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Coordination between a company’s sales force and its marketing department sometimes requres direct and active intervention. Christine Crandell, who is currently executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera, was previously a marketing VP for Ariba, where she learned first-hand about bringing the two functions together.
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By Christine Crandell
Not long after I assumed the role of vice president for marketing at Ariba, Inc. in the Fall of 2005, I came face to face with one of the challenges marketing executives fear the most. There was a discernible rift between sales and marketing that not only fostered an uncomfortable work environment, but negatively impacted sales revenue and Ariba’s ability to gain further market share. I decided that if the company was to assume an industry leadership position, then I needed to focus most of my energy on turning this ambiguous relationship into an aligned relationship. It was a journey that would take the next two years.
By any measure, Ariba, is now considered the world leader in spend management. Founded in 1996, the company helps its customers analyze, understand, and manage their corporate spending in order to increase cost savings and improve business process efficiency. Offering a combination of software, services, consulting, and an integrated supplier network, Ariba provides a total approach to optimizing spend management processes and building lasting supplier relationships. The average sales cycle is six to nine months and Ariba applications currently operate on nearly four million desktops around the world.
Initially, both sales and marketing mounted significant resistance to any change to their organizational structure and working model. But the existing situation was untenable. Marketing operated within autonomous geographic regions where they were independently funded and ran without corporate oversight. Sales and marketing lacked any common plans, shared goals, common vocabulary, or documented processes. It was only through perseverance and unwavering support from executive management that the alignment process succeeded. And it took a real shift in thinking and repeated demonstrations of the success of the program before both organizations understood the value of the alignment. Once it kicked in, though, the culture shift was both dramatic and lasting.
Re-Engineer and Re-Focus
Our first objective was to create a global marketing organization and define new cross-functional roles and responsibilities. So in early 2006, I proposed that executive management launch a “Re-Engineering and Refocusing” program to merge the company’s marketing resources into a common structure and integrate the regional marketing campaigns. The program resulted in a complete overhaul of all marketing processes, skills, and lead management. We then established field marketing roles and embedded them within the field sales team using a matrix structure reporting to both marketing and sales leadership. Next, we gave field marketing teams responsibility for lead management, field coordination, and communication. Although field sales welcomed marketing’s engagement, both sales and marketing continued to complain about “their style being cramped.” Patience and perseverance were the watchwords.
In 2007, after completing the reorganization, I unveiled the next phase of the alignment program which integrated the common processes, systems, and reporting model across worldwide sales and marketing. Together, the organizations created a working model in which they defined shared roles and responsibilities, a common vocabulary, and acceptable hand-off points. The two organizations also established campaign councils along with regional campaign and sales dashboards viewable in Salesforce.com.
Using this data, the company’s sales and marketing leadership generated monthly metric report cards. Although this sudden openness drew complaints from sales, the reports did begin to highlight inefficiencies in both sales and marketing. To mitigate the resistance, I convinced management to designate alignment champions who were instrumental in helping sales accept the new transparency and stimulate changes in its own processes and structure. By identifying these champions within the field, we were slowly able to bring about a key culture shift.
Meanwhile, marketing was not immune from changes they considered unpleasant. We identified marketing roles that were critical to selling and I took the position that anyone from marketing with a role tied to finding and nurturing leads or closing sales opportunities should have their compensation structure coincide with that of sales. Consequently, and despite marketing’s resistance, executive management agreed to tie marketing performance bonuses to sales revenue targets. With the ongoing and visible support from the CEO we were able to calm fears and move further on down the alignment path.
During the final stages of the reorganization, we completely reengineered sales training into a curriculum-based, mixed-mode program that leveraged adult learning principles and technologies. For example, we developed common Individual Learning Plans for sales and marketing and annually assessed both groups for competency and skill development. We then restructured the sales support team into a shared service so that they could provide consistent support to all sales teams around the world. This new process brought higher quality and consistency to RFPs, sales help desk response, and demos. As a consequence of the alignment, Ariba, in 2007, reported the single largest increase in sales pipeline AND marketing mindshare within target markets in the company’s history.
Lessons Learned and Conclusions
We learned several lessons during two-year alignment program:
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New sales people need to be educated and often sold on the merits of alignment. This requires a constant education process and the need for field sales champions.
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M&A activities disrupt the alignment process and need to be factored into the integration planning.
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Missed revenue targets can often trigger a lapse back to a previous stage in the alignment progression.
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Marketing’s shift to a Customer Centric Marketing Organization model often leaves sales feeling territorial about their ownership of customer relationships.
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Moving along the path to alignment requires exceptional staff and passion in addition to extreme technology automation.
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Building and maintaining trust at the account executive level is constant challenge.
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Reorganizing marketing or sales does not produce alignment; a cultural and structural change does
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Don’t underestimate the need for emotional commitment and tenacity on the part of sales and marketing
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Strong, friendly peer relationship between sales and marketing leadership is a critical success factor
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Consistent and visible support by the CEO is instrumental in removing barriers and diffusing organizational pushback
In the final analysis, the alignment process at Ariba was a hard-won success. But the beginning of 2008 found the company with common processes and systems implemented across worldwide sales and marketing. As a result of the alignment, marketing contributed 75 percent of net new business… 80 percent of leads were followed-up… and marketing contributed about $200M to the pipeline.
The theme for 2008 turned to “Evolution and Connectedness,” with a goal to remove the remaining boundaries between sales and marketing – a goal that management clearly recognizes as long-term. During that year, and for the first time, sales and marketing embarked on fiscal year planning in a cooperative spirit, setting mutual metrics for both groups. Together they established processes for monitoring the full life cycle of campaigns using lead follow-up and pipeline velocity. And in a move to further improve revenue, sales embedded liaisons on a rotating basis into marketing groups such as training, campaigns/demand generation, and customer advocacy. Field marketing has evolved from a tactical role into a strategic one that advises sales leadership on account white spaces, industry growth trends, sales competency, and morale issues.
And as a final salute to success, both teams have jointly developed and accepted a common reward structure.
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About the Author
Christine Crandell is executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera, Inc., a provider of data center infrastructure technology. In this role, she is responsible for the company’s business development, alliances and global market strategy. Ms. Crandell brings more than 20 years of experience in strategic marketing for enterprise technology companies including Ariba, SAP, Oracle and PriceWaterhouse. She is based in California and a frequent speaker and writer on marketing, strategy and technology. She can be reached at
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