Interview by John Smibert
In this video Peter Strohkorb talks about the value of improving collaboration between Marketing and Sales.
Peter shares what he has learnt from research he did into the effectiveness of B2B sales organisations based on how collaborative their sales and marketing groups are. He also give us some insight about how to facilitate effective collaboration. [private]
Peter Strohkorb is an expert in sales and marketing collaboration. He is an author and speaker.
See more of the 'TALKING SALES' series here
Interview Transcript
John: Hello! I'm here with Peter Strohkorb. Welcome Peter, delighted to have you! Peter's an expert in sales and marketing collaboration, an author and a speaker. Welcome!
Peter: Nice to be here, John!
John: Peter, recently you published a research paper that I thought was fascinating, where you studied about 200 companies and how their sales and marketing work together.
Peter: Yes.
John: You've got some really good findings out of that. What was the key finding, in your mind?
Peter: We conducted research into 185 B2B organisations and we looked at specifically how do successful organisations - and when we say successful we mean financially successful organisations - treat their sales and marketing collaboration differently compared to the less successful, less financially successful organisations.
John: And what was the outcome? [01:00]
Peter: There is a 30-page research report, but the key outcome is that as an organisation with good sales and marketing collaboration you're twice as likely - so 100% difference - twice as likely to be financially successful compared to those organisations where the sales and marketing collaboration is not present.
John: That's significant!
Peter: Very.
John: Very significant. Why do you think that was, and what recommendations would you have for people to learn from that?
Peter: The main things seemed to be that there was a willingness between the two different teams to actually come together and to want to collaborate in the first place.
John: Right.
Peter: The thing that a lot of organisations do is that they try to solve what's essentially a people problem and a communication problem between people in technology.
John: Let's throw technology at it and see if that fixes the problem, right?
Peter: Well, and to a degree it's the vendor's fault as well because they say "Well, you just put our stuff in and everything will be fine!" But, of course, we're not robots; we're humans. We have feelings and emotions [02:00] and egos and attitudes and beliefs, and for that reason the way that we're advocating it should be done is that you solve the people issue in the people dimension first.
John: Right.
Peter: Get the people to come together, get them to understand why they should work together, what's in it for them, how they should work together, how collaboration works, what success looks like and the metrics around that. And then you can say "What technology supports all that?"
John: Right.
Peter: Don't start with the technology, start with the people.
John: Great advice, and thank you very much for bringing it to us, Peter!
Peter: Thank you John, great for being here!
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See more of the 'TALKING SALES' series here
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