Albert (Ally) Motz

Ally is a senior sales, marketing and general management executive with more than 20 years experience spearheading the rapid and sustained growth of b-to-b organizations. Ally has a high level of proficiency in launching new ventures and developing growth strategies, including market share enhancement, market expansion and new market segment penetration. He is skilled at working with senior executives to identify and align strategic and financial goals to improve company performance.

Ally gained his expertise in formulating business strategy, developing senior executive relationships, consultative selling, and setting up and motivating effective sales teams during his highly successful career in several leadership roles. Prior to founding SiriusDecisions Canada, Ally was Country Manager for Gartner, where he led the company's Canadian subsidiary to record sales (400 percent growth to 41M), increased profits and world-class client retention results. During his tenure he orchestrated and executed a growth strategy focused on market expansion, new client acquisition, account growth, executive-level relationship development and client loyalty.

At Pitney Bowes, Ally was a top performing sales manager and the senior project manager responsible for the company's first foray into customer relationship management. As general manager at Carpita, he oversaw the company's successful expansion of large-scale retail operations.

Ally has an extensive network of influential senior-level contacts in Fortune 500 companies, as well as in large government organizations. He sits on numerous committees of key business and industry associations, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and industry association events. Ally is the Vice-Chair of the Canadian Marketing Association’s B-to-B Council.

Canadian B-to-B Sales and Marketing Integration Survey

The words “sales” and “marketing” are generally spoken of in the same breath, as their goals should be nearly identical: To get new customers, and to retain and grow current ones. Unfortunately, the reality of the relationship between the two functions in most organizations ranges from strained to working at cross purposes. In an effort to drive better insights into the relationship between the sales and marketing functions of B-to-B organizations across Canada, the Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) recently joined forces with the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA), and SiriusDecisions, and launched an exclusive survey. The B-to-B Sales and Marketing Integration Survey uncovered a wealth of exclusive data and knowledge about the efforts and results being achieved by Canadian companies. Here we present the executive summary of findings and insight from the survey.

Communications: One of the key indicators we wanted to probe was the perceived willingness of marketing and sales staff to make their counterparts successful. Respondents reported a general willingness to make the other group successful (57% Yes, 35% 50/50). However as we’ve observed with hundreds of organizations, the greatest challenges to sales and marketing integration are the lack of integrated processes, effective measurement and goal alignment.

The majority of respondents have formal processes in place for regular communications between sales and marketing (63%). But are they the right processes for effective demand creation and lead management? Are roles and responsibilities clear? Are definitions and handoffs clear? Do sales and marketing have common goals in mind?

Goals: When asked to identify their most important goals, marketing respondents indicated that they are clearly focused on lead/demand generation activities (39%) followed by branding/advertising/PR (28%) and product development/launch/introduction (10%). However, it is rather surprising to see that so little attention and focus is being applied to improving relations and collaboration with sales (7%).

On the sales side, it’s no surprise that sales groups are clearly focused on attaining their revenue growth target (35%) followed by increase/grow revenue from existing accounts (27%) and cultivate new accounts/segments (18%). However, it is rather concerning to see so little attention is being applied to improving sales efficiency and productivity (8%).

It appears that despite their willingness to help their counterparts be successful, marketing and sales are focusing on “more of the same” rather than improving what they do and how they do it.

Lead Generation: Since lead generation and development are key areas of integration between sales and marketing, we asked respondents about their efforts in these areas. The majority of respondents admit that their sales and marketing groups spend less than half of their time working together as part of their lead process (56%).

Expectations are a key part of the equation. We asked sales professionals about their expectations for marketing’s contribution as a percentage of pipeline, the responses reveal that dependence on marketing contributed leads runs the gambit. Most interesting are the more than 15% of respondents that expect marketing to contribute more than 41% of the sales pipeline. SiriusDecisions research indicates that for most companies, that expectation is unreasonably optimistic and can lead to a poor view of marketing if it fails to deliver. Perhaps with such high expectations of marketing‘s contribution to the pipeline, it is not surprising that almost two thirds of respondents rated their marketing group’s efforts as less than good.

