The Importance of Strategically Managing the Return on Commercial Assets

The assets that support growth – e.g. customer data, digital channels, sales content, product knowledge, and so on – are among the most financially valuable assets in your business. We like to call them commercial assets. Your operating system must give you the capability to strategically manage those assets.

We've gone from managing sellers to managing selling ecosystems. Humans are still critical, but money and budgets are shifting from human capital to the tools that make those humans more effective. As part of this change, the growth technology portfolio for selling has grown in scale, cost, and complexity.

To acquire new customers, the operating system must help sellers without overburdening them. It must rebalance channels appropriately to maximize revenue yields and turn an organization's owned digital infrastructure into a competitive weapon. Here are some examples of managing core growth assets:

1. People: Improve the return on investment from your customer-facing employees. Focus them on the right actions, clients, and conversations. Maximize time spent engaging buyers. Optimize your ability to onboard, ramp, coach, and reinforce the selling behaviors and activities that create customer value. “We focus a lot on our return on assets and the return we get on investment capital – which is north of 20% for us,” reports Chris Downie, the CEO of Flexential.¹²⁸ “I think of our sales machine as a growth asset, and we invest in developing our sales and channel resources and training them is central to our go-to-market approach and delivering our value proposition to customers.”
2. Customer data: Manage customer data like the asset that it is. Convert that data into insights that drive revenue and help reps in real time. Unify sales and marketing data sources, transforming and translating them into insights that inform tactical actions. “Business leaders who fail to measure the value of their customer data assets are ignoring the new business realities of the Data Economy and the economics of information in a 21^st Century Commercial Model,” according to Doug Laney, the author of the book Infonomics.¹³¹ “Measuring a data asset's contribution to income streams and expense savings can justify budgets for its care and feeding and establish a minimum for the business value to substantiate data investments to maintain and to monetize that data.”
3. Digital selling technology infrastructure: Reimagine technology portfolios as an interconnected ecosystem that combines all your existing tools – data, content, people, technology.
4. Selling content: Align all selling content, regardless of which organization creates it, around a consistent value story and go-to-market strategy. Consolidate, manage, and align selling content with the customer journey. Use playbooks, training, thought leadership, and validation material to support more relevant, compelling, and impactful interactions. “If data is the oxygen that runs the modern growth engine, content represents the gasoline required for combustion,” reports Bruce Rogers, author of “Publish or Perish: A CMO Roadmap for Managing the Content Supply Chain.”⁶⁷ “Content is a valuable commercial asset because modern selling is increasingly centered around owned digital selling channels that rely heavily on timely, targetable, personalized, and compliant content.”

Maximizing the return on growth assets like salespeople, data, and content, which are severely and persistently underutilized, can unlock significant firm value. For example, sales reps still spend most of their time not talking to customers, data is not fully leveraged, marketing content is not utilized, and most CMOs don't believe technology is replacing their marketing staff any time soon.

After decades of digital innovation and investment, selling technologies have not yet lived up to their immense potential. Our interviewees expressed frustration with the persistently low levels of adoption and utilization of these technology assets. For example, most CRM implementations have lower than acceptable return on investment, less than satisfactory user adoption, and significant unrealized potential, according to research by the Sales Management Association (SMA).²² Much like trying to drive a professional race car on local roads, most revenue-centric technology stacks have ample unused functionality, yet cannot even justify the current spend levels because of underperformance.

For sales, low levels of adoption by the customer-facing employees limit impact. Most sales personnel struggle to put new sales methodologies into daily practices, input data into CRM profiles, execute the right sales plays, and use expensive thought leadership content developed by marketing. For marketing, accountability and teamwork are challenging because most stakeholders – mainly CEOs, CFOs, and CROs – question the potential impact of marketing activities and suspect any justification of the investment. Measurable return on assets in both categories is low.

