There is a glaring lack of collaboration between the sales and marketing teams of industry‐leading companies as they work to differentiate their solutions, according to recently released research from Corporate Visions, Inc., Incline Village, Nev.
According to the survey of 730 firms, one in three respondents said that their message creation process is non-‐collaborative, politically charged or nonexistent. Another third said that collaboration is there some of the time.
Companies said that they include field representatives in their sales and marketing meetings only 37 percent of the time (marketing associates were included 54 percent of the time). This is a critical oversight, according to Corporate Visions, because field representatives are often the people within the company with the most direct contact with customers. Of those with direct impact on the sales and marketing process, only c-level executives were included less often (27 percent) than field representatives.
The result of such a lack of a team effort, according to Corporate Visions, is that messaging and sales tools are created by accident. Only three percent of respondents said their company uses a repeatable process when creating content, messages and tools across the enterprise. Sixty-one percent said their companies do not use a repeatable process. Others said they include a repeatable process some of the time.
According to Corporate Visions, this means that most messaging and tools created to support sales teams are done more by accident than on purpose, and enterprises are risking inconsistent and diluted messages.
“The results of this quarter’s survey indicate that while some organizations are taking steps to better align sales and marketing, many continue to operate in inefficient silos,” said Tim Riesterer, Corporate Visions chief strategy and marketing officer, Corporate Visions. “Enterprises need to employ a cross-functional framework for message development where marketing and sales work together to create messaging that resonates with customers. The repeatable framework should begin with identifying the customer’s main goals, then pinpoint how these goals are at risk. These risks will redefine the customer’s needs that only your solution/service can meet, which in turn will help you create new, effective messages and tools for any campaign.”
Corporate Visions further suggests that companies “turn [the] message development model inside out with a repeatable, scalable method that goes beyond traditional value propositions and feature-advantage-benefit models to find your ‘value wedge.’”
Corporate Visions defines the value wedge as the sweet spot where a company solves a problem that the customer may not have even known about, didn’t appreciate, or didn’t understand the magnitude of.
“Most importantly, you need to tell the story of that problem and how you solve it better than the competition,” Corporate Visions added.