Most of what he says is pretty spot-on. My only modification would be to point out that individuals who leak from the funnel should be recycled by marketing with a special program until they are ready to progress again. This can be done with your marketing automation system.

Check out Carlos’ great whiteboard session and be sure to leave your comments below.

Ask any pilot and they’ll tell you with a high degree of accuracy the length of runway their plane needs for takeoff depending on weight of the aircraft and environmental factors. They can also tell you at what ground speed their plane achieves the necessary lift for takeoff. If their plane is a G5 it needs 5, 150 feet of runway to take off. If it is a 777-200 there better be at least 8, 300 feet of black top in front of it.

If knowing when a given level of revenue can be achieved is so critical, why do companies get it so wrong? It’s because they are only looking at the late stages of their funnel and ignoring the time necessary to find and nurture prospective buyers (the mid and early stages) to the point where Sales should engage. They’ve been trapped in the “Sales Cycle” mentality rather than adopt the “Buying Cycle” perspective.

Recently while creating an integrated Sales and Marketing plan for a client, I asked the management team to tell me the length of their sales cycle. They estimated it was 8-12 weeks. They had historical data to show that once a prospect was talking with them about the problem they hoped to solve it took 8-12 weeks to advance to a point where a purchase decision was made.

Unfortunately, if they had built their business plan and cash flow projection based on that information they would have crashed and burned just like a G5 with only 2,000 feet of runway.

What hadn’t been taken into consideration was the amount of time Marketing required to attract and nurture buyers. In the case of my client, once all the stages of the buyer’s journey were identified, they estimated that the early and middle stages of the funnel took 38 weeks. So the time it will take to find, nurture, and close a prospect actually will be 50 weeks–nearly one year–not 8-12 weeks.

This knowledge enabled us to build a realistic demand generation plan to support short term and long term revenue objectives.

The other factor impacting time to revenue is internal bureaucracy. For some companies the amount of time it takes for Marketing to plan and implement a program or campaign is ridiculous. Companies who want to be more nimble and aggressive must take a critical look at the approval processes for marketing budgets and content. Does an email campaign really need five managers to sign off on it? Why make Marketing jump through another set of hoops to get approval for a specific program budget if it has an approved budget for the quarter? Worse yet, why is that the president or the Board have to sign off on a $10,000 program? Tight fiscal restraints can choke the life out of Marketing momentum and extend the time to revenue. It’s far better to hire good managers, approve budgets well in advance, and let them manage to the budget.

Don’t let expectations be set that your revenue cycle is shorter (or longer) than it really is. Marketing and Sales have to collaborate in the planning process in order to create the right model for the company.

If you’ve been a marketer for more than 10 years you’ve seen a breath-taking amount of change. If you’ve been in the business only since about 2002, you’ve seen a lot of change too.

Consider all the new terms for marketers that have surfaced: Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Marketer, Marketing Technologist, Engagement Officer, Demand Generation Director, Social Media Specialist, Search Specialist, Digital Marketing Director and Marketing Operations Manager. I believe six of those nine titles didn’t existed 5 years ago. Two titles, Chief Revenue Marketer and Marketing Technologist, have only joined the vernacular in the past 24 months.

To appreciate just how much the marketing profession can change over time, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane. It used to be so simple.

I love the hit TV series, Mad Men. I like seeing what the advertising business was like in the 1950’s. Simple. It was the same model that I stepped into 20 years later as an eager, long-haired grad with an advertising degree. I still think a gray Hart Schaffner Marx suit with white shirt and black wingtip shoes is a great look.

Somewhere in the 1980’s direct marketing concepts started to make inroads in B2B companies. New job titles surfaced, such as, Database Marketing Manager and Direct Marketing Manager. I recall reading a book back then called, Customer Engineering. It revealed to me the modeling, measurement and predictability of direct marketing. It changed the way I viewed marketing and my role as a marketer. I began to create plans and campaigns that drove sales in a measurable way.

At about the same time I read Geoffrey Moore’s, Crossing the Chasm (yes, the book is that old). Moore’s seminal book made me view the customer and customer behavior in an entirely different light.

In the 1990’s I learned to integrate and embrace call centers for pre-qualifying prospects and providing warmer leads to the sales department. This was also the time I built a bridge between my marketing team and the sales department. It wasn’t called sales and marketing alignment back then. It was called, this is how you achieve your bonus and keep your job.