Most organizations are not data driven. For example, the majority of the 360 CMOs surveyed by Forbes report they don't support decision making or measure results with the first-party data within their CRM, Marketing Automation, and Digital Marketing platforms.¹⁵ The same goes for sales. Most sales managers and performance professionals told us they cannot effectively use AI and advanced analytics to understand seller effectiveness or buyer intent.⁹ (See Figure 7.1.)

The operations around the selling technology infrastructure don't work well either. Selling content is a big and growing component of the growth investment mix (41% of marketing budgets, according to HubSpot⁵²). Eighty percent of CMOs report they are increasing their investment in content creation and delivery.⁵ This includes things like guided selling, next-best-action guides, playbooks, recommendation engines, real-time scripting, and automated chatbots. Unfortunately, these do not scale in a modern selling model, making them very expensive. For example, localizing, targeting, and personalizing a branded content asset in five market segments is more than 20 times the cost of the original content asset, according to the Forbes Publish or Perish study. Add new digital channels and one-to-one segmentation at scale, and the cost curve accelerates dramatically.⁶⁷

If you need a reasonable financial return on investments in analytics, digital selling technology, and content, you will need to change your approach to managing technology and data assets.

Jennifer Mauldin, President and Chief Customer Officer of Inmar Intelligence, reinforces the importance of return on selling assets and supports long-term sustainable growth as a metric of success. “A key to making smart investments ahead of the curve has been the focus from the board on down to the C-suite on sustainable growth and the contribution of growth investment to firm value,” says Mauldin.¹²⁵ “When we think of growth, we don't think of growth at all costs. Rather we look at prudent and sustainable growth. Put another way we look at growing firm value and the things that contribute to that – intellectual property, innovation, and people.”

Developing the operating system offers the best way to improve productivity of salespeople, technology adoption, and return on selling assets. It will connect and coordinate your core selling CRM, sales enablement, training, and content management, and selling structures. That connection of growth assets will simplify the day-to-day selling workflow and generate more consistent and scalable growth.

With a systems-based approach, it becomes easier to establish clear strategic and financial criteria to help your enablement and operations teams to evolve your growth technology portfolio. We'll now detail three building blocks related to growth assets:

• The CRM, sales enablement, content, and learning technologies that support selling
• The direct, field, and partner selling channels that engage customers in human interactions
• The owned digital selling infrastructure that engages customers digitally

Building Block #1: Revenue Enablement – CRM, Content, and Learning Technologies That Support Selling

Customer Relationship Management, digital asset management, and training tools and platforms represent a significant portfolio of assets on the balance sheet. Most organizations already have 20 or more of these tools in house with thousands more out there trying to get in.

These assets underperform relative to their capabilities and the expected financial impact, putting more pressure on growth leaders.

CRM platforms too often only serve as systems of record for the sales teams, yet sellers do want help actually selling – and try to ignore anything that feels like a burden. Interestingly, the key measures of sales productivity – time spent with customers (34% of rep time) and quota attainment (42% of all reps) – have not moved materially over the last few decades based on a survey of 2,900 reps.²⁰

The enabling tools are no better. Digital asset management systems that house sales plays are disconnected from the training and development systems that teach them. Sales engagement and conversational intelligence solutions aimed at arming reps with better insights bypass CRM. The content, data, and IP in all of these systems are not widely distributed. “Today the selling assets are all there,” reports Christian Smith, CRO of Splunk.¹⁹ “But our team has to go and get them, which is optional, self-service, and manual to some degree. We need to do a better job of more effectively suggesting what you should do next, automatically. I think that is a big opportunity to drive that consistency and performance.”

Fortunately, sales analytics and AI are accelerating the convergence of traditional sales enablement, readiness, and engagement software. This will make frontline selling faster, simpler, and more consistent. Individually, these solutions are automating and enabling critical aspects of the day-to-day customer workflow – from finding content, preparing for sales calls, and logging the results in CRM to responding to RFPs. Connecting them will revitalize legacy investments in CRM, sales enablement, digital asset management, training software, and customer data. As a result, they create selling outcomes that grow revenues, enterprise value, and profits.

