9 Lessons from 20 years in B2B BDM, Marketing and Sales.

What's the secret to business success? 

If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships and you'd be wrong. The classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. 

This is exactly 20 years that I’m jumping between Business Development, Sales and Marketing and here are the 9 biggest lessons my career has taught me:

1. The best marketers never stop listening to customers.

In my experience, the best marketers I know are the ones who are always listening to customers. Customer-centric marketing uses personalized messages, products, content, and more to ensure the consumer is getting exactly what they’re looking for. This is marketing at its best: simple and approachable messaging that your buyer understands.

2. The best salespeople never compete.

Easy to sell when there is no competition, but nowadays it is also rare in this hyper-competitive world. The biggest difference between the best salespeople and everyone else is how they handle competitive opportunities. The best salespeople care more about selling solutions than selling products, they never got into a “feature comparison.” Focused on the customer, they spent time listening and deeply understand the customer’s business and need. According to my sales experience, it’s always about how the product can solve the needs of the client, so if you’re pulling up your feature comparison doc thinking you’re going to win a deal, you’ve already lost.

3. Sales and marketing share the same target.

Both sales and marketing teams want the same things. They just have different ways of saying it. Sales talks about opportunities, pipeline and quota. Marketing talks about leads and the funnel. At their core, those things are the same. My advice is to have a fully aligned, hybrid sales and marketing team that put your organization in the best position.

4. Never underestimate the power of storytelling.

Not a percentage, not a robot, not a “conversion ratio” but a human in the end is buying from us. So marketers, salespeople, customers, we’re all human — and there’s nothing more human than a story. A customer story shares a real-life experience that someone has had with your brand. It makes people who aren’t yet customers say: “hey – I can see myself in that story. We can do that too!”

5. Marketers should think about products the way salespeople do.

In sales the best salespeople understood what they were selling, deeply. Most of the time, in my experience, marketers are not nearly as well-versed in the products as they are in marketing. To be a better marketer it is necessary to know your products or service as well as anyone in sales.

6. Salespeople should leverage marketing roles.

Under the marketing umbrella we have different activities and functions like, branding, public relations, lead generation, product marketing, marketing operations, and more. Each of these it has own specialization and often takes years to become an expert in. The best salespeople understand how to work with each marketing function and take advantage of the skills and different capabilities when needed.

7. Marketers should spend more time with salespeople.

Every salesperson you meet is under a lot of pressure to meet their quota and close deals. Continuing tasks like cold calling, meetings, updating CRM – it is hard. Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically or complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate. My suggestion for marketers is to spend a day shadowing a salesperson on their team. They’ll have an entirely new perspective for how hard their job is, and they may come away with a few things you can do as a marketer to help them. 

8. Salespeople should spend more time with marketers.

Salespeople think marketing is lightweight and easy, most of the time they think marketing is for people who couldn’t sell. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creating content, managing customer relationships, building campaigns, measuring leads etc, marketing is more science than art, with buyer persona research, market research, audience segmentation and much more. The modern salespeople understand that marketing is fundamental for the sales results and a health dialog only helps both team.

9. Best Marketers and Sales understand that growing is business for “two”.

Today, sales is parts of the wider marketing mix, and marketing is directly accountable in sales process. Due to sales automation tools like CRM and marketing software, you’re now able to making the whole process more data driven. The top sales and best marketers understand that positioning the customers journey like make the difference.