Somewhere in the tech bubble of the late 1990’s and into 2000, marketers lost their way. Looking back I recall being under tremendous pressure from VCs to build brand awareness and get “eyeballs” to the website. It was all about how big and important you could make your company appear leading up to an IPO. Forget about the customer, we were asked to help build a house of cards.

Then throughout 2001 and 2002 the house of cards collapsed. It wasn’t pretty, but coming out of that downturn revenue and the customer regained their rightful focus for investors and business management.

With revenue back on center stage the challenge to marketers was clear, “Prove that what you are doing is driving revenue.” Many marketers panicked. They couldn’t do it. They knew little more than how to build awareness and provide unqualified leads to Sales..

About 2005 marketers began to learn how to use the Web and email for cost effective lead generation and direct sales. This required learning new skills for search marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and how to write compelling email offers. Finally, marketers had some of the tools they needed to impact the purchase decision and generate performance metrics to show to top management.

Fast forward to 2011, or more accurately switch to warp speed, Scotty. What skills are required for marketers to handle their revenue responsibilities today?  A post on Software Advice gets to the heart of the matter. Here are the main areas for skill development from the post, New Skills Needed to Address Marketing Gap

1. Analytics and metrics: Marketers must now be able to measure campaign performance; track conversions along the sales funnel and make accurate forecasts.
2. Lead management strategy: Marketers have to work with sales to define the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Then, they must develop a process that will best lead the buyer down that path.
3. Content marketing: Relevant content is the key to engaging the buyer and getting them interested. Marketers have to be able to build a content strategy around their buyer’s journey
4. Social media: More buyers are getting social, providing a viable medium for engagement. Being successful with social requires thought, strategy, content and consistent execution.

The first two skills involve data analysis and the ability to identify actionable information in gigabits of data. The marketing department has to have ready access to good data and a data geek.

There is no better source for learning about the buyer’s journey and lead management strategy than MathMarketing’s Funnel Academy (advanced B2B marketing curriculum). The newly formed Marketing Automation Institute is offering training for marketers who want to take their game to the next level. Other great sources of knowledge that I depend on regularly include MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments, to mention a few. Even conferences, such as DemandCon, can play an important role in your professional development plan.

The pace of change for marketers will only accelerate if history is any indication. To thrive in this exciting new world, be very intentional, and schedule serious training for yourself and your team at least twice a year.

Survey Results: How Aligned Companies Outperform Others

Here are some of the impressive and shocking findings about companies with aligned sales and marketing:

• Grew 5.4 points more than their competition
• Closed 38% more proposals
• Lost 36% fewer customers
• Marketing contributed at least 24% of the revenue opportunities
• Marketing was compensated, in part, on the conversion rate of proposals (deals won).

But first, the best-practice of aligning marketing and sales to the buyer’s journey isn’t new. It was creatively exposed  in 2003 in  Hugh Macfarlane’s book, The Leaky Funnel. Yet the majority of B2B companies still don’t get it, which Sharon Drew clearly points out in her post. I come face to face with this reality when I coach companies on how to align sales and marketing. Oddly enough the concept of aligning one’s revenue-generation engine to the buyer is  foreign to most companies, but slowly smart sales and marketing executives are “getting it”.

Once sales and marketing processes are aligned to the buyer’s journey then it’s time to turn on the marketing automation system, integrate it with CRM, develop the content strategy, and go into action.

Sharon Drew emphasized that sales and marketing managers must work together to identify the real buyer and get the entire decision-making team on board at the prospect company .

I was reminded when reading her article that marketing automation systems make it possible to offer and efficiently deliver role-specific content to everyone on the decision-making team. Marketing automation systems can even aid the sales team in identifying buyer roles by tracking what type of content they consume.

A check list.

1. Identify the buyer’s journey.
2. Align marketing and sales processes to it.
3. Intelligently use marketing automation integrated with CRM to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time with the right frequency.
4. Identify and bring to the “table” all of the buyer’s team.
5. Leverage the marketing automation system to drive a lead scoring process that turns over leads that are ready to engage with you.
6. Measure. Measure. Measure.

