In my last blog post, I introduced our newest research findings on sales culture, and how most sales organizations today have a sales culture or climate that is hindering their ability to build a Challenger sales force. Most sales leaders recognize that while traditional change management initiatives such as effective training, coaching, and communication campaigns are required to embed new behaviors, change is destined to fail if it’s not supported by the right sales environment.

In fact, when we asked reps what’s preventing them from adopting new sales behaviors; over half of them reported their operating environment or culture as the biggest inhibitor of behavior change. And when you look at the cartoon illustration below, it is easy to understand why.

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Source: Sales Leadership Council

After hosting a Forrester webinar on April 25 about “3 Ways To Turn Content Marketing into Thought Leadership“, I received some interesting questions from clients. I thought I would share the questions — and a short response to each – since this line of inquiry points to broader question about the role of public relations (PR) in content marketing generally and thought leadership marketing specifically.

Here’s the Q&A I found intriguing:

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Source: Forrester 

Assuming your sales process is reasonably effective and you have strong alignment between the sales and marketing team, how do you find a chief sales officer that will outlast the current average tenure of 18 months?  While it is important to identify a handful of highly qualified candidates it’s even more important to focus on several key questions during the actual face-to-face interview process.

Consider these provocative interview questions during your next CSO search.

Do you believe in having sales reps do cold calls?

This may sound like a trick question but it should cause the applicant to inquire regarding the status of your internal lead generation activities. If your candidate says that all leads should be generated through rep cold calls then he or she is likely very old school and may not embrace best practice lead generation methodologies. While cold calling is not dead in all industries, best in class companies use a variety of techniques to provide their selling teams with highly qualified leads.

What is the ideal relationship between sales and marketing?

It’s not just about brand and brochures anymore, and the ideal candidate will understand the critical role the marketing team plays in helping their sales team succeed.  It’s true that sales reps are responsible for building strong pipelines but savvy sales leaders know that getting a steady stream of warm prospects in the hands of their reps is the best way to build a qualified pipeline quickly.

They should ask about the current relationship between the groups and should have some concrete ideas on ways to help foster better relationships in the near and long term.  Collaboration between the teams is more than just attending joint meetings, there should be common definitions of what qualified leads look like and also response time commitments from sales once a warm lead has been passed.

What is the best way to align compensation plans between the sales and marketing teams?

If marketing and sales have a common goal of turning qualified leads into qualified opportunities and ultimately into closed business, it only makes sense to have both organizations incentive goals closely aligned.  The sales leader candidate should ask how the organizations goals are currently aligned and be prepared to offer suggestions on how more closely aligned compensation can drive the needed behaviors to increase new business bookings.  Strong sales leaders know that variable compensation is what pushes high performing sales people to go the extra mile to finish a deal, without a strong marketing team backing them up the task is sometimes impossible.

Hiring a sales leader is often one of the most challenging efforts for a CEO; it takes quite a lot of effort to screen out the poorly qualified candidates and find the winners worth interviewing.  Engage your executive leadership as part of the process and don’t be afraid to ask what may feel to be unconventional questions, it’s time to close your revolving sales door.

There are quite a few studies showing that companies publishing more blog posts and more content in general equates to generating more business than those that don’t.

I suppose if you’re starting from scratch, adding any kind of content has the potential to improve a company’s ability to attract people seeking to buy.  Since content creation is one of the biggest obstacles to companies realizing gains with content marketing, it’s no wonder that advice about how to produce articles, blog posts, infographics, white papers, and visual marketing has become so popular.

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Source: Top Rank

Between 2002 and 2012, the shareholder return of the average airline company rose an uninspiring 5.6% a year. Diversified consumer services were a notch lower, gaining just 4.2% a year. Worst of all were computers and peripherals companies, with a 3% average annual return — barely the rate of inflation in many parts of the world.

It was just lousy timing if you happened to be in one of these industries, which were all in the bottom quartile of total shareholder returns (share price change plus dividends paid) in the 10 years through 2012.

However, one thing you can probably count on, if you are in one of these industries, is that average TSRs in your sector will be better in the next 10 years. Perhaps by a lot.

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Source: Harvard Business Review

There are a lot of misconceptions about how to sell effectively. Some people dive in with just one goal in mind: to close the deal. Others wing it and hope that their charm, talent and knowledge of the product or service they are pushing will get them the sale. A few salespeople even think the best thing is to call a prospect repeatedly until they get an answer. Wrong. Sales pros talk about how the best salespeople make the sale.

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Source: Forbes

Database intelligence and list source providers are everywhere. They play an important role in an overall data management strategy. Even with ongoing inbound contact capture efforts from websites, social media, and events like trade shows, it makes sense to occasionally add fresh contacts from a reputable source.

