Matthew Jonas shows you how you can achieve effective marketing collaboration in the sales and development process
Franchise Development (FD) Marketing is a unique animal. Franchisors aren’t selling a product, they are proposing a new way of life for owners/operators and their families.
There aren’t reams of analytics on consumer behavior to go by, and the franchise development marketing calendar doesn’t follow a typical consumer sales cycle throughout the year.
Not all franchisor organizations even have a marketing team, but rather a manager or service representative who takes care of some marketing tasks, like posting on social media, placing ads or organizing a trade show booth. As franchisors grow however, more substantial brand marketing becomes a necessity.
Most FD marketing teams consist of three to five key individuals at the most, compared to an entire floor of consumer marketing personnel. It’s a niche, a world of pipelines and sales funnels and counsel along the way.
Walk into any franchisor’s headquarters or home office and you will see a worn path between the marketing team and the sales team. It’s a necessary partnership that requires a delicate balance of stellar communication skills, full transparency, mutual respect and a clear understanding of the end goal: making the deal (all without blowing either department’s budget!)
When the deals don’t happen, the blaming begins with each undervaluing the other. Either the sales department didn’t correctly utilize the marketing support provided or the marketing team didn’t provide quality leads or the appropriate materials for the sales team.
It’s a gotcha game that goes back to the beginning of supply and demand. The good news is, franchisors don’t have to linger within the entanglement of their two professional teams.
Companies waste at least $1 trillion annually on ineffective marketing efforts and decreased sales productivity. Sales teams ignore 80 percent of marketing leads. 1 When Sales and Marketing work well together however, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower. 2 The question then, is how to make this magical collaboration happen?
Recognizing the differences in culture
Like any profession, there are specific skillsets and character traits necessary to be successful. Both sales and marketing personnel require basic professional skills and a significant amount of training and education, however we must look beyond these signature traits to discover where the true misalignment lies.
Marketers deal with data. Marketing strategies are analytics-driven and measurable, and the results of those efforts take time and money before they hearken success or failure.
Patience is a keyword here, and then retest, repeat or try again. Further, while all of this testing and retesting is going on, their paychecks keep coming in. The sales team operates altogether differently. Sales people are relationship builders.
They are skilled at listening and gauging emotion, they enjoy flexibility, have a keen understanding of which tools will be effective for which candidates, and they have no time for patience. They think spatially vs. linearly. Importantly, salespeople typically only get paid when the deal closes.
It’s a fast moving, high-pressure department, very different from marketing. If each sales and marketing team member understands these differences, communication guidelines can be implemented to create more harmony and better collaboration.
Both teams need one another to succeed
Marketing teams can sometimes be so focused on the target audience or external customer, they forget that the sales people are their internal customers. One of the best things a marketing team can do – and one they often avoid – is to sit down and listen to their sales team.
What kinds of challenges are they facing with their candidates? Is there a specific place in the sales process where prospects are consistently dropping out? Who aren’t they talking to that they want to be? A clear picture of internal challenges will help marketers make adjustments where needed and hyper focus their strategy in places they hadn’t thought of.
Sales people love this part. They want to tell the marketing team every single problem they have so the marketing team can get busy solving it. Communication is certainly important, but collaboration is a two-way street.
Sales people also must welcome new ideas and strategy and be open to implementing new technologies that give marketers the data they need for reporting purposes.
Marketers don’t study the numbers just for fun (well, some do!). Their job is to think out of the box, to find leads where they hide, and it might be in a place the sales people don’t agree with. Sales people must trust the marketing savvy who design the sales funnel, casting both wide and narrow nets out to prospective business owners.
Coming together over lead sourcing
One thing the sales people and marketing team can agree on is that one quality lead will beat 20 mediocre leads every time. When the sales team asks for more leads, what they really mean is more quality leads.
Typically, a quality lead is one that fits into whatever parameters have been set for the organization – and then converts, and a dropped lead should indicate the opposite. This is not always the case. Why not?
A key factor that incorporates input from both teams is whether the lead maintains its quality throughout the sales process, not only once a sale closes. The sales process for a franchise sale is approximately 90 days. If marketers measure the quality of a lead early and continuously through each stage of the sales process, they can better understand the quality of the lead source.
The reason a lead drops out of the process may have zero to do with the lead source. For example, a quality lead enters a pipeline from an email marketing campaign. Halfway through discovery the lead leaves the process due to an illness in the family.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the lead source, but will be lumped into the lost column, which drops the conversion rate of that email campaign. Measuring lead quality throughout the sales process is a perfect way for both sales and marketing teams to work together.
Collaboration is key
Franchise Development Marketing and Franchise Sales have one goal to reach by way of two cultures, two sets of skills and two overall philosophies. Getting them to successfully align their strengths can be one of the best things a franchisor can do to grow their brand.
When each team truly understands the way the other operates – culturally, professionally, even economically – conversions are bound to go up, and that’s a win-win for everyone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Jonas is president and co-founder of TopFire Media, which provides high-impact digital PR and franchise digital lead generation strategies for a range of clients. A seasoned marketer and highly respected franchising expert, Matthew has built a nearly 20-year career dedicated to delivering outcomes and results through an integrated and strategically-based approach for emerging, established and mature brands including HoneyBaked Ham, Huntington Learning Center, i9 Sports, Pita Pit, Dale Carnegie Training, Kahala Brands, Earl of Sandwich, and many others. A product of the dot-com era, Matthew built his marketing expertise during digital media’s infancy and continues to refine them today.