In the past few years, there's been an explosion in accessible sales engagement data from first-party website, email, calendar, recorded sales conversations, contactless selling platforms, and third-party sources. AI is increasingly being used to mine all this data, which should help sales reps to make better decisions and managers to evaluate training needs, selling priorities, and seller performance. High-performing sales organizations are using a new generation of AI-enabled tools to augment, automate, and leverage their sales support infrastructure assets to generate better sales outcomes and higher levels of frontline sales productivity.

New systems have emerged that aggregate, orchestrate, and deploy all this customer engagement data even while using CRM as an administrative system of record. These business innovations must still overcome too many disconnected applications vying to be the “single pane of glass” and too much tool fatigue. “We have a lot of disparate systems in the commercial technology ecosystem,” Greg Munster, VP of Global Sales Operations at Canonical. “It's making things complicated for the customers, for internal sellers, and the operations and enablement executives who manage those systems. It often feels like we are working for the selling tools rather than the tools working for us.”

These developments are being amplified by continued changes in buyer behavior to change the vendor landscape, too. This has led to a wave of consolidation, mergers, and acquisitions in the sales and marketing technology sectors. For example, sales enablement (sales guidance), sales readiness (sales training), and sales engagement (data-driven selling) solutions are converging as the fragmentation of the day-to-day sales workflow and seller experience are no longer acceptable. Sales enablement firms rooted in managing selling content and digital assets like Highspot, BigTinCan, and Showpad have been developing, acquiring, and partnering with sales training and development solutions to combine sales readiness with traditional sales enablement. This overlap in capabilities has forced a rationalization of sales enablement and readiness players. This makes sense because:

• They support the same core day-to-day selling activities – target, prioritize, prepare, engage, follow up, report, and repeat.
• They use the same content – sales playbooks, training content, product content, and selling content – to prepare for meetings, practice the skills needed on the call, and communicate with the clients.
• They increasingly use the same data – customer engagement and seller activity data drawn from actual presentations and conversations as well as from call recordings or practice demo presentations.

This is just the beginning. There is still a long way to go. This represents a real opportunity to materially transform the economics of selling and radically improve the experience of sellers and customers. Big financial rewards await the sales leaders who can knit together end-to-end platforms that effectively use AI and advanced analytics to deliver speed, simplicity, and scalability.

How can you take advantage of this opportunity now? The executives we spoke to are using advanced analytics to connect stranded sales support assets in several ways:

1. Rationalize the Revenue Enablement Stack. Most companies have invested in too many selling tools – more than 20 on average – to automate and support the day-to-day selling workflow: how we train, coach, disseminate content, enhance customer relationships, and efficiently manage contracts. Many operations and enablement leaders are concerned about the growing complexity of this selling stack and the negative impact this “technology mayhem” is having on selling costs, the seller experience, and even sales rep attrition. Spending the time to evaluate your sales technology portfolio and customer data assets will identify immediate ways to rationalize the technology stack. This will eliminate waste, redundancy, and stranded or nonperforming assets. It will streamline the seller experience, improve adoption, and increase productivity, sometimes by more than 50%. It's an opportunity to reduce duplication, disconnected apps, and underutilized assets while improving value, impact, and seller experience.
2. Simplify the Day-to-Day Seller Workflow. You should do this to enable salespeople and maximize the return on investments in sales enablement, CRM, and engagement technologies. Improving usability and adoption by frontline revenue teams pays off financially by reducing costs, improving return on assets, and generating more consistent growth. “Most organizations have not yet realized the immense promise of sales technology,” notes Greg Munster of Canonical. “A big reason has been the lack of focus on the seller experience and the usability, utility, and adoption of the selling tools they deploy as a key strategic and operational goal of their selling technology deployments. The root cause of these problems has less to do with the features and functions of the tools you buy, and more to do with how easy they are to use and how well management supports them. This is particularly evident with CRM deployments but extends to every other class of tool designed to help revenue teams become smarter, faster, and more effective. As a consequence, the financial returns on most investments in salespeople, data, technology, and content fall well short of their potential by any financially valid measure – Return on Assets, Return on Investment, sales productivity, and quota attainment.”