1. Afraid of the water
2. Blissfully ignorant
3. Content challenged
4. Buried in bureaucracy

Matt also suggests a “simple” solution for sales and marketing alignment, which I recommend that companies view as a starting point only. Companies who are developing and following best practices in this area are tackling the stubborn issue on more fronts, as I outlined in a previous post here, The Top-10 Processes that Align Sales and Marketing.

These processes, and those in other departments that impact Sales effectiveness, are the subject of a white paper, “The Internal Forces that Empower or Impair Sales”, which provides critical reading for any sales executive who spends too much time lobbying inside his company for better support.

1. Funnel stage definition: defining the buyer’s journey and designing the sales funnel stages correspondingly.
2. Lead qualification and scoring: defining at what stage in the funnel a contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead and then a sales-qualified lead.
3. Forecasting and reporting: a forecast is supported by the funnel metrics; these metrics are impacted jointly by Sales and Marketing.
4. Lead nurturing: communicating with contacts and leads in the funnel in such a way that they advance through the stages efficiently.
5. Lead recycling: when to return stalled leads back to Marketing and how to apply further nurturing.
6. Customer retention and growth: how Marketing and Sales work to keep and grow customers.
7. Market requirements: the way Marketing taps Sales for input to the market requirement document.
8. Strategic account planning: the way Sales taps Marketing for support with strategic account identification and development.
9. Quarterly planning: jointly developing and tracking revenue-generation plans and campaigns.
10. Content and collateral development: how Marketing works with Sales to define and deliver the right sales tools.

The paper is free to download at http://revenueintensity.com/wp3

The timing of the white paper is not coincidental. The books just closed on the first quarter of 2011. How are you feeling about the company’s revenue performance? If you are responsible for the revenue number, either as the company’s head of sales or as its CEO, are you totally satisfied that your revenue engine operated at peak performance? Or, are you frustrated that the entire organization wasn’t more effective and efficient at creating revenue growth?

Did the VP of Sales have to spend more time campaigning inside the company for better processes and support than he or she spent in the field with prospects and customers? If so, this is a warning sign that departments upstream from Sales—Marketing, Product Development, Operations, and Accounting—are not well-aligned with Sales and with the customer.

Download our new white paper to gain fresh insights for how to transform cross functional teams to better support Sales.

His article highlighted the speed bumps that can hinder ROI for marketing automation right from the start.

The three speed bumps are, according to MacConnel:

1. Lack of fresh inquiries
2. Lack of good content to offer leads
3. A weak  lead scoring model

MacConnel’s article reminded me of how important an aligned sales and marketing plan is to the full and rapid realization of a MA system’s benefits.

In companies where Sales and Marketing aren’t properly aligned around the funnel the process of adopting a MA system will be more painful and take more time. Ask anyone who has been there.

In companies where Sales and Marketing are already ‘on the same page’, the adoption of a powerful MA system will turbo charge the revenue engine quickly because the biggest speed bumps will have already been removed.

I’m a proponent of aligning Sales and Marketing through a rigorous funnel planning process BEFORE adopting marketing automation. Just like learning to drive is a smart precursor before buying a car, so is aligning Sales and Marketing a smart precursor to a marketing automation investment.

How does an aligned revenue plan (funnel plan) prevent or minimize the speed bumps MacConnel warns us about?

1. A continual source of fresh inquiries.  Teams that are wedded to an aligned funnel plan know exactly how many fresh names need to be drawn into the funnel and nurtured through the funnel stages. Through modeling and testing they will already have a good idea of what tactics should be employed and with what rhythm to ensure a continual flow.
2. Good content relevant to the buyer. Teams that are aligned around the buyer’s journey and are clear about the buyer’s problem they are solving are in a better position to know what content should be provided at different stages in the funnel. The right funnel planning process for Marketing and Sales aids the team in achieving higher levels of buyer insight, which leads to better content development.
3. Smart lead scoring. Teams that have defined the stages of a revenue funnel with complete empathy for the buyer’s journey are going to create better lead scoring rules. They will be more aware of the buyer’s behaviors that signal different levels of interest.  This knowledge of ‘interest’, when added to demographic  and firmographic  information for ‘fit’ results in sophisticated lead scoring.

Companies can adopt MA the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is to first get Marketing and Sales aligned via a funnel planning (revenue planning) process.