A 2024 survey from Constant Contact showed that 73% of small businesses (SMBs) lack confidence in their marketing strategies and whilst the numbers for sales achievement are less clear, because most organizations keep them secret, a common estimate is that between 60% and 90% of sales teams don’t hit their targets.
There are many reasons for this apparent lack of success, but experience shows us that the Sales department tends to blame Marketing for not producing enough quality leads, and Marketing blames Sales for not converting the quality leads into business. What most organizations don’t do is treat this as a “commercial” problem, i.e. a combination of Sales and Marketing, instead of looking individually, and blaming individual sales or marketing activities.
Creating new business revenue and happy customers is hard!
When you analyze the organizations that do this well, we call it creating “commercial excellence”; you quickly come to some conclusions, namely:
- Sales and Marketing work together, not necessarily as one department, but with common objectives and lots and lots of communication
- All commercial activities should be structured, not random or ad-hoc; there is a strategy, and everyone sticks to it. If the strategy doesn’t work well enough, you change it, not ignore it.
- Communication is essential, within the department, between departments, with the customers and with the marketplace.
- All commercial information is available to everyone, including details about who they were, what they said, whether we sent them an offer, and their reaction to it. This way, nothing falls between the cracks and gets lost
- Training is a necessity, not something we do when we have time. Technologies change quickly; our own products and services are constantly being improved (hopefully). We have new systems available, AI is being implemented, and methods of communication change. In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote “Adapt or Die” in his book The Origin of the Species. It is unclear whether he was describing Sales and Marketing, but he could have been.
- The goal is ALWAYS making your customers successful.
Most organizations live from their existing customers; if they are successful, then you do well, if they fail, then you fail with them.
The easiest way to achieve this “commercial excellence” is to build a framework, where you define levels either that you have already achieved or as targets that you want to achieve. You start by defining the Sales and Marketing Pillars. Pillars in general are the name we give to the supports that hold the roof up, and that is a great analogy here – what actions are essential for commercial
excellence?
In this diagram you can see the 25 possible combinations of maturity - Marketing (from A to E) and Sales (from 1 to 5)
This type of framework has been used for the last 40 years and was originally called a Capability Maturity Model. It was funded by the US Department of Defense and used in the software development industry, where I first encountered it. Over the last 40 years, we have generally dropped Capability from the name and call it a Maturity Model or a Maturity Matrix, and it is in use for assessing the maturity and providing a framework for improvement for many types of complex projects.
The SM3 Sales and Marketing Maturity Matrix is an implementation of a two-dimensional maturity model, specifically designed to address commercial effectiveness. The first step in any maturity framework is to establish your starting point, as anyone who has used an auto navigation system will tell you, there is no point in asking for instructions to reach your destination if you don’t know where you are starting from. Using a questionnaire, with sliding scales to allow 99 different answers (points) to every question, and input from a minimum of three different people, you can establish your current position with considerable accuracy. Another advantage of having three to five people answer the questionnaire is that you can assess the consistency of the information, assuming that everybody answers the questions with some degree of honesty, you will know if there is general agreement (or not) on the starting point.
For any improvement plan to work, the areas of disagreement need to be addressed.
Probably a simpler representation of an organization’s current capability, and which of the pillars are weak is the spider diagram. This is a simple graphical representation showing which areas need attention before you can reach the next level of maturity. Easy to explain to senior managers who have limited time, this diagram can be a valuable tool in focusing attention (and resources) on areas that need improvement.
Together, the questionnaire, the reports and the diagrams form an essential framework for achieving commercial excellence and making the organization more successful.
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