   Some of this responsibility falls on sales teams. Sales leaders need to insist on making the simplified seller experience a primary goal of their sales enablement strategies. Some responsibility is on the vendors. Forward-thinking solutions providers like Highspot and Revenue.io are connecting the dots across the sales technology portfolio to converge around one pane of glass, one selling motion, one system of record. In any case, overall costs and the seller experience will improve in any organization by simplifying the day-to-day seller workflow and streamlining the administration of data, technology, and content in their business.

3. Automatically Enrich, Update, and Augment CRM with Real-Time Customer Engagement and Behavior Data. Most (61%) high-performing marketers are developing a single view of the customer to direct targeting and inform multichannel customer engagement programs, according to an analysis by Forbes.¹⁵ This is because common customer and account profiles fuel an array of event-triggered Account-Based Marketing (ABM), sales engagement, digital marketing, and media communications across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints. As the speed of modern selling increases to keep pace with customer expectations, these triggers and alerts are happening faster and faster, often in real time.

   To create these profiles, sales enablement teams are unifying data from many touchpoints, channels, and media interactions into a system of record that stores a common customer profile rather than keeping data in independent fragmented applications. The best solutions automatically and immediately augment CRM systems, syncing customer engagement and seller activity data without data entry by reps – this ensures data integrity and process consistency. More and more business processes rely on the signals from this profile data, so any delay or inconsistency in updating profiles (say, uploading in 10-minute batches) can create interval problems in a mature revenue enablement model.

   “Many sales engagement and conversational intelligence tools use single streams of digital engagement and conversation data to help sales reps with sequences, priorities, and outreach,” states Howard Brown, CEO of Revenue.io, a business that has helped hundreds of organizations leverage insights to grow. “The real value is created by combining conversation data with other engagement data like marketing automation data, external intent data, and opportunity data in CRM to help optimize or prescribe who sellers should be contacting, what actions they should be taking to deliver the best results, and what skills they need to be developing.”

4. Align Sales Enablement, Digital Asset Management, and Sales Readiness into a Single Selling Motion. Advances in analytics have pushed the sales enablement, readiness, and engagement software categories toward a single end-to-end platform. Sales operations, training, and enablement managers assemble these capabilities to create a closed-loop feedback system that integrates planning and prioritization (before the sale) with action and engagement of the buyer (during the call) with reinforcement and coaching (after the fact). They combine the core sales enablement capabilities of delivering the right content to the right seller at the right time in the right context with training and development capabilities. This improves sales readiness before calls and evaluation of skills based on actual performance. These insights target microlearning and reinforcement to address in-the-moment sales needs and long-term skill gaps.

Building Block #2: Channel Optimization – Selling Channels That Maximize Effective and Efficient Interactions

The emergence of 4D selling channel systems – digitally enabled, displaced geographically, data-driven, and dynamic – has had a dramatic impact on the way organizations manage and optimize the performance of their selling channels.

The Keys to Improving the Economics of Selling Channels

The rapid shift to 4D selling has reconfigured the budgets and infrastructure that support selling. Partially in response to digital transformation, CFOs have cut or shifted funds that previously went to sales travel, real estate overhead, entertainment, and events and moved them into technology and training via digital channels. That shift has freed up more time for selling; accelerated adoption of digital selling – in 2020, over 99% of sales calls were digital due to the pandemic – and increased visibility and auditability, e.g. recording of most sales conversations. The compressed nature of these changes during the pandemic in 2020–2022 proved that selling via virtual channels without face-to-face engagement can work, even with complex, highly experiential solutions. “B2B selling organizations learned they can get 50% higher engagement, speed of response, and productivity from their sales reps at lower costs by incorporating virtual selling channels into their commercial model,” said Michael Smith of Blue Ridge Partners.

