Depending on the how you have structured your sales and marketing, these could be two independent functions and chances are that they both work independent of each other, often blaming the other for the non-performance.

However a customer does not see this as two functions. She is a seeing every single touch point as the company and you make an impression – good or bad based on that.

However if you can think of the whole journey a customer takes from the first touch point to the way the sales order comes in , you can iron out a lot of glitches.

By mapping this journey, you will also be able to identify the gaps between, how you think a customer should come versus how your systems are working for the customer to actually come.

During one of our marketing launches we covered multiple steps as to how the campaigns will flow, what will be the sequence of mails that the team will send out, how will the follow-up happen, till we get the prospect to come for a presentation. since we did not map the whole process backwards, we failed when a prospect asked us to share some content before coming for a presentation and in another case asked us for a justification document after we had given a demo. Now in both these cases we had not anticipated that a customer could need these because they were looking at a new technology.

If you go to sites like Gartner, they have a very nice item for their conferences, “documents to justify to your management” which are all the reasons why attending any of the conferences would help the company. This way they are helping the manager who wants to attend, get documents easily, instead of expecting him to justify by himself, in which case he could fail to justify properly and therefore not get the approval to attend. Which would be a loss to Gartner. So they have thought through the possible steps which could stop the sale from happening and put the data in place to help.

In B2b sales , where multiple levels of approval and justifications are needed, mapping the complete journey can help iron out the creases in both your marketing and sales plans.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!