The end results of efforts are dependent on skills, resources, processes, and collaboration. Many of marketing efforts and subsequent results can be traced directly to an organizations’ demand creation strategy. The data collected indicates that there is plenty of room for improving respondents’ lead qualification and handling processes. It is not just a matter of getting more leads into the sales process, but getting better qualified leads into the hands of the sales force.

Campaigns: With such high expectations for marketing sourced leads, why do more than two thirds of respondents commission less than five lead generation campaigns each year? But the end goal should not be only to run more campaigns. Sales and marketing must work together to segment and target their efforts to result in better lead qualification and conversion rates from first inquiry to closed sale.

Customer Buying Process: The old approach still in place at many organizations is to align efforts, knowledge and collateral to specific stages of the selling cycle. But increasingly, best practice companies have shown that understanding and aligning with the customer’s buying process is far more important. When asked about this, more than 75% of respondents reported that their selling process is not fully aligned with the customer’s buying process. Just as there is much work to do around the lead definition and management process, and better target campaigns, sales needs to improve their understanding of an alignment with their customers’ buying process.

Recommendations: Based on the analysis of the data and information collected from this survey, we present the following 5 key recommendations:

1. Sales and marketing Integration will only work with buy in and leadership from senior marketing and sales management.
2. Alignment begins by identifying the strategies, processes and systems which must work together.
3. Organizations need to reconcile their current sales process with their customer’s buying process. Use the customer buying cycle as a tool to communicate with marketing.
4. Sales needs to agree with marketing on the lead types that need to be created, the lead definitions, and the actions sales will take with leads provided to them.
5. Organizations need to focus on improving campaign and program efficiency. Improved sales and marketing effectiveness can benefit from collecting proven, effective processes and best practices into marketing and sales playbooks.

Gazing into Marketing Technology’s Future

Clever marketing slogans and tantalizing sales pitches aside, most b-to-b marketing executives realize by now that technology alone won’t chase away their demons. But with a growing need to be systematic, repeatable and measurable in nearly everything they do, finding ways to weave technology’s science around sound process certainly can help keep these demons at bay. Driving maximum value from marketing technology typically comes down to making smarter investment decisions with limited budgets; basically, prioritizing efforts in five key areas that will drive the greatest incremental return.

One: Unified Customer Database
Ah, data quality issues…the bane of many a b-to-b marketer’s existence. Bad data that results in inaccurate records that leads to lost responses, redundant marketing efforts, wasted resources, incorrectly routed leads and frustrated sales reps. Compounding the issue for most organizations is the fact that the problem is far from confined; it spreads across a vast network of disparate databases and spreadsheets. The solution still revolves around the idea of a unified customer database to create visibility into the status and disposition of every prospect and customer across the enterprise, but the application is becoming less pie-in-the-sky.

Two: Enterprise Marketing Management
Coupled with an organization’s need to track and quantify ROI on its marketing investment, economic realities have made it critical for marketers to show their impact on an organization’s bottom line. As a result, a new class of technologies known as enterprise marketing management (EMM) has emerged; EMM combines a marketing automation platform with marketing resource management (MRM) and business intelligence functionality to provide deeper visibility and reporting into all marketing activities, from planning and budgeting to execution and management.

Three: Lead Nurturing
I have witnessed many times the downside of a one-and-done approach to demand creation, where a marketing function interacts with a prospect a single time, then forwards responses to sales and pushes non-responders back to the starting gate to wait for the next campaign. The world of b-to-b demand creation is not nearly so black and white; prospects will have varying degrees of interest depending on where they are in their buying cycle; this interest must be captured and advanced over a period of time. Campaign and lead management solutions that allow you to assign scores to a variety of attributes and activities and to define a series of business rules for further action help “evolve” a prospect by knowing where they are now, and knowing what to do next.