Research from the Wharton School of Business reveals the response to the displacement of employees is leading to shifts in the go-to-market investment mix:

• 97% of organizations are changing their go-to-market strategies
• Over 80% have cut business travel and event budgets
• Most are making work at home or work from anywhere policies the status quo
• About half are cutting the size of their field sales forces
• 81% are increasing investment in digital technologies to improve market coverage and client engagement
• 88% agree the pandemic represents a big opportunity to change the way they reach and engage customers.⁵

This has had a profound impact on the economics of selling. The financial impact on 4D selling – combined with a revolution in sales technology and analytics – can exceed the mass adoption of direct and teleweb channels that led to a transformation in selling over the last two decades. In the 1990s channel innovators like Dell, IBM.com, GEICO, and Charles Schwab reduced the cost of selling more than twofold by migrating lower-value PC, software, insurance, and financial transactions from expensive field sales reps to less expensive direct channels.

Selling organizations can achieve similar or greater gains by fully embracing the potential of commercial transformation. AI-enabled service automation, virtual assistants, contactless selling, and conversational intelligence tools can significantly improve the cost, effectiveness, and experience in any sales channels, physical or digital. In the short term, these tools automate sales tasks, guide sales decisions, leverage agent time, and capture sales conversations for analysis, prioritization, and personalization. For those willing to harness readily available but not broadly applied technologies like AI, augmented reality, 5G communications, and haptics to truly transform the selling experience, 4D selling offers even greater untapped potential for financial gain and competitive differentiation.

Over time, AI tools, conversational commerce, and emotion processing will create even more value by helping virtual sales reps assess customer sentiment and build trust in the absence of nonverbal cues and body language, according to Prof. Raghu Iyengar of the Wharton School of Business. “Advances in Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) are going to allow for more nuanced reactions to human emotions.32 The market for these technologies is estimated to grow to $41 billion by 2022, and emotional inputs will create a shift from data-driven IQ-heavy interactions to deep EQ-guided experiences, giving brands the opportunity to connect to customers on a much deeper, more personal level,” according to Iyengar. “Companies that carefully plan for how Perception AI, which covers the gamut of sensory inputs including voice, vision, smell, and touch, can complement their offerings will find a competitive edge.”

Corey Torrence of Blue Ridge Partners reiterates the importance of providing frontline, customer-facing employees with real-time coaching and guidance at scale. “To make the greatest use of scarce time we must equip sellers with better information about where the buyer is positioned in the buying cycle and meet them there with the information, content, and plays the buyer needs much faster.”

General Stanley McChrystal, author of the book Team of Teams, emphasizes the critical importance of speeding up communications in the face of rapidly changing market and customer buying behavior. “The speed and interconnected nature of the world in which we function have rendered traditional organizations with rigid functional structures and process hand-offs between members of the revenue team too stoic and slow to keep up with customer expectations and the accelerating pace of market and competitive change,” reports General McChrystal.

Unfortunately, traditional organizations with rigid functional organizational structures and process hand-offs between teams have a hard time moving information that fast. “The organization as a rigidly reductionist mechanical beast is an endangered species,” says McChrystal. “As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents.” To accelerate the flow and cadence of information sharing, he advises sales leaders to dramatically increase the cadence of communications to customer-facing employees. This means moving from making weekly updates to the field to daily updates and ultimately to real-time communication to ensure critical decision-making, coaching, and prioritization information cascades down quickly to sellers at the edge of the organizations who must make fast decisions and engage customers with the right messages and solutions at the right time.

