Tag Archives: Common

Should You Combine Sales and Marketing? Five Points

Situation: A company is considering combining its marketing and sales teams. The company’s overall objective is to expand their marketing presence and to bring on new customers. Some team members believe that these two functions are distinct, while others believe that they should work in tandem or even be combined. What do others think about these options? Should you combine sales and marketing?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The skill sets required to create and operate an effective marketing effort are different from those required to create and operate an effective sales organization.
  • Sales and Marketing are two different sides of the same coin – they complement each other but are distinct.
  • Direction begins with the CEO; however it is imperative to make certain that everyone in the organization buys into both this direction and the organization to achieve it.
  • Some feel that it is not a good idea to have one person covering the role of Sales and Marketing. Sales is tactical while Marketing is strategic. It is Sales’ job to implement the Marketing Strategy and report back what is working and what is not. Marketing’s job is to take the feedback from Sales into account and revise the strategy accordingly.
  • Challenges which can create a constant battle between marketing and sales are due to:
    • Lack of common direction, and
    • Poor or inconsistent communication between Sales and customer on one side and Sales and Marketing on the other.
    • These challenges need to be resolved to have an effective Sales + Marketing organization.

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How Do You Align Vision Among Leadership? Three Approaches

Situation: The CEO of a software company finds that she and her #2 don’t have the same vision for the company concerning objectives and what is required to reach these objectives. In addition, key employees are reaching retirement age. The company needs to bring in new employees to learn the skills of those who will retire. How can these challenges be addressed? How do you align vision among leadership?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Consider the following approach:
    • Add 1-2 people and bring them up to speed within the company so that they can step into the roles of the employees who are nearing retirement.
    • Focus the CEO’s role on creating the development outline and priorities, assisting in closing significant sales opportunities, participating in industry seminars to publicize the company’s capabilities, and guiding administration and finance.
    • Focus the #2’s role on assuming a greater role in new software development and customer support and have this person delegate and oversee internal technology development and code maintenance.
  • In pursuing this approach take the following steps:
    • Buttress the CEO’s skills with another developer who knows the key software, and who can maintain this for the company long-term.
    • Shift development from individual efforts to a collaborative atmosphere to ease and speed integration of new code into the company’s software.
    • Reduce the CEO’s day-to-day administrative role.
    • Increase the #2’s role in software development and reduce focus on maintenance and internal technology.
    • Add an additional resource in sales/marketing to boost company growth.
  • How to Get There?
    • Allow the #2 the latitude to start developing some of his own ideas for new tools or products.
    • Bring in a “marriage counselor” to assist the CEO and the #2 to define a common understanding.
    • One focus will be to establish that they clearly respect and value each other’s talents and contributions. The other focus will be to work through objectives and requirements where there has been difficulty reaching consensus.

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How Can You Use Web and Mobile Tech to Bridge Different Worlds?

Interview with Jason Langheier, MD, MPH, Founder and CEO, Zipongo

Situation: The Internet and social media provide opportunities to bridge seemingly distinct worlds through common interests. For example, grocery chains that sell healthy foods and health insurance companies might be brought together through a common interest in healthy eating habits. How can you use web and mobile technology to bridge these two worlds?

Advice from Jason Langheier:

  • Interests and industries which are at first glance distinct can be brought together using the power of the Internet and social media. For example, Let’s Move and the Partnership for a Healthy America have nudged national food retailers and grocers to improve the health of their offerings in an effort to fight childhood obesity. Success here can benefit health insurers because obesity leads to increased healthcare costs through its link to diabetes and other complications. The potential of subsidies from health insurers to promote and generate healthy food choices is interesting to food retailers, but requires new incentive and recommendation systems.
  • We want to help people harness their motivation to build lasting new eating and activity routines. We do this through rewards based commerce, supported by social networks and gamification to help reach one’s health goals. We focus on choices that people make in daily living like grocery and restaurant choices and physical activities. We highlight alternatives, create simple recommendations, and make it easy to act on those recommendations. We encourage repetition of positive choices through a feedback loop which is tailored to the individual.
  • Commitments made within a social network are more likely to stick than promises to self. We leverage existing social media networks and offer incentives for referring friends. Friends help friends make better choices by encouraging them to read labels and buy healthier foods at the moment of purchase.
  • It is important to keep the user interface simple, especially at first. Many of the most successful applications initially present simple yes-no choices. From a tracking standpoint, this also minimizes variables and improves data measurement. Featuring high contrast action buttons on our site also helps prompt decisions.  There is a sweet spot on a commerce site between presenting an overwhelming array of options, and too few choices – which we assess through A-B testing.  By starting simply and building complexity slowly we build a baseline control scenario, then vary choices simply off the baseline to improve results.
  • The entrepreneur seeking to truly achieve a social mission must plan for both the short and long-term. In the short-term, it is critical to build milestones which will demonstrate financial feasibility and sustainability for potential investors. However a long-term perspective is also essential, particularly when one is interested in long term behavioral and economic impact.

You can contact Jason Langheier at [email protected]

Key Words: Internet, Social Media, Food, Insurance, Health, Common, Interest, Software, Bridge, Entrepreneur, Partnership for a Healthy America, Incentive, Tracking, Reward, Commitment, Behavior, Change, Friend, Simple

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