First, and most importantly, please have a wonderful, warm and safe holiday!  I'd like to thank you for your support, your notes, and the agreements...and disagreements... with my weekly ramblings.  Hopefully, there have been a few takeaways this year that you've been able put to use to increase your own sales and marketing productivity, which brings me to today's subject of "just getting along".  

-This is not about the wars, since neither I nor you can make much of an impact.
-This is not about the backstabbing of the self-righteous Washington politicos.
-This is not about troubled personal relationships.  Fixing Washington might be easier.

The 20% Factor 

What this is about is a few ideas as to how to negotiate the divide, build a bridge and bring together the too-often warring factions of Sales & Marketing into an honest and openly transparent relationship focused on the success of the overall company's results and the health of our existing customers.

• "I would have made my quota if I had gotten better leads."
• "We gave you more leads than we agreed to."
• "The copy content we received was worthless."
• "The blogs and social posts were lame."
  

-90% of Sales & Marketing managers point to disconnects on strategy and tactics.

-50% of B2B companies have "serious" disconnects. 

-20% of our management time is spent just talking about the problem.

-7 hours every week is spent by salespeople reworking or creating Marketing content. 

Right now, it's too late in the month to do anything about this or refocus any of our management talent to even discuss this in December.  However, as we think ahead to our January sales meetings, the most refreshing strategy that we could introduce in 2024 would be to make impactful statements acknowledging the problem while providing a specific a plan as to exactly how we are going to fix the disconnects and build a bridge rather than continuing to walk on eggshells around the problem. 

5 Ideas to think about over the Break: 

• Openly communicate that there's a problem and fixing it in 2024 is a primary company objective.
• Create a task force of the CEO, the heads of Sales and Marketing, and someone else-maybe the CFO or head of IT because of the need for quick data and comparative analytics and commit to meeting formally once a week to share insights, updates, and feedback.
• Create clear, shared goals and objectives between the departments. Common outcomes around the company's business plan for revenue, margin, customer acquisition numbers and costs.
• Consistently and transparently publish everywhere all the Sales and Marketing metrics of MQLs, SQLs, or whatever KPIs you have.
• Tie portions of annual bonuses for the entire management team to the same KPIs.
  
  

2024 SALES PLANNING 

Check out our updated sales productivity site page.  Just page down to get our 2023 edition of 
Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023. Or you can just email me, and I'll send you a free copy.  

We will be issuing our updated 2024 edition at the end of the first week of January. 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.