As an illustration, McChrystal points to the success of the US armed forces as they adapted to the new challenges of fighting the war on terror. Under McChrystal's leadership, the US Joint Special Operations Task Force was forced to abandon the hierarchical, top-down command and control structures and linear planning processes that were the foundations of military command for centuries. To defeat new threats from highly adaptable and networked terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, they were forced to discard a century of conventional wisdom to find ways to become faster, flatter, and more flexible. They looked at best practices of their highest-performing teams of Navy Sales, CIA operatives, or Army Rangers – and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents. They built a network of teams that functioned with extremely transparent communication and decentralized decision-making authority. They tore down walls between silos. Reversing years of “bottom up” information flow, the Task Force pushed “general and officer level” information and awareness throughout the ranks to give people on the front line the information, context, and understanding they needed to take initiative and make decisions quickly. To facilitate that information flow they built a “virtual” Situational Awareness Room (SAR) – an adaptive intelligence hub that provided real-time information critical to ongoing anti-terrorist operations. In practice, the SAR acted like a central nervous system where 7,000 team members spread across 70 locations globally would meet in daily operational and intelligence briefings.

The results were dramatic. “When we tried to do the same things tighter and faster under the constraints of the old system, we managed to increase the number of raids from 10 to 18,” reported McChrystal. “Under the new system, this figure skyrocketed to 300. With minimal increases in personnel, we were running 17 times faster.”

Sales travel, events, and offices are not going to disappear from the selling formula. But they will be significantly reduced and reallocated. “Every organization will refine its spending based on its own competitive situation, buyer preferences, and go-to-market model. But our experience tells us that a data-driven 4D selling channel system can generate sales productivity gains of over 50% with cost reductions of 10%, as compared with traditional field sales,” according to Michael Smith, who has helped dozens of organizations reduce selling costs and improve engagement by adding “virtual account executives” to the coverage mix.

These performance gains will come from three primary sources (see Figure 7.3):

• Migration moves expensive selling interactions from high-cost field sales channels to lower-cost call center, digital, and contactless selling channels. For example, a fully loaded field sales visit can cost more than $1,000, whereas a call center interaction costs well under $100. It is possible to move less important interactions to lower-cost, low-touch, or even no-touch channels. Many customers even prefer it. AI-enabled contactless selling innovations like self-service chatbots, contactless selling platforms, and recommender engines offer continuous improvements in migrating interaction types to the optimal channel. Even firms that deal with heavy equipment like Ryder System and United Rentals have already migrated hundreds of millions of dollars of sales to low-touch and no-touch channels. Over the last several years, John Gleason, EVP of Sales at Ryder, has successfully adapted his commercial model by shifting sales coverage of smaller transactions and clients to a call center. “When I joined Ryder, we had zero inside salespeople,” says Gleason.¹¹⁹ “Now Ryder has 170 inside salespeople and they tackle one of the biggest issues – used vehicle sales. Ryder is the largest seller of used trucks in North America and most customers are small accounts with under three trucks. Today, 35% of all those vehicles are sold by our inside sales team with higher productivity, better customer satisfaction, and lower costs. When I gave small accounts (under three trucks) to inside sales, our customer retention rose from 50% to 72%, our CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) went up 400 basis points, and our cost dropped in half.”
• Automation removes low-value time investments for customer-facing employees and eliminates less productive tasks in the day-to-day selling workflow. There are challenges here. By nature, the sale process is nonlinear, unstable, and constantly changing – realities that hinder automation efforts. Also, the human nature of sellers may mean that any time saved gets reallocated to other similarly nonproductive or nonbusiness activities. All that said, anything that provides for more seller time spent in front of the customer has revolutionary possibilities.
• Augmentation helps sellers add more value during customer touchpoints and interactions. Sellers create more value by telling better stories, executing the proven selling motion, and focusing time on the most profitable opportunities. Arming, training, and coaching sellers with more effective value proposition content and/or delivery could reshape economic impact in terms of revenue per rep, deal size, price, margin realization, customer lifetime value, relationship equity, and differentiated customer experience. “The biggest opportunity for technology and systems to improve selling performance, by far, is enhancing the value of a sales interaction,” according to Marcus Jewell of Juniper Networks.¹¹⁶ “Augmentation rules everything. That's where we are seeing the biggest gains. We're still a belly-to-belly selling system – we sell deals up to $120 million – so you have to have human interaction. But there are many ways you can make those sellers better in ways that impact margins, total contract value, seller effectiveness, and can differentiate the buyer experience (which is our number one goal).”

