Your weekly disruption

Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.

Aligning Sales & Marketing to Drive Growth

With our 20+ years in both the Sales & Marketing arena the biggest challenge we see facing our clients is to align the requirements of both divisions. Especially now that most of us are back from our Summer break and New Year planning is upon us.

The need to work together has been around for a long time, but as we increasingly operate in a complex multi-channel environment, the pressure has never been greater to get it right. In what we may view as a bygone era, the Sales plan was just as pertinent as the Marketing Plan. It is where the great debates ensued. And great executions eventuated. To launch our series of blogs on this topic we are starting by looking at a couple of fictional scenarios: scenarios we often hear played back by our clients.

What would you do? How would you advise these colleagues? While the situations are fictitious, the issues are most definitely not.

Mathilda has just taken up a Senior Sales role with a clear remit to reignite growth.

“3 months in and I am encouraged to see that some of the traditional battle grounds between Sales & Marketing functions are being successfully navigated – particularly there is intent from the senior leaders on both sides to understand the needs of the other – but the reality is we are not enabling this within the wider teams with our current processes.

We have a real challenge around timings. Our Sales teams are having to develop Joint Business plans with customers at a point in the annual planning cycle when we have not even confirmed regional priorities, targets and plans let alone deployed them to the markets. Not only does it make it difficult to set meaningful targets and investment levels, it exposes us to potentially challenging conversations with customers through the year if plans change. From the discussions I have had with some of the Sales leaders their teams are struggling with the whole process and at the same time as being expected to deliver on increasingly stretching targets.

I have to find a way to make the strategy and planning process truly cross-functional and more aligned to customer lead times. The trouble is the business believes it is doing this already. I don’t think that talking more frequently is enough of an answer, but how do I go about taking it to the next level?”

James has recently joined a consumer packaged goods company as a Marketing Manager.

It is so frustrating: the stream of new brand initiatives we have is fantastic, we have really listened and acted on the feedback from the sales team & their customers about how uncompetitive we are, both in how much we invest and the rate at which we bring news to the category, but they are still not happy.

We have an outstanding plan for next year but all I hear is that the marketing teams are not realistic in what they expect the sales team to be able to deliver. “Shelves aren’t elastic” is constantly played back to me as I show the revised range and when I discuss my proposed promotional plan I am told it is not implementable in the current retail environment. The other pushback I get is “yours is not the only or the biggest launch I have to manage this cycle”. It’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate the constraints but it would help if Sales were clearer on their constraints and what they really needed up front.

I’m sure I could approach things differently but there is some helped needed from the senior people on the broader capacity issue. There seems to be little co-ordination across the business and brands, particularly in the regional teams, about the number of launches and activities feasible in a year with the resources we have locally. The tension is not apparent until we get to the execution stage in the local market.

What increases my frustration is that I feel that there is a solution to all this. People throughout the organisation, at all levels and across functions, need to find a way to work together more collaboratively. The question is how do we make this happen in a way that isn’t a talking shop, but genuinely makes it easier to activate our plans?

So what would you advise Mathilda and James to do?

Lessons from Real Life

New Product Development (NPD) is where most of the internal angst occurs. Numbers may be signed off 6-12 months by Marketing, Manufacturing, Finance in advance of launch of the Sales team. We recall a product launch in 2014 where the sales force had an agreed budget of 30,000 units per cycle. Budget cuts ensured that the planned TVC was canned which meant that three Major Accounts postponed executions; yet the 30,000 target remained. No wonder trust between Marketing & Sales often erodes.

A better way to treat NPD is that Marketing works on long-term brand plans from the existing range that ensures growth over and above requirements. Ditto for the Sales force as they look at Channel and Account plans. NPD should be the cream on top.

In terms of Customer planning it is often frustrating when both Senior Managers from both Marketing & Sales do not spend the time to be in trade. We worked with a global Tea Company where the plans were outstanding yet no one had ventured into the coal-face to understand the constraints at store level.

From the work we do with clients and our recent assessment of what it takes to effectively join up Marketing and Sales, we have identified a number of opportunities which if seized upon can drive incremental growth.

In Mathilda’s case the opportunity is to create a more joined up strategy and planning process where the customers’ requirements are built in much earlier and planning from brand to channel to customer is done collaboratively and iteratively. In James’ case the opportunity is to gain better cross-functional understanding and alignment to what it takes to successfully activate initiatives in the market.

Over the next few blogs we’ll be looking at what can be done in practice to tap into these and other opportunities.

Happy Weekend!