Sales Pipeline

Creating something beyond the pool of acceptable substitutes

This is the second part of the interview with Sean Doyle. We brought a couple of points back for context. We hope you take his points to heart regarding hiring a CMO, and the terminology used by Sales and Marketing - do they match?
4 Questions a CEO should know before hiring a CMO: You wouldn't hire your nephew out of high school to run your sales team, why do you do it to run  your marketing team and campaigns? 
"Here's another simple litmus test to sales and marketing have a common language, but what does sales call somebody who's at the point of action, they need a proposal. They want to know what it would look like to buy your product or service. What does marketing call that person? Just ask them those questions. If they don't even call a prospect the same thing, you don't have marketing alignment. If they don't understand what marketing alignment is at all, tell them, just Google it and start the journey. 

Why business owners tend to hit plateaus and struggle to grow.

Kevin McCann of the Executive Strategy Group, gives actionable logical, simple, but wildly important tips in this episodes. Here's one to start, if we take something just as fundamental your website. Take the first, top five pages of your website. Look at your navigation. Print out those pages. Go grab a yellow and green highlighter. You'll have to listen to this episode for the insights and assessment you can do right now.
Then, he praises one of his partners, HubSpot, but admits there is something missing. On the buyer persona, typically, it's, "Who is your ideal customer?" What vertical industry are they in? The standard demographic, size of company, title, revenue, growth, trajectory, vertical industry, et cetera. You'll have to listen to get the rest of what's missing and how he solves it with Revenue Growth Mastery 
He also goes through what is the REAL pain you are solving. It's not what you think 90% of the time. "The value of your offer needs to be relevant to the impact that the customer is experiencing with their challenge. Most sales reps totally miss that."

Actions Sales Leader Need to Take in a Recession

There have been only three recessions in the last 30 years, 1990 2001 and 2007, prior to the current COVID Crisis.* This makes it difficult for more than half of all sales managers to know what to do because they’ve had limited experience managing during a recession. Steve Benson of Badger Maps tells sales managers what actions to take during this current recession. This program is for sales and marketing managers.

If Marketing Owns the Pipeline is Management of the Sales Department Far Behind?

In recent years marketing has chipped away, usually unintentionally, at various steps of the sales pipeline to aid the salespeople. Most of this is made possible by marketing automation and telemarketing being managed by marketing. I respect, that the sales pipeline ownership has finally shifted from sales to marketing. Marketing in more sophisticated companies probably manages more than 50% of the pipeline steps now and to me, that means ownership has shifted.

Why Sales is Surrendering the Pipeline to Marketing

The sales pipeline, aka the sales funnel is the long-standing measurement of the past, present and future for a company.  In the not too distant past marketing dumped demand into the beginning (top) of the pipeline and sales took responsibility for the rest of the process. 

Marketing Drives the Pipeline and Owns It - Obermayer Podcast

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The sales pipeline, aka the sales funnel is the long-standing measurement of the past, present and future for a company.  In the not too distant past marketing dumped demand into the beginning (top) of the pipeline and sales took responsibility for the rest of the process.

How to Shorten the Sales Cycle

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Shortening a company’s sales cycle has an outsized impact on the business. It reduces a competitors market share, increases cash flow, reduces sales territory turn-over, and reinforces sales forecast accuracy,  but how to do it consistently is always the conundrum. Our host today on SLMA Radio is Dan Perry of the Brevet Group and his guest is a founding partner of the Brevet Group Brian Williams.  
They discuss:

Three Biggest Mistakes Sales Managers Make and How to fix Them – McClelland

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When revenue slumps everyone looks to the salespeople as not having performed, and yet the reasons are often deeper and have more to do with how the salespeople are managed. 

Who Owns the Pipeline. The Creators or the Closers

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The pipeline or sales funnel is evolving as marketing becomes more aggressive and sophisticated in the creation of not only sales leads, but qualified leads.  It only takes a view of sales funnel models to see that marketing has evolved from top of the funnel suppliers to active participants in many stages of the customer journey.  The question is, who owns the pipeline?   The creators or the closers?  Sometimes marketing is assuming both duties.  In B2C marketing is called upon to do both, in B2B not so much. 

Is Pipeline Ownership in Question? Hear from Jen Spencer

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Some say it is starting to get confusing as marketing assumes an ever increasing responsibility for parts of the sales pipeline; sales it seems is relinquishing areas it wants help with or doesn’t want to deal with. In this episode with Jen Spencer, Vice President of Smartbug Media, we try to understand the changing nature of these two departments which serve the prospect that holds the purse strings. The host is Jim Obermayer.