Four: Dashboards
With their ability to provide visibility and actionable analytics across distributed enterprise applications through a single Web-based interface, dashboards continue to draw attention from marketing executives. This promised visibility depends to a large degree on the ability of the dashboard’s underlying technology to not only aggregate outputs from various systems, but to provide analytics and insight that helps executives to modify strategies, tactics and processes for better results.

Five: Sales Systems Integration
Although many organizations are making progress around the strategic and tactical alignment of sales and marketing, the integration of sales and marketing technology has been slower to come about. For the most part, visibility across the demand creation and lead management spectrum has revolved around an examination of CRM-generated data, which is limited due to both a lack of sales adoption and integration with other marketing applications. The use of the CRM system as the system of record for contact data with bi-directional feeds of data is the first step of many to begin to bring the technological worlds of sales and marketing together. Tighter integration between sales and marketing processes will require more systems than just CRM, however. Customized sales communication (CSC) systems used to organize and deliver collateral and tools for sales to drive its opportunities, have the added advantage of allowing marketing to see and understand how content is being used. Marketing and sales leaders also can work together to determine which sales productivity and accounting systems should be integrated with marketing technologies such as territory management and opportunity management systems.

Historically, there has been hesitancy on the part of marketers to embrace technology, as it was often assumed that it would result in a loss of control. But after years of manual business processes and a reliance on decisions made by other parts of the organization regarding the systems they can use and have access to, leading marketers use technology as a key component of their evolution and their relationship with sales.

Marketing In a Down Economy

Though the severity, depth and timing of any economic softening remains up for some debate, that doesn’t mean that chief marketing officers should sit idly by and wait for the debate to settle. Four strategic imperatives can help shelter the marketing function from a downturn of any size and scope, and better prepare it for rapid growth when the curve turns northward again.

ONE: MARKET DATA
Over the past six years, many marketing functions have made significant strides not only in their contribution to the business, but in their ability to reliably gather data and information that can be used to show why slashing marketing spend is the last thing their organizations should do in tough times.

Customer attitudes/satisfaction: By collecting insight on customer attitudes and behaviors, you can help to determine whether the slowdown so widely trumpeted in the mainstream news is affecting your corner of the world. You can assess their attitudes about your offerings, and their current satisfaction levels. You may find you won’t likely be dragged down as much as the herd, and overcorrecting in terms of greatly reducing spend would result in an awful lot of opportunity lost.

Market intelligence: Syndicated and primary research for the marketplaces you are currently targeting can help shed light on whether those markets will suffer more or less as a result of general softening.

Demand creation/pipeline: Many b-to-b organizations have begun to track an overall demand funnel from cold to close incorporating both demand creation and sales pipeline metrics. The data now pouring out of these funnels can help business forecast slowdowns long before deals stall or turn into losses in the historically sales-dominated portion of the pipeline.

TWO: RETENTION
While marketers have grown accustomed to the majority of their efforts to be focused around selling to new prospects, in a slowdown it is critical to keep what you already have, and use this base as a key target for continued growth.

Segmentation/marketing mix: A down economy requires additional work with sales to determine which segments and specific customers are in trouble; on the flip side, opportunities for growth as a result of conditions should also be identified.

Account-based marketing: For accounts with significant retention challenges, developing account-specific marketing plans and assigning dedicated marketing resources to the cooperative execution of these plans with sales can be very effective.

THREE: SALES ALIGNMENT
Marketers in a down economy that work hard to draw their function even closer toward sales have a better chance not only to survive, but to thrive.

Marketing sourced pipeline: Closely monitoring the percentage of sales pipeline uniquely driven by marketing, as well as the organization’s pipeline-to-quota ratio is critical in any economy, but takes on new meaning in one that is slowing.

Sales playbooks: A sales playbook takes an often-overwhelming amount of marketing-created information and distills it into a series of “plays” that can be applied to help facilitate specific stages of buying processes for specific audiences within target markets.

FOUR: MARKET POSITIONING
One of the marketing areas that can suffer the most during a down economy is reputation, due to its general difficulty of measurement and activities that were often unlinked to other marketing efforts. But such a blanket reduction in funding will undoubtedly hurt your demand creation efforts, as it is the influencers in your markets that do the best job convincing constituents that certain projects, products and services are truly need-to-haves.

