Podcast interview with Andy Paul

He’s has been heroically publishing a daily podcast episode under the Accelerate banner and Andy recently invited me to join his show. We had a ranging discussion about sales and marketing alignment which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Here are the highlights:

  • Sales people want to tell their story before the buyer is ready to hear it. The buyer’s journey gets gazumped by the seller’s process.
  • A sales person needs to know as much as they can about what each buyer already thinks, and Marketing can help.
  • Sales and Marketing don’t need to understand how to do each others’ roles, they just need to respect each others’ role and agree how and when to hand over.
  • Companies we’ve studied follow a predictable path around building great processes:
    1. Sales gets one;
    2. Marketing gets one (but it’s different);
    3. They build a single process together; then
    4. They use data to optimise that sales and marketing process
  • We saw from the data in our last alignment study – jointly published with Marketo – that businesses enjoy different and surprising benefits at each stage:
    1. Sales process delivers better lead acceptance (MQL to SQL ratios), but not better closure rates;
    2. Marketing process doesn’t deliver more leads, but does deliver leads with higher closure rates;
    3. A single process delivers better lead acceptance (no surprise there); and
    4. An optimised process delivers even better acceptance but also kicks Marketing’s contribution to revenue.

Get your own optimised sales and marketing process

Funnel Plan helps you build a process together, then to optimise it with performance data. It gives you great videos on how to think about all of the key questions, places to answer those questions and then a way of distilling them and communicating your answers in Funnel Plan. If you’ve already got a Funnel Plan, you know all that. If you don’t, go get one now. Get yourself a Funnel Plan and wrestle all those questions together with your colleagues

I’ve got loads lined up for you for next week, and until then, may your funnel be full and always full.

Our thanks, this week to:

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