Four of the best and brightest marketing and sales people share how they’ve gone about loosening the status quo and moving deals forward.
—————————————————————————————
“Making Power Positioning and Power Tools Your Company’s Messaging Culture”
Eryn Del Castillo, VP Sales Operations Advanced MD, ADP
Slides withheld at speaker’s request. Please email conference@corporatevisions.com with any specific questions.
Power Positioning at ADP by the numbers:
143 closed deals in the pilot region
$4.6M incremental revenue
90 day period
40 number of times replicated across the organization
How ADP is using Power Positions in marketing and campaigns:
Lead gen: Align scripting and talk tracks with how buyer responds initially.
Digital marketing: Emphasize Power Positions and POVs in those areas. Tweets, website, infographics. Aligned with corporate marketing and PR.
Business Unit: Run marketing and events at a local level. Have seen a lot of success passing Power Positioning information off to the business unit and them creating competitive messaging for that business unit.
Sales effectiveness: Making sure people on team are extremely field relevant.
Eryn talks about ADP’s field readiness kits, which are clickable PDFs. They make it easy to navigate the sales process. The messaging and Power Positions are embedded. Salespeople can get what they need to move the sale forward. ADP wants to make sure a new hire has just as much of a chance to close a deal as a seasoned rep.
—————————————————————————————
“Aligning Messages, Tools and Skills Training”
Kevin Joyce, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Miranda Technologies
Kevin sets the stage by establishing that there are basically seven different “species” of job functions in the room (marketing, marketing opps, sales, finance, etc.). He then talks about the “Tower of Babble” and how the tower failed because everyone was speaking different languages. He says that’s essentially what typically happens with all of the different species in a company. He then asks us to imagine what would happen if all of the different species spoke the same language. He helped Miranda do that. “It’s wicked hard,” he says, but can transform the culture of a company.
Kevin joined Miranda from a completely different industry and took over sales and marketing. The company was stagnated and he soon realized it was not just about sales and marketing – they had an enterprise-wide issue. He thought, “if we could get this whole organization speaking the same language, we could transform the company.”
They engaged with Corporate Visions and brought all the stakeholders to a three day session. They came up with a great message and differentiation and then brought it to the sales force who was resistant at first. But they started to believe when they saw the change. Six words changed the culture of Miranda, says Kevin. “Is this unique, important and defendable?” Results were black and white. The top Power Messaging users were selling 30 percent more revenue in four months and the deals were twice as big.
“This is a cultural transformation and if you can get your company to buy into it, you’ll be great.”
—————————————————————————————
“Developing Distinct Point of View as Foundation for All Product Stories”
Rick Weber, Vice President of Marketing, Added Value Services, ADP
Slide deck
ADP developed POVs for each of the eight lines of business in Added Value Services (AVS). As Rick says, “Power Messaging is now in our DNA.” AVS had a fragmented marketing program. Now they make sure Power Messaging is in place before any products are launched. There is consistency across everything: sales talk tracks, tools and campaigns, thought leadership, PR, advertising, live events, client and internal communications, and digital.
Once they had their Power Positioning, they first overhauled their brochures to align with Power Positioning. They incorporated grabbers, pain point, impact, contrast and proof. Next, they moved to advertising and redid it based on Power Positioning. One of their revamped ads recently won a best ad award. They also weaved it into sales campaigns.
To help train sales in Power Positioning and how it’s laid out, they held an online competition called AVS Idol. 200 people presented to 50 idol judges. They also worked a lot with the online channel. They use POV searches to develop keywords. They can track a keyword to a sale. All marketing programs now have a digital component that they can track to ROI.
They’re working on getting more traction through social channels. They’re running social media throughout the organization, calling it social selling. They serve up tweets to the sales force, which the sales force can tweet out as their own.
After Power Positioning, ADP’s AVS group is:
– Creating awareness of AVS product and services
– Putting clients’ objectives first
– Understanding their differentiators
– Generating revenue online
– Delivering tools that sales uses!
And, according to Rick, marketing has the “strongest partnership with the sales organization that I’ve ever had.”
—————————————————————————————
“Aligning Marketing Communications with Sales Enablement to Increase Impact”
Tracey Fanelli, SVP, Marketing and Communications, Wells Fargo
Slide deck
Tracey was asked by her sales organization to make them “more customer-focused,” use more pictures, less words. They decided to engage with Corporate Visions.
How they started:
– Started small with one topic area
– Pilot training
– Tailored materials
– Train again
– Message again
These are the lessons that she took away from that process:
Lesson #1: Look deeper than the initial request you have from your sales organization. What is he/she really asking and wanting?
Lesson #2: Test, refine and test again. See if it works with a small part of the organization and then roll it out bigger.
Lesson #3: Find your advocates. Seek, find and leverage the advocates you have in the organization.
Lesson #4: Money talks. They incented the sales force.
Lesson #5: Marketing owns the message. For consistency, marketing should be the creator and sustainer of the messages.
Tracy mentions 57 percent. What is it? Customers are 57 percent through the sales process before they ever engage a salesperson. Customers are choosing to delay conversations with suppliers. They’re getting information from your website, attending industry conferences, reading long before they reach out to you.
“…the goal of collaboration is not collaboration, it’s better results.” Morten Hansen