Motivated a little by my prior post on using blogging to imbue culture, I have a post over at my 21Publish blog to try to imbue some culture (in the public eye) on people performing inside sales and marketing functions at 21Publish. As I’ve mentioned before, the sales process and the role of cold calling (if any) depends on what type of product or service is being sold. There is also a lot of detail on optimizing sales operations which I do not go into on this post. Yet some may be able to imagine how things need to be segmented out so that skillsets of employees are used properly and so that customer prospects are engaged the way they want to be engaged.
Update (9/30/05) – Here’s a snip of a blog post I did about a year ago that sheds some light on different sales processes as related to the type of product being sold. I believe sales operations is something that every entrepreneur and general manager should better understand …
Where things can go awry is in the implementation of marketing and sales operations, and I’ll only address two activities for brevity: cold calling and networking. A popular saying is that networking is the most effective way to generate sales. While I think this is true, I think that such thinking ignores some underlying core concepts. Better understanding the core concepts is helpful because a spectrum of marketing and sales techniques may be used in an organization.On one end of the spectrum, cold calling operations are generally better for those types of offerings that are more commoditized, common, and well-defined. Cold calling operations are also better for those cases where the customer’s problems are not that confidential. Thus, as you can imagine, since customer prospects can be contacted at any moment by telemarketers (aside from do not call regulations), if the prospect has a common and well-defined problem, there is very little risk to having an unknown, telemarketer give the sales pitch to them.
On the other end of the spectrum, problems of an infrequent nature and with a confidential slant to them (e.g., merger integration, company turnaround, new business launch) – these types of problems are better matched to sales and marketing processes involving networks. Use of networks and trusted people are the people that get invited to the party. Since problems faced by customer prospects are more confidential and infrequent, networks serve as feelers into the marketplace for suppliers.
So this is just another way of thinking about sales and marketing. At which end of the spectrum do your products and services sit? Do you have multiple products that require different operations? Does a blend apply? What should the balance be?