What high performing sales & marketing teams do differently (and what you can learn from them)

Running out of ideas on how to create more sales at your company? Do you think you know everything about B2B Sales & Marketing already?

Ever heard of BANT?

Budget Authority Timing Need – OK, fair enough, you got it! it’s how your Inside Sales Team will qualify a lead before passing it to the Sales team to continue its journey, hopefully, to close.

But how about MEDDIC?

Focusing on MEDDIC is what turned a million-dollar business into a billion-dollar business, according to Brian Halligan, founder, and CEO of Hubspot.

“From $0 to $100 million, [PTC was] successful because we sold a better widget,” HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan said. “From $100 million to $1 billion, we sold a shift in technology. MEDDIC became important because it’s not just any old purchase — it’s a transformation of the business.”

You should consider using MEDDIC as a qualification framework if your company sells a product that requires a transformation in behavior or the average sales price is incredibly high, as understanding exactly how a prospect buys, why they would buy, and who’s championing you internally is crucial to maintaining an accurate pipeline.

How about ‘Sales & Marketing alignment’? – Did you know that because of the massive changes in how B2B sales work, some companies are no longer separating sales from marketing? Yes, They work together in the same unit/department.

Two companies I’ve worked at that absolutely ‘nailed’ Sales and marketing were: Zscaler, founded in 2008 and now a $50 Billion company: And Visual IQ, founded in 2006 and was recently bought by Nielsen.

Both companies had a sales team and process that came from bigger organizations.

At Visual IQ, our entire sales team came from Adobe and used Adobe’s lead development methodology. We were closing millions of annual subscription deals with companies like Target, Crate & Barrel, Honda, Amex and Bank of America.

At Zscaler, our sales team came from big companies like Fortinet, Paolo Alto, VM Ware and Cisco. Our sales bible, from our CEO Jay Chaudhri, was ‘The Challenger Sale’. At Zscaler our team closed deals at Barclays Bank, Wonga and Coats while I was there.

Back in the 00s, everyone said that successful sales were about great relationship management – you’ wine and dine’ the prospect, make them feel special, and listen to their every whim.

But then came ‘The Challenger Sale‘

It revolutionized the way we look at sales

– A book based on hundreds of thousands of data points from hundreds of companies. The Team over at Corporate Executive Board made a breakthrough – ‘Relationship managers’ did not close the most sales. In fact, it was ‘Sales Challengers.’ What do Sales challengers do that’s so effective and different?

As a Challenger, you offer a new perspective to your prospect and don’t shy away from conversations about money. You understand what brings them value and leverage that information to deliver an irresistible pitch — and to pressure them tactfully. Remember the three T’s: You teach them something valuable, tailor the sales pitch, and take control of the conversation.

Here are the stats

40% of high sales performers primarily used a Challenger style.
High performers were more than 2x likely to use a Challenger approach than any other approach.
More than 50% of all-star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales.
Only 7% of top performers took a relationship-building approach — the worst-performing profile.

Another book that profoundly influenced me was ‘Inbound Marketing‘ by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, founders of Hubspot. I first read it in 2008, when I lived three blocks from the HubSpot HQ in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’d see Brian and his team in our local bar!

The first key point in the book is the importance of creating a marketing flywheel of resources that not only hit every channel but also hit each sales stage, as well as utilize every type of content out there, from ebooks to videos.

My second key point is the importance of almost zen-like communication between the marketing and sales teams.

You can do all the lead scoring, ABM campaigning, and predictive analytics you like but if your Sales & Marketing teams need to communicate more effectively, these strategies will have limited effects.

By ‘communicating’ I suggest having real conversations about how you work together – the pros and cons; Don’t be afraid to get down & dirty about what’s going wrong! Equally or even more importantly, make sure to celebrates what’s going right!

These exchanges require trust, honesty, and sharing vulnerabilities and mistakes. This requires psychological safety across the company. Even more importantly, this trust is built up over time. So if you have a bad culture and/or high turnover, that could be a problem.

At High-performance enterprise B2B companies I worked at, like Zscaler, Hansen Technologies, CloudSense and Tricentis, I met with our sales team & each salesperson once a week. We reviewed their target accounts and devised approaches and campaigns based on those conversations.

At Visual IQ, not a week went past that I did not talk to at least three VPs of Sales at some length about their targets and how to accomplish them.

Why is it important to hold Your Teams Accountable With a Service-Level Agreement?

The Sales and Marketing SLA

An SLA agreement between a service provider and its customer guarantees a specific output. When it comes to sales and marketing, this is a two-way agreement, with marketing promising a certain number of leads to sales and sales promising to contact those leads within a defined timeframe.

In this activity, you’ll need your sales data for an entire year divided into quarters. You’ll need to know the following:

● How many qualified leads did you generate?

● How many of them became sales opportunities?

● How many of those opportunities are closed to create new customers?

● What was the value of each sale?

A typical SLA:

Every month, marketing will deliver ______ qualified leads to sales, and sales will contact each lead within _____ hours of receiving it.

An SLA like that puts you in the top 5% of companies. But you can be even better than that.

The Judicial Branch

Sales and Marketing often jostle on almost every issue that crosses both functions. A typical conversation may sound something like this:

Salesperson: the leads this quarter were weak. That’s why I missed my target

Marketer: What are you talking about? The leads this quarter are better than ever!

Now, this is a very simplistic way of demonstrating the problem. It may be similar to what I experienced at an Enterprise software company a few years ago.

Marketing had generated a lead through an event, which we then marketed to, mainly through email and some Google ad retargeting. Finally, about nine months after this event, the lead broke through and eventually became a sale – one of almost $5 million (annual license).

While attributing the lead, the salesperson claimed that this was a contact he had been networking with during this time; the lead was, in fact, a friend of his of over five years standing. This situation can be quite commonplace in industries like Telecommunications, or Insurance, which are amazingly incestuous; everyone seems to know everyone.

How did we solve this conflict? The Chief Commercial Officer split the lead source between sales and marketing generated.

However, I recommend having someone outside sales and marketing make these decisions (as recommended by Hubspot). For the judicial branch to be effective, it’s paramount that its members are unbiased and focused on what’s best for the company.