Integrate Sales and Marketing Work Streams

Kevin Price of The Price of Business discusses synchronizing sales and marketing teams with Lin Fisher of Baker Communications

[Kevin Price]:  Welcome back to the “Price of Business.”  I am your host Kevin Price.  It is the show that never ends.  What does that mean?  Well, it continues 24/7 at Priceofbusiness.com where you find original video.  My price points are there.  I talk about all kinds of stuff.  What’s wrong with journalism?  What’s going on with the economy?  What we learned from the Massachusetts Senate race.  It also has original articles, of course archives of previous shows.  If you missed a show you can always catch it.  You can catch the show again right there at the Price of Business.  Great articles. Excellent articles by our contributors, including the folks at Baker Communications, of which we have a spokesperson here today.  Lin Fisher, you’ve been on before.  Good to have you on again.  And I am sorry.  You know what?  It’d be good if I hit that button.  How are you Lin?

[Lin Fisher]:  I’m doing great Kevin.  Great to be here. 

[KP]:  Hey, I’ve only been doing…Hey, this is my 20 year learning how to do this experience.  I’ll get it eventually.  Yeah, you gotta hit that little button there.  So, good to have you on and you’ve got a guest of your own.  Introduce us to Gary

[LF]:  Sure.  Great to have Gary Pawlaczyk on.  He’s our, one of our customers for the last six years.  He is the executive Vice President of sales and marketing for Cadmus Communications which is Cenveo Company.

[KP]:  Yup

[LF]:  And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Cenveo, they’re a publically traded company in the commercial printing and fulfillment business.  About two billion dollars in sales. 

[KP]:  Great.  Now let me just…right from the very beginning tell you, I’ve gotten some great feedback on the segments that we’ve been doing with you and of course Walter Rogers is the regular here on Wednesday, but one of the things that people keep saying is: Hey, you know what?  We don’t do CRM for a living, but it’s a part of what we do.  Take that message to where they can appreciate it.  So, I want us to really work on that this segment.  Let’s really get this down to where the decision makers out there can really value what we have to bring today.  So, let’s jump right in.  What’s our focus here today?

[LF]:  Our topic today is going to be focused on the benefits and challenges companies face when integrating their sales and marketing work streams.  Really what that means Kevin is how do you get these two teams to not only think and act as one , but to literally synchronize their activities using a CRM system as the conduit. 

[KP]:  Okay.  So integrating sales and…?

[LF]:  marketing work streams.

[KP]:  Got it.  And the deal is, is that it’s amazing because those two seem to be mirrors of one another, but the reality is that there’s always turf battles virtually every aspect of the business including the sales and marketing.

[LF]:  You know, you hit the nail right on the head Kevin.  There’s no bigger sales effectiveness obstacle in most sales organizations than the disconnect between sales and marketing.  And that can come from a variety of different challenges and essentially the difference is they have very different DNA and as an example, these organizations report to different executives, they are pursuing slightly different goals and they are using different metrics to gauge success.  So, you know, it doesn’t surprise anybody at the end of the day that both these organizations are trying to generate revenue that there’s going to be some conflicts given that circumstance.

[KP]:  Got it.  Got it.  So this properly implemented CRM system will help overcome those situations.

[LF]:  Yup, absolutely.  There’s a conduit that we can use around the system of customer relationship management that can actually synchronize both groups activities to get to the singular outcome.  You know, one of the great things that Gary has been able to achieve over his career is to actually get ahead of the curve and integrate these two different disciplines to the benefit of what we all care about which is generating revenue.  So I wanted to give him a quick second to chime in on—

[KP]:  Absolutely.

[LF]:  marketing and sales integration.

[KP]:  Welcome to the program Gary

[Gary Pawlaczyk]:    Kevin, it’s a pleasure to be here and Lin thank you for asking me to join.  Just, Kevin, to pick up on what Lin was saying, you know, through my career and the ups and downs in the economy…you know, when you look at the  two sides of what marketing is, the first is brand management.  It’s creating a perception in the marketplace about your brand.  The second is something that most people don’t think about.  It’s really the sales engine that is behind the sales organization of a company that really becomes the heartbeat of the way that that company operates and so many times marketing and sales are working is silos.  In the difficult economy you have CEOs and senior executives who will look at the brand management side of that business and say this isn’t necessary.  This is, you know, basically a waste of my money.  So, they’ll cut that part out and then you’ve got a sales entity that’s left without some type of marketing engine behind it.  So what I’ve focused on for most of my career was combining those two entities together so that they were inseparable and that marketing became the heartbeat for how a sales organization operates effectively. 

