That’s the question that John Fox seeks to answer in a recent eBook addressing “management blunders.” Fox,  author of The Marketing Playbook, is convinced that most companies don’t apply the same discipline to marketing that they apply to product development.

Result? They fall short of the goals they’ve set — or more ambitious goals that they could be reaching.

Echoing some of the themes in our recent position paper Masters of Client Discovery, Fox identifies five key reasons that sales teams are underperforming.  Just as we pointed out in our piece, he notes that sales professionals are being asked to do things that should be delegated to others.  The 5 key management  blunders he recognizes:

  • Letting sales reps decide which marketing activities get done. Instead of creating an advanced marketing system, many companies expect their sales people to hunt for their own business. The reps naturally request support that addresses their own personal interests. This creates a “hodgepodge activity list,” but it doesn’t encourage you to focus your marketing resources on the stages of the sales process where deals are getting stuck.  As a result, deals disappear.
  • Making sales reps responsible for their own marketing work. Over the years, marketing departments have abdicated many responsibilities to sales reps — making them busier, but no less productive.  Indeed, reps are often responsible for generating leads, producing presentations and constructing proposals. Industry sources suggest that sales reps spend as much as 40% of their time (16 hours per week) engaged in marketing-related tasks.  That’s time not invested preparing for key meetings, building relationships and closing deals.
  • Allowing sales reps to be responsible for the customer qualification mix. By allowing sales reps to determine which prospects you engage, you will needlessly disperse and diffuse your limited resources. It’s critical to have focused qualification criteria — ones that determine whether a prospect is a good fit — to ensure your resources are optimally deployed.
  • Expecting sales reps to take on an educating, nurturing role with customers and prospects. The sales rep’s time is often wasted merely educating prospects at an early stage of a buying process — time that is taken away from guiding buyers through the later stages of a decision. To avoid this problem, marketing needs to step into the role of educator and nurturer.
  • Turning sales reps into overpaid secretaries and clerks.  Companies often expect their sales reps to “record everything” and encourage them to spend an excessive amount of time on clerical work. Again, this time must be taken from other activities. By reducing clerical demands, you free up your sales people to focus on closing business.

Buyers now expect sellers to know their business, listen and provide sound advice, and create a “win-win” situation, according to research from Development Dimensions International. Sales, in other words, is more demanding than ever. Fox cites this data point to make the case that companies need “repeatability in their marketing operations  for the principal purpose of creating traction for sales reps.”

So what must happen to end the blundering? Focus marketing on the activities that will create this traction, while empowering sales reps to concentrate on what they do best.