Sales is not always about selling a product or service. Sales is about selling ideas, next steps and risk. Marketing is not all about creating qualified leads. Marketing is about influencing and nurturing opportunities from pre-pipeline, as they progress and into post-sale. Sales and Marketing have a common end goal, but operate over different timelines and objectives.

Every interaction and step of the sales process should create an idea in the minds of the audience that aligns to an outcome you want to engineer. Any marketing or sales campaign that does not address all three of these requirements will miss its potential. The goal is to create inception in the mind of the audience for an idea that ticks three needs.

Effective teams always pull in the same direction. They may have diverse skills, experiences, specialities or outlooks, but they always align in the areas that it matters in. No tug-of-war team has ever won where half the squad is pulling against the rest of the team. Marketing is a Sales efficiency engine and yet too often these organisations have too little understanding of each other’s challenges, constraints and value to be able to see the common linkages between their worlds.

An organisation’s revenue can be said to primarily come from four sources: landing new customers, retaining those existing customers, upselling additional services to them and cross-selling to new buyers within a customer ecosystem. Understanding those objectives and intentional, strategic planning at scale is the foundation of integrated marketing.

Enterprise B2B purchases are often described as ‘complex sales’ because they have many moving parts and take time to complete. An impulse purchase in a store requires only you, the buyer, to make a decision. In a complex sale, many stakeholders will have inputs and criteria that need to be met meaning that purchasing decisions are commonly made by a buying group. Too often buyer persona analysis focuses on the individuals within a decision rather than trying to understand the dynamic of the group.

When it comes to hitting a revenue target there are four levers at Sales’ disposal: increase the volume of deals you win, increase the value of deals you win, increase the win-rate of your deals, decrease the time it takes to win deals. These four levers can be worked individually or collectively by both Sales and Marketing and systematic joint planning of interactions, initiatives and incentives can support moving the needle. What’s important is to be clear on your goal.

Most publicly traded enterprise organisations look at goal attainment on a quarterly cadence as this aligns with their reporting obligations. Quarterly reporting needs to announce the revenue earned in that quarter and new business closed, quarterly profitability, forecasts of future revenue, growth and profitability.

A net new customer is any buying group within an organisation you have not sold to before. An upsell is an additional solution sold to a buying group you have already sold to in an existing customer. And a cross-sell is a new solution to a buying group you have not sold to in an existing customer.

What you do with deals that are won is well documented, but deals that are lost should not be forgotten. Ask yourself: why would a prospect chose a solution that doesn’t have your strengths, doesn’t deliver as much value and doesn’t meet the biggest needs of their business? When you know the answer, plan what you’re going to do about it?

To be an effective tool, sales funnels require clear definitions against which opportunities can be classified. Sales stages are used to calculate weighted pipeline for forecasting, and when sales data is accurately classified it can be analysed to identify bottlenecks, issues or opportunities. Predictable revenue and new business is foundational to business planning and reporting.

Targets motivate behaviour. Rarely is there a greater expression of targets driving behaviour than in a Sales function. Sales teams are different in every organisation, but in general Sales prioritise their effort based upon the same basic criteria. They are an excellent example of prioritisation and should be applauded for their simplicity and focus but can also lead to unplanned consequences and misaligned activity.