The Man from SPIT (Sales Performance Improvement Technologies) glared at the sales team with a look of distaste and suspicion as if he smelt something obnoxiously odorous and couldn’t quite locate the offending source or orifice.
“I want you to forget everything you know about selling” he began “because let’s be frank – since over 80% of you are under 50% of your sales quota there isn’t much you need to forget…right?”
OK…he was right…but it’s not as we hadn’t tried….
First we hired a mega-name-global-consulting-shop with patented sales pursuit and account mining methodologies. They assaulted us with Powerpointed process frameworks and Einsteinian win-factor algorithms and account planning templates that would give the Indian annual budget document an inferiority complex in terms of girth, weight and opacity….
Then we ran all-night strategy workshops where the algorithms churned out unnerving sales growth numbers by substituting facts with factors and experience with Excel.
Totally exhausted, we then waited with baited breath and fevered brow for the sales graph to go off the charts …but the patented methodologies, Powerpointed frameworks and Einsteinian algorithms somehow just didn’t work.
So we went back to mega-name-global-consulting shop…
Give us our money back we said…you sold us a real bill of goods…
They said their methodologies and templates are field-proven and best-of-breed (I know… sounds like sheepdogs). It’s just that you guys don’t know how to fill’em in properly they said….
So after some toing-and-froing they sent in a senior TOE (Template Optimization Expert) – a 13 year-old ivy-league MBA who was actually 51 but was presumably Botox-injected up to his receding hairline.
The TOE ran another bunch of all-night workshops and the sales numbers grew even scarier…it was now clear that there was no way we could keep the annual growth below 100% no matter what we did to screw it up….
So once again we waited with baited breath and you-know-what….but somehow we didmanage to screw it up cause the sales graph continued to flat-line.
Deputy God was hopping mad.
“Do you know” he rasped “what the problem is”
You may have expected a question mark at the end of the rasp…right?
Wrong! Because when Deputy God asks a question you’re supposed to figure out hisanswer.
The ‘problem’ of course – at least to all us non-gods – was that nothing had changed.
But that wasn’t the right answer because that wasn’t the problem that was pissing him off.
His problem was that DG (i.e. Deputy God – his shirt-cuff monogram) was running out of vent-worthy targets, which usually consisted of the 3 P’s – People, Process and Prospects.
He started with People.
So he launched into one of his mind-numbing babblogues – i.e. babbling monologue
Nothing’s happening because we don’t have the right People he said
All our sales guys are old school…we need the new school…he concluded.
Consultative selling…domain knowledge…industry expertise…vertical-specific solutions
C-level connects and relationships….ability to map and navigate long complex sales cycles…
So we went and got the right People from the very best talent pool the US had to offer…from Accenture, Cap Gemini, PWc and IBM….you name ‘em we head-hunted ‘em
Vertical Experience Business Heads, Client Partners, Domain & Subject Matter Experts, Solution Architects, Innovation Mavens….we got ‘em all
But still nothing changed
So then we went hammer-and-tongs after the Process.
The mega-name-global consulting shop returned triumphantly with their much-vaunted PEST (Process Efficiency Solutions Team) to implement the latest mobile-enabled Sales Automation and CRM Platforms. As if that wasn’t enough we also got seamlessly integrated state-of-the-art Sales and Customer Analytics Tools that daily vomited terabytes of data that confused and scared the living daylights out of everyone.
But still nothing happened…
Again at the end of the year over 80% of the Sales team were under 50% of the sales quota.
So it came down to the final ‘P’ – Prospects
“Our prospect-base is pathetic” DG thundered having exhausted all the other targets.
“If they only knew how great we are they’d be falling over each other to sign us up”
So obviously the prospects didn’t know how great we are ‘cause they weren’t even willing to empanel us – forget about sending us any RFP’s!!
But unlike People and Process you couldn’t keep changing or re-engineering Prospects…
So apart from bitching about them there wasn’t much else he could do.