Building Block #3: Customer-Facing Technology – The Owned Digital Selling Infrastructure That Manages Customer Touchpoints

As discussed, most organizations have built a large array of company-controlled and company-owned digital channels to address the rising desire of buyers to learn, shop, and buy online. This combination of customer-facing technologies collects enormous amounts of first-party customer engagement data, including customer buying signals and behavior that communicate unmet needs. It's also an environment where the company controls 100% of the message.

This digital selling infrastructure requires a large capital and operating investment that commands most of your growth resources, yet rarely shows up as a discrete budget item. Marketing organizations micromanage media spending with marketing mix models that improve targeting, yet often ignore the wealth of tangible, attributable data in their digital selling infrastructure. This and the people who staff and provision them represent perhaps their largest growth asset—and that asset is underutilized and underperforming relative to its potential.

These far more targeted activities draw upon a significant amount of data captured within the owned digital infrastructure. It's disappointing that “owned media” is rarely a budget consolidation category, because not utilizing it this way prevents these programs from fully reporting results as part of marketing spend, or forces their exclusion from most fully loaded ROI models.

Much of the owned digital infrastructure is bought and managed by the marketing function. Consequently, this infrastructure frequently falls into the silo trap. It often becomes disconnected from the technical, process, and data perspective from the sales and service teams to which it is supposed to feed leads and intelligence. That is a big reason why most (62%) marketing organizations are not leveraging the first-party customer data from their digital marketing technology systems in marketing planning and measurement.¹⁵ Neither are their peers in sales. Only 32% of sales reps report they use information from marketing automation systems in their day-to-day selling.¹⁷

To monetize the data that is generated by this owned digital infrastructure, managers have to find ways to connect digital interactions to customer profiles, get that information to sales and service teams, and suggest smart ways they can act on it. This requires a blend of advanced analytics, sales enablement, and high degrees of sales and marketing integration.

Account-Based Marketing is a great example of a program that connects dots from marketing data to sales and service actions.

Economics is another hurdle. Any program that tries to monetize these valuable first-party data assets should have an extremely high return on investment. Unfortunately, the economics of monetizing customer-facing technologies are compelling in theory but not yet well understood. The value chain spans too many functional business units and budgets to allow any single manager to make the business case. This ambiguity exacerbates the perception that marketing cannot link its results to tangible sales results. Conventional waterfall and siloed marketing funnels of MQL and SQL metrics are archaic and generally gone, so we need a new dashboard approach to make the economics of owned infrastructure clear.

“Data is the new oil, and we are big believers in that because our tech captures a lot of data,” says David Rabin, VP Global Commercial Marketing at Lenovo, in a recent interview with Wharton Business School as part of the “Markets in Motion” research initiative on evolution of the commercial model.³⁸ “I believe we should be able to measure 70% of what we do. I can measure the basics – registrations, engagement, activity, attendance – in media and events. But there is a ‘moat’ around marketing – there is still a human factor between marketing engagement and the sales outcome – because a sales rep has to receive that lead, and code it into CRM, and give credit to a marketing action and verify it converts. The problem we as marketers face is the same as our clients. There are thousands of solutions out there who can help us with that problem – 47 new vendors – but we have no capacity to deal with tools that can help us, we simply can't get to them.”

This is the real reason marketers like to hide behind front-of-the-funnel “vanity metrics” like clicks, website visits, downloads, and sales qualified leads (SQLs) to justify their investments in digital marketing, media, and technology. The vast majority of inbound digital marketing interactions (95%) are anonymous – which means you cannot tell whether a visitor is a prospect, customer, Russian spy, or even a robot.