The problem is filtering through the plethora of list providers to find the right fit for your requirements. Each vendor comes with their own set of advantages and potential problems.

Here is some of the criteria points I recommend when selecting a list and a data source provider.

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Source: Heinz Marketing

I attended a local Sales and Marketing executive meeting recently that featured a guest speaker on the subject of effective hiring practices.   Having been in sales and sales leadership positions my entire career I have interviewed my share of sales candidates and almost did not stay for the presentation, but I am glad I did!  As the presentation unfolded it became clear I had picked up some bad interviewing habits over the years and my candidate search planning was still in the sales 1.0 world.  Since the goal is to attract great candidates I realized my processes needed some improvement.

Most importantly, according to Brad Smart at www.TopGrading.com, the cost of a bad sales hire is 24X compensation, so making a bad-hiring decision can cost your firm millions of dollars!

Primary Steps for an Effective Sales Candidate Search:

• Search planning
• Attracting well qualified candidates
• The interview process
• Successfully closing the candidate

Search Planning

Search planning starts by developing the job specification.  This includes defining the primary duties and responsibilities of the position, reporting structures, resources and associated budgets.  It also includes developing a compelling company story and the ideal candidate background.  Make sure you are realistic about the requirements of the position, and accurate with your company story and facts.

Attracting Qualified Candidates

Attracting qualified candidates can be accomplished using a variety of resources – both internal and external.  You may have internal candidates that are qualified for your position.  Internal candidates may have much faster ramp up time as they already possess knowledge of your products/services and understand the company culture.  Externally, targeting competing industries and companies is an effective way of sourcing candidates.  Using tools such as LinkedIn including LinkedIn Groups and ZoomInfo can greatly increase your visibility to a potential candidate and their background.

Two common mistakes when sourcing candidates are not evaluating enough candidates and not creating a compelling company story.  Also realize that depending on the level of sales person you are hiring you will need to screen between 50 and 100 applicants to find the right one, so be prepared to do your background work.

Interview Process

The interview process is typically the most trusted candidate selection methodology and may be the least reliable.  Interviews rarely reflect real live situations and don’t show the candidate’s true patterns of behavior.  Some studies have suggested that 80% of hiring decisions are made in the first 10 minutes of an interview.  (That is a startling statistic considering that in such a short time you may approve a bad hire that takes months to recover from – or pass on an ideal candidate who ends up selling for your competitor).

When interviewing, make sure to follow the criteria for candidate selection you developed during your search planning process.  Separate the ‘must haves’ from the ‘nice to haves’.  Also, spend time exploring past success and failures of the candidate, as habits of success and failure are often indicators of future performance.  Reviewing past W2?s is a must – ask for at least the last three years.   Discussing references during the interview is also important.   Personal references are always biased so make it clear that you intend on speaking with past reporting managers as to the specifics of their duties, achievements, and ability to work internally with peers.  Overly cautious responses can be a red flag and what isn’t said can sometimes be more telling than what is said.

Closing the Candidate

Once you’ve found your ideal candidate how do you close the sale?   Hopefully you had discussion regarding compensation as soon as both parties established interest.   Discuss with the candidate the reasons they have for leaving their current position to join your firm.  Have they reached the top of the career ladder, are they looking for an opportunity to build a new team?   Does your firm command a leading position in your market?

Whatever the reasons, you have to assume that your candidate is going to receive a counter offer from their current employer.  Talk about the likelihood for a counter offer openly with the candidate but rest assured that by pre-determining the candidate’s motivation to make a move you have a higher probability of closure.   Don’t get into a salary bidding war but do leave yourself a little room to maneuver from a salary and compensation perspective.

Yes it takes commitment, but effective hiring requires a significant investment in time and resources.  Just remember that assembling a team of “A” players is your best avenue to a successful 2013.

Ask CMOs what tops their challenges list, and most admit that improving marketing’s accountability ranks right up there.

B2B marketing execs worry about measuring marketing performance a bit more than B2C since a direct sales force and/or channel partners are largely responsible for the last mile of the customer purchase process.  

Managing marketing performance is a perennial issue all marketers face.

Unlike revenue growth or margin, there are few accepted answers to the question, “What value does the business get from your marketing investment?” Typical answers focus on pipeline, which Sales then hotly contests.

Email marketing is a mature marketing tactic, yet I don’t believe B2B organizations are capitalizing on its potential to generate leads.

I realized this when I read MarketingSherpa’s just-released 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. They surveyed 594 B2B and B2G marketers, of which just about half send out 10,000 to 10 million emails every month. The top priority for the entire group is to deliver highly relevant emails – it ranks above even driving website traffic and revenue.

This makes sense, considering highly relevant email will achieve the other two goals.

But, I wonder how easily they can create highly relevant emails when only 15% reported they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process, as you can see in the below chart.

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Source: B2B Lead Blog