So either DG could go back to wailing about ineffective People or inefficient Processes or he could find a new target to vent his spleen on.
It must have felt like Archimedes trying to figure out the adulteration in the king’s golden crown.
And when the blinding revelation came, he didn’t run naked down the street yelling ‘Eureka. Eureka!’, but instead paced up and down in his office muttering ‘Marketing! Marketing!’
“No wonder” he mused wonderingly “all this time we’ve been looking at the wrong places “
After all, he reasoned, if Prospects don’t know how great we are and are not falling over each other to sign us up whose fault is it? MARKETING!
If Sales people can’t sell it means they are not being enabled and supported effectively. And who is supposed to enable and support Sales? MARKETING!
Who is supposed to extract instantly actionable insights from the daily vomited terabytes of data that will transform every under 50% sales quota seller into a dizzying over performer? You guessed it – MARKETING! Ergo, Marketing Isn’t Working!
Before I go any further it is perhaps worth noting that this marketing-isn’t-working subroutine is nothing unique. Every company I have worked in, once every 3 years or so this very same finger-pointing tub thumper happens. I realize of course that this may well be due to the fact that I stink at Marketing.
Years ago I worked – only for a while mind you – in a cigarette company. Three months after joining I launched my first brand targeted at the eastern markets in India. Within a week of the launch the tobacco in the cigarettes began to moulder and emit a distinctly sulfurous odour when lit. The company’s blend-master was a non-smoking chemistry PhD who previously worked at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (Nuclear to Nicotine – talk about slippery slopes!) Well since you couldn’t smoke a cigarette without lighting it you can imagine how rapidly sales of the newly launched brand went to hell in a hand-basket. The Managing Director was however totally unfazed. Marketing, he said, will brilliantly spin the sulfurous odour into an aspirational brand differentiator and drive the sales right back up.
And when that didn’t happen one guess what did happen – that’s right: Marketing Isn’t Working!
Actually, thinking about it in retrospect I have to confess that it’s a rod that Marketing made for its own back. The fact is in the past marketing leveraged the information imbalance that that existed between the enterprise and the consumer – i.e. the average consumer had little or no capability of factually unraveling the marketing ‘spin’. And of course marketers projected this information imbalance enabled ‘spinning’ ability as proof of their omniscience and virility and enterprises often happily bought into that marketing-propagated myth. So on occasions when the spin didn’t work the obvious conclusion was – you guessed it – Marketing Isn’t Working!
Today, avariety of factors ranging from the buying behavior and the burgeoning buying power of the digital generation, empowered and emboldened by infinite information availability and the viral percolation of social media mean that marketing as we knew it will very shortly be no longer known.
So from that perspective Marketing will no longer be working.
According to a recent BCG survey of US listed companies 1 out of 3 are unlikely to exist within the next 5 years. 50 years ago that number was 1 out of 20. This over 650% increase in corporate mortality is in no small way caused by the digital impact both in terms of the technologies as well as the expanding generation of digital consumers.
For longer than I care to remember, Marketing has been projected and perceived as exciting and sexy; creative and strategic. The reality is – in both B-2-B and B-2-C spaces – that as clients and consumers become more knowledgeable through access to ever more volumes of information, marketing has to be more tactical and transactional; more data and metrics rather than concept and creative driven; more dynamic and responsive rather than strategic and floating at 30000 feet.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that there is no need for strategy. But what it does mean is that marketing strategy needs to factor in the exponential paradigm shift that is impacting every enterprise and industry. It needs to recognize that the jealously-guarded information imbalance has at least equalized if not reversed and understand the consequences of that grim reality. While businesses for years have piously chanted ‘The Customer Is King’ (in reality of course we were nothing more than un/mis/semi informed peasants with spending power) the fact is today even an individual consumer is endowed with the truly regal powers of information-enabled choice and social-media enabled mass influence. And if enterprises forget that fact even for an instant and suffer the consequences, you are sure to hear the tub-thumping wail rising from the corporate ramparts: Marketing Isn’t Working!