The real value of customer-facing technology is realized when an organization has a system for (a) identifying more of the leads coming in digitally, and (b) getting that information to a human who can convert it into value. Sales and service reps are in the best position to use this information to create value either by winning a deal, improving the customer experience, or keeping an angry customer from leaving. “The Revenue Operating System paints a clear picture of the state of your selling system,” says Viral Bajaria, the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of 6sense.⁷⁰ “There are the places where the data exists, and the places where the data needs to be used. First-party data has a lot of richness. The problem is it's disconnected from the CRM. So the CRM data becomes stale. Often it is the least up-to-date system, because nobody goes in to update historical information, and there is a lot of incomplete data in it. Some people try to bypass the system – but ultimately if you want to have salespeople use marketing signals from your websites and third-party signals of intent – you need that data in your CRM – that's why we put so much emphasis on cleaning data, eliminating bad data, filling missing data gaps in data. That's where the ROI is.”

Mike Diorio, a Sales Systems Analyst at Datadog, reinforces the simple fact that sales reps need a single system of record to simplify their selling motion and execute more advanced programs like Account-Based Marketing. “I constantly tell our sales team, if it's not in CRM, it does not exist,” says Diorio. “Sales forces need a single system of record and workflow to be successful. For us, Salesforce.com is our all-encompassing truth, and everything a rep does needs to be captured there in order to have proper visibility and reporting.”

A range of solutions have emerged that offer sales leaders practical ways their organizations can start to connect these stranded customer-facing technology assets to the four sources of value creation outlined here:

1. Incorporating digital marketing data in customer profiles and frontline selling systems. A growing number of Customer Data Platforms like Snowflake. Blueshift, and Openprise are automating the process of pulling data in from digital channels and touchpoints – including e-commerce, marketing automation website, mobile, blog, social, and text interactions – so it can be used to help sales and service teams in client conversations, decision making, and offers. Revenue Operations platforms like Revenue.io automatically augment CRM profiles with data from marketing.
2. Leveraging data from contactless selling technologies with sales, marketing, and service teams. Several solutions are leveraging the customer engagement data created in contactless selling platforms, including chatbots and AI-guided digital assistants, social media, text, and messaging platforms. Sales Engagement Platforms like Xant.ai and HubSpot Sales Hub are using data from chatbots to append customer profiles and provide guidance to sellers. Customer experience platforms like Sprinklr and Interaction Management Platforms like Podium are extracting insights from social, text, and messaging interactions that make up a growing portion of customer contact so they can be used to inform sales and service actions.
3. Sharing digital marketing data with sales and service teams. Marketing Automation Platforms like Adobe Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, SAP eMarketing Cloud, Saleforce.com, and Pardot have the potential to unify and integrate their suites to share data across sales, marketing, and service functions. For example, SAP offers its customers a Customer Data Platform, Emarsys, that makes it fast and easy to unify customer interaction from all three of its functional solutions – SAP Sales Cloud, eMarketing Cloud, and Service Cloud platforms.
4. Enabling ABM programs to optimize account coverage. Many B2B organizations are adopting a variety of sophisticated ABM or account engagement platforms from 6sense, Demandbase, and Terminus that apply digital, targeting, and personalized marketing practices to improve sales productivity and key account development. These platforms help them blend advanced analytics, with marketing content, and high degrees of sales and marketing integration to accelerate enterprise selling and redefine the customer journey. ABM is a great example of a program that is much better described and managed as a system that connects dots across the sales, marketing, and service ecosystem rather than a narrow technology category. For example, 6sense uses AI and analytics to analyze buyer engagement data from many different sources to support day-to-day selling by revenue teams. They orchestrate prospect and customer data across many systems. They map that data around account structures to make it much easier to develop, cross-sell, upsell, and penetrate their best customers. They integrate that data with profiles in CRM. They augment that data with third-party data that holds buying signals and identifies anonymous visitors. This is helping growth leaders to leverage their huge investments in sales, technology, CRM, and content management and enablement systems.