I have conducted sales and marketing program reviews with over 100 organizations in the past twenty four months as the CEO of FullFunnel, and have gathered tremendous perspective in the process. We begin all of our client engagements with some form of qualitative and quantitative analysis of their existing sales and marketing programs, as well as a deep dive into the hurdles and challenges that our partner organizations face. This level of analysis is an exceptionally valuable exercise, yet few organizations commit to it all, and even fewer do so on an annual basis. With all that company leadership has to do, I understand why taking a step back and being overly critical about your company’s sales and marketing program gets put on the back burner more often than not. Ignoring such an exercise, however, can be significantly detrimental to both the short and long-term viability of your organization.
Throughout the 100+ audits that FullFunnel has conducted, a few common themes seem to be plaguing sales and marketing organizations of all shapes and sizes. These themes are valuable areas of focus for an annual program review should you chose to conduct one yourself. Start by forming a focus group of sales and marketing stakeholders and conduct a review on these four areas:
The foundation of every productive sales and marketing program is the infrastructure on which the program is built. This platform infrastructure, often called the “Tech Stack,” is typically comprised of a website (or CMS), CRM, and marketing automation platform, but can scale to include a variety of other platforms, such as analytics, testing and optimization, sales enablement, and more. First, the company must take a review of their website and its form and function.
Website:
CRM:
Marketing Automation Platform (MAP):
When reviewing your current team, make sure you’re asking the following:
Having the proper systems and people in place are two pillars to a successful customer acquisition program, but without solid, repeatable process the program will not scale. Make sure you’re asking the following process related questions:
Even if their Platform, People, and Process are optimized, organizations may still not achieve the level of performance they truly desire. When reviewing your program performance, be sure to break activities up by how they align with the sales funnel, and ask your stakeholder team the following questions:
Top of the Funnel:
Middle of the Funnel:
Bottom of the Funnel:
In a utopian scenario, an organization’s sales and marketing programs would be constantly evolving and optimizing. Similar to how a pharmaceutical company invests heavily in research & development, marketing and sales teams should be constantly investing in R&D, testing, and experimenting to deliver the greatest return on deployed capital you can. Unfortunately, for many executives and owners, “fire fighting” other aspects of the business often begets sales and marketing focus, and this can cause customer acquisition programs to become stagnant, innovation to slow, and results suffer.
If you think your sales and marketing program needs a thorough evaluation and course adjustment, please request a consultation.