The Emerging No-Man’s Land between Sales and Marketing

The Emerging No-Man’s Land between Sales and Marketing:

(this is a guest post by Taylor Mitchell of our sister program for Sales executives, the Sales Executive Council. It originally appeared on their blog.)

A fundamental shift in customer buying behavior has created a rift where Sales and Marketing have traditionally engaged customers. This void in the purchase process where customers are free from supplier engagement, a “no-man’s land” so to speak, has several implications on what successful selling looks like in today’s environment, but one of the more immediate concerns is that most suppliers haven’t fully recognized the shift has even occurred

This lack of awareness could partly be blamed on the fact that there is significant internal confusion in supplier organizations over the ownership of certain commercial responsibilities. Data from the MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic illustrates that companies don’t have a good sense of which function, Sales or Marketing, owns some of the most important commercial activities—almost 70% of the member companies surveyed were unsure of who owned the insight generation responsibility, for instance.

As such, many sales organizations lack the scalable organizational support reps need to successfully sell in today’s environment, and are therefore leaving individual reps to do much of the heavy lifting themselves.

What makes matters even more difficult for sellers, and sales organizations alike, is the fact that buyers are not contacting suppliers until they are, on average, 57% of the way through their purchase process —meaning they have already determined their needs, completed due diligence, and have even begun to do some comparison shopping.

Given that this emerging commercial rift or “no-man’s land” is essentially enabling customers to make purchase decisions without supplier influence, it is all the more important that suppliers alter their strategies to drive customer engagement at the earliest, most formative stages of a sale and shape customer demand.

The SEC is focusing on just this in our forthcoming 2012 research. Initial findings suggest that the best companies are developing an organizational capability spanning both marketing and sales to generate unique insight, develop scalable commercial messaging based of that insight, and to generate leads/select opportunities based on customer receptiveness to that insight. By doing so, these companies are able to successfully support their sellers in engaging customers early and shaping their demand.

What is your organization doing to tackle no-man’s land and increasing buyer sophistication? Does developing an organizational capability to generate unique insight and support sellers sound like the right approach to you?