The three-headed sales beast
You all know the story of two wolves we all have inside of us. The good and the bad ones. And the moral of the story is that the one you are feeding better is winning.
Well now imagine you have two mythical monsters one good and one bad and both have three heads. Imagine how difficult it is to feed all three heads and make sure that you are feeding the good one.
Today’s selling organization is a three-headed monster. You can name it Cerberus, after the three-headed dog that guarded the Underworld. Its heads are: marketing, sales, and customer service. The only way to win in today’s sales game is to keep feeding the right monster and make sure that the three heads work together and don’t bite each other.
Achieving a symbiotic relationship between the heads and keeping the dog running in the right direction is the task of revenue-generating management. Usually, this was the CEO’s task, since he was the only one having the overview and incentive to coordinate all three functions. Some organizations are trying to delegate the responsibilities to CRO (chief revenue officer). The reality is that, as long as you don’t build a cohesive cooperative organization that will work as one, no matter how “title hierarchy” looks like, you will be feeding the “bad” dog.
Why the three heads should work together
Because they will fail individually. Marketing will never create proper demand, without feedback from sales (regarding the market and customer environment) and customer service (regarding the credibility of value proposition and customer reality). Sales will never be relevant without marketing (creating proper content and messaging based on “best marketing practices” and valuable insights regarding trends and industry) and customer services (delivering agreed upon level of services and benefit and impact expected by customers). Customer services will have a hard time delivering what is promised if marketing (creating unreasonable expectations) and sales (overpromising to close) will not work as part of the team but as the other team.
How the three heads should work together
First, establish a culture where each project from the awareness building to implementing and upgrading is one project. If you have guts, build teams around projects, not verticals and functions.
Second create metrics that will reflect a single responsibility no matter which part of one customer project you are covering.
Third, start removing all friction points the customer is facing on its journey from awareness to living with your solution and upgrading it. Reward the whole team for improving customer journeys.
What you can do as director of sales (be Hercules)
Your role as a leader is “building bridges”. You need to build at least two. One inside your team. And the second one between three heads. If you fail in either of them, you will fail as a leader and director of sales. Because you will fail your boss, the customer.
There are two important insights you must possess.
- One is to understand the input your marketing needs from your sales organization to create customer-relevant, market-valuable, and company-unique content and communication.
- The second one is to understand the risk-adjusted and process-oriented profile of your service organization so that you can run sales practices, that will work on their strengths and reduce their deficiency.
How does a good Cerberus look like
The Cerberus is a mighty beast, but only if all three heads are looking in the same direction and they are each fed consistently. If each member of all the organizations (marketing, sales, and customer service) is asking him/herself the question: “Is what I am going to do right now aligned with the goals and abilities of the other two organizations?”, then you have nothing to worry about.
How can you start
The first step you can take as CEO or someone responsible for revenue operations is to check what your organization looks like towards the customer journey. If you see the separation of duties in the process that is felt by customers and friction in the end-to-end journey, start creating a single process. Start removing frictions and involve people based on their contribution to improved customer experience, and not based on “titles”.
Give teams common goals and give them autonomy to get things done.
