lot of small clients interested in Sam's custom business solutions and achieves its sales objectives. However, SCSS management is still unhappy with the bottom line numbers at the end of the year. Why is that? The sales group did everything it was asked to do, but Sam's most profitable market segment consists of large companies needing project based solutions. Selling a large number of small businesses custom software solutions that outstripped the ability of SCSS programming and customer service engineers to deliver a quality product in a timely way created backlogs, overtime, missed deadlines and, ultimately, a sub-standard outcome for both the company and clients. Those profitable clients were rapidly becoming former clients.

What does it take to turn that situation around?

Creating and communicating a vision that is translated to day to day goals and objectives is a first step. If a company determines that it needs sales growth, profitability, and customer loyalty in order to be successful, it needs to make sure that its sales team has a strategy reflecting those critical success factors. A successful strategy includes team-building and getting your sales staff to perform in a way that reflects corporate goals. This means teambuilding not just with other sales staff but with every staff likely to be in contact with your customers. In most organizations, this includes everyone who answers an outside telephone call.

A second step is to provide business tools that help corporate managers analyze and guide that sales process as needed. Such business tools are centrally located, enable quick review of not only day to day activity but also the larger picture of the direction that sales are taking. On a daily basis, this can mean immediate shared access to faxes and eMail, notes regarding client phone calls and meetings. This kind of access is particularly important when sales staff are on the road and may not be able to access easily the needed resources for the very important top officer who calls your office. This is when you want whoever answers that telephone call, receives a fax or sees an eMail to be able to access information related to that customer and provide needed information.

Technologies such as the GoldMine Business Contact Manager and the Microsoft Customer Relationship Manager facilitate alignment of sales/marketing goals with corporate goals because management can see where sales and projects are going. Organizational change to align sales goals with corporate goals can mean that you will still do some of the things you already know how to do, but you will have to do them better. You may have to do some things differently. You may even have to learn some new skills and techniques.

Yes, aligning your company's marketing and sales agendas with corporate goals---and then growing success by supporting your company's goals with business tools that meet those corporate goals is absolutely doable and worth the time and effort.

August 2003

Revised 2007