[KP]:  Got it.  Got it.  And you’ve got to figure out how to create that unity between the two because, again, you know, frankly my view is that marketing people tend to have an almost completely utilitarian view of the sales people and the sales view…the sales people tend to have this philosophy about the marketing people that they don’t really know what works in the real world.  And so it’s kind of hard to get those two to mesh properly. 

[GP]:    I would agree with that.  You know, I kind of smile when I talk to Lin about this as we prepared for the interview.  The way that I’ve gotten over that, and it’s not the case that many companies can do, but you know, mid to large to smaller companies that will be able to relate to this…I’ve simply looked to integrate both functions under my responsibility.  If you’ve got a single point of contact and strategy that both sales and marketing report to then they’re aligned.  You have the same set of goals.  You have the same set of objectives and they’re working as a team as opposed to opposing entities.

[KP]:  Got it.  Got it.  How can this be practicably done Lin through the CRM system and the implementation?

[LF]:  Yeah, so you know, using the CRM as the main conduit if you grant access to both marketing and sales folks, using the CRM to create synchronized activity around a singular focus for a sales initiative is absolutely critical.  What that means is, is that you get marketing people in the same room as sales people and instead of marketing, processing, and planning and creating results that they simply threw over the fence to sales, what they’re doing is they’re creating a, literally a synchronized set of activities inside of the CRM tool to help trigger activities that sales takes action on.  So, what happens is you end up rather than having leads that are generated by marketing over a period of time that eventually grow cold and eventually once sales gets them, sales kind of takes a look at it just like you said Kevin, and they look at it and go, “Wow.  These leads aren’t really that good at all.”  There’s a disconnect there.  So there’s a staggering statistic that says, and this isn’t our statistic, it says that 75% if all leads that are generated by marketing are never followed up on by sales in a timely fashion.  So, if you translate that into dollars and cents every dollar that’s spent on generating a lead, ? of that dollar is being wasted just because there’s not good integration between what marketing is doing and what sales is doing.  So, the first great step is exactly what Gary said, get the revenue generation portion of marketing underneath sales leadership or at least get those folks in the same room talking and strategizing at the same time.  Using the CRM as a conduit will create that synchronicity and create great tracking and it’ll also reduce the time between what marketing delivers to sales and how sales takes action. 

[KP]:  Hey real quickly, how do we get in touch with Gary?

[GP]:    Well, the way to get in touch with me would be through my website at Cadmus.  The name is Pawlaczyk.  P-A-W-L-A-C-Z-Y-K-G@Cadmus.com.

[KP]:  Got it.  Got it.  Just wanted to make sure that we gave that plug to you for taking the time to be a part of our discussion here today.  This process, this process of implementing a CRM…it really is crucial because really the entire survival and really the thriving of the business is predicated on it, isn’t it?

[LF]:  It absolutely is Kevin and, you know, one of the things that most leadership teams overlook is the fact that marketing should be part of the user base of the CRM system.  Most of the time people look at CRM and Salesforce automation tools as a sales only tool and that’s really, again, what creates the first fork in the road around the disconnect is if you don’t create an opportunity to connect and collaborate and take action as one singular team then you can’t act as one singular team and the CRM allows or creates that conduit to process more volume and more activity that those organizations need to get accomplished. 

[KP]:  Yeah, no question about it.  Very, very crucial and I tell you what is exciting, what’s really helpful is that we cover a lot, always, on this program, but the reality is that there’s only so much time and what I love is the fact that you have become, and I say you…Baker Communications has become one of the best resources as far as providing content for our web platform of any of our contributors.  Right now there’s a great article right now:  “Integrate Sales and Marketing Work Streams” by Walter Rogers and so what, frankly it looks like you guys have a book in development because these articles are very substantial.

[LF]:  You know what Kevin?  Don’t let the cat out of the bag, but we are working towards that very thing and we’re excited to be sharing a lot of these best practices and knowledge nuggets that we’ve learned over the last 30 years of being in business and you know it’s really…you take the best of the best, implement what works for you and reject the rest and so we invite everybody to take a look at our articles and come join us at Bakercommunications.com and we’d be happy to help in any way that we can. 

[KP]:  Very, very good.  And that is the email, I mean the website there.  Bakercommunications.com.  When you get there, you’re going to go “Wow” because it’s just incredible how much information they have.  You’re going to be impressed by the scope, the breadth, the depth in terms of the clients that they have and we’re delighted that you’re able to share that with our CNN audience here every week.  It’s phenomenal the kind of information that you’re providing out there.  Thanks so much for being with us Gary.

[GP]:    Thank you.

[KP]:  Thanks so much Lin.

[LF]:  You got it Kevin.  Thanks so much.

[KP]:  Looking forward to having you guys back on next week right here on CNN650, on The Price of Business.