Public relations: Develop a map of key press targets, feeding them customer stories of cost savings and innovative productivity demonstrated by your customer base, or perhaps showing information from a user conference that highlights customers bucking the recession/slowdown trend.

Analyst relations: Analysts often play a significant role at the beginning of buying cycles (helping their clients determine which problems they should solve) and toward the end of these cycles (helping differentiate vendors from one another).

Social media: Social media is now a way of life for many b-to-b marketers and salespeople. Blogs are a perfect example of the way that traditional media and new media are crossing, as influential bloggers should be identified, targeted, fed content, data and observations even in advance of traditional media to cause buzz prior to mass release. By positioning yourself as a peer to your buyers, you become a go-to outlet for information on a regular basis.

If there is one theme that crosses all four of these key areas, it is to be proactive. Plan and communicate well enough, and that CFO might just go knocking on someone else’s door.

Social Media in B-to-B

As more b-to-b organizations explore social media as a way to raise awareness and create demand, they must first understand what is shaping the social media landscape. According to our research, roughly 50% of b-to-b organizations are utilizing some type of social media, reallocating a portion of their traditional media spend to do so. We’ve identified 8 categories of social media that can influence b-to-b marketing efforts including:

1. Blogs. Web logs or journals that allow readers to comment on and create links to and from other entries or posts. Primarily text, blogs can also include video or sound files.
2. Social networks. There are two types of social networks. Online communities such as MySpace and Facebook allow users to post profiles about themselves and connect with others, while professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and Jigsaw enable users to link to others through their association with friends or colleagues.
3. Forums. These message boards were first seen in the 1980s, where users with similar interests exchange messages. Most forums are moderated and focused on a particular topic or function.
4. Podcasts. Syndicated or subscription-based digital media files that can be downloaded or streamed, providing automatic distribution of new content. Podcasts can be audio-only, or include video.
5. Media sharing. Sites that let users upload, download, link to, comment on and rate digital media such as videos and images.
6. Web feeds. Content data format that notifies users when updates are available; these users then click through to the new content.
7. Wikis. Collaborative documents that are created using a Web browser. Contributors can add, delete or edit content, and notify other authors of their changes.
8. Social bookmarks. Sites such as del.icio.us and Digg that enable users to store and share Web bookmarks typically organized by tags into lists. Bookmarks can be public, private or restricted to a certain group; users can rate and recommend bookmarks, and many bookmark sites provide Web feeds to notify subscribers of updates.

While the “cool factor” of these social media types make many of us want to try them all, the impact and value of each type varies dramatically. I have no doubt that social media can be a valuable addition to the b-to-b marketing arsenal, particularly to grow brand awareness, increase customer loyalty and enable knowledge sharing both internally and among our customers. Demand creation, however, is more of a stretch, certainly for those organizations that do not closely adhere to social media’s rules of the road.

Under Marketing’s Influence

With marketing now involved in more tasks from cold to close than ever before, it's time to re-examine the potential span of its influence, and in turn how this influence should be pursued and reported up to the higher levels of the organization.

It’s often easy for marketing leaders to become so fixated on having to generate a tangible “lead” with everything they sponsor in order to justify its cost, but this ignores critical areas of influence that must be sponsored, actively driven and measured. The four types of influence include:

Sourced. The generation of an opportunity that can be tracked back to a marketing-sponsored program.

Recycled. Leads that should be recycled back into marketing for additional nurturing/management until they exhibit certain characteristics or behaviors, thus reducing lead waste.

Touched. A hybrid of programs and support designed to help others source and migrate opportunities.

Facilitated. The targeting of and messaging to the sources that are internal or external to an organization that play an advisory (but not final decisionmaking) role at key junctures in a buying cycle.

By changing the paradigm on which we evaluate marketing’s influence, we widen its charter and provide additional opportunities for it to make a difference.