Samsung – The Next Big Thing

Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd’s “feud” has endured through multiple movies (those links not at all safe for work), and now comes to Samsung’s campaign for the company’s latest iPhone killer, the Galaxy S.

What’s not to like about this one? These guys are hilarious, have worked together on screen for nearly a decade, Bob Odenkirk is in it, and LeBron James makes a cameo. A campaign like this is exactly what Samsung needs to push people to consider its new super-sized phone.

Dodge – God Made a Farmer

I’ve had some harsh words for Chrysler’s attempts at American spirit-mongering in the past, but this is pitch-perfect. The commercial is essentially a montage of hard-bitten farmers set to legendary radio announcer Paul Harvey’s speech “God Made a Farmer”, but what makes it so much better than the Clint Eastwood-narrated “Detroit” ads is that the message dovetails with the Ram Trucks brand – rugged, dependable, sensible.

Taco Bell – Viva Young

Taco Bell has pivoted much of its whimsical marketing in recent years, choosing instead to focus on nutrition and sustainability. And it’s not like these things are wrong, exactly, but who goes to Taco Bell to eat healthy food?

The thing about Viva Young is that the inversion – old people doing the things young people do – illustrate Taco Bell’s true differentiator – they are indisputably the fast-food brand of teenagers and young adults. I’m not afraid to admit, here on my work blog, that I’ve had nights that eerily resemble those of the retirement-home residents in the video – nights that end, as theirs did, with a drive-thru meal from Taco Bell eaten in the parking lot.  And if a guy like me has had those nights, I’m willing to bet that lots of other Americans have too – and that many people might rediscover their love for “The Bell” after last night’s ad.

Best Buy – Asking Amy

Best Buy is leaning heavily on one of it’s key differentiators from online and big(ger)-box competitors: it’s friendly, knowledgeable sales staff. And I can’t think of a better way to do it than to enlist Amy Poehler, who is excellent at playing the witty ingenue.

The core message of the ad – Poelher’s come-ons to the salesman aside – is that we all have a million questions about how technology works, questions that will only accelerate after everything in our houses are “smart” or “connected” or have “dongles”. A large store full of experts – likely within a few miles of your home – is the natural place to begin learning about those things. That’s what Best Buy’s banking on, and it’s likely key to the company’s survival at this point.

Hyundai – Epic Playdate

I’ll be honest and say that a big reason I’m including this one on the list is the presence of The Flaming Lips, the wonderfully weird indie band that once released a four-disc album, Zaireeka, where each disc was designed to be played simultaneously (I’ve done it and it’s awesome).

But here’s the thing about Hyundai’s product, the Santa Fe. It’s a crossover SUV, the mini-van of the 2000′s. It’s a crowded market. It’s probably a very nice car but there’s nothing exciting about it in particular. It is designed to functionally transport a family around town. Introducing some whimsy into this product is a smart move on Hyundai’s part.

(Interested in content marketing? Learn how to scale effective content; join us for a webinar next Tuesday!)

Last week, I took a trip out to Dallas to help facilitate MLC and SEC’s joint workshop series, An Introduction to Challenger Messaging (click there, register for an upcoming date, and bring some colleagues!). I’ve been spending the majority of my research time on the challenges (ahem) of Challenger messaging for the last few months, but this was the first opportunity I’ve gotten to see messages being developed in real time by our memberships in Sales and Marketing.

The first and biggest takeaway from the day was – man – you guys love this stuff. I’m not trying to be self-serving in saying that; I think that commercial people – marketers, especially – are incredibly liberated by the idea that there’s a viable way out of commoditization. It’s empowering to know that we have the ability to influence and help set the terms of the sale, rather than just wait for customers to tell us what they want.

The second is that there’s a lot of time wasted on content marketing. No offense to those who were there; it’s understandable and even inevitable. We’ve been told by consultants and pundits and gurus and bosses for years that we have to be a resource for our customers, and that by being a resource they’ll ultimately reward us with a sale. We’ve sprawled our marcoms across dozens of channels, channels that we ultimately have to fill – and I don’t think there’s anyone out there satisfied with what they’re getting for all that investment.

In last year’s major research for B2Bs, one of the questions we tackled was – what’s the “sweet spot” for content marketing? What does good look like? Here’s what we came up with:

Let’s talk about what you’re seeing in the graphic above. What we’re saying is: there are five kinds of commercial information.

• The first is general information – basically, this is any information at all.
• The second is accepted information. This is general information that is credible and relevant to your customers. So, if you’re in the IT business, this might be a tweet reading “90% of CEOs want to move their business to the cloud.” – your customers can believe it and it’s relevant to them.
• The third is thought leadership. This is, essentially, new accepted information. Sticking with the IT example, it might be “CEOs top priority is to move operations management to the cloud” – assuming that’s something new the market doesn’t know.
• The fourth – insight – is where the hard work starts. Insight is new information that is frame-breaking, or changes the way a customer thinks about a problem. “You think the biggest barrier to moving to the cloud is cost. But cost is negligible over the long term – the biggest issue is uptime.”
• The fifth – commercial insight – is the sweet spot. This is insight that leads back to your solution’s unique differentiators. Think the insight above, plus “And Solution X uses Processes Y and Z to maximize uptime.”

I promised an easy test, and here it is: when you judge your content marketing efforts in their entirety, what kind of information are you putting out? Are you giving people information, or are you changing the way they think?

If you’re not changing the way they think, it’s time to take control. Register for two upcoming meetings today. First, if you haven’t been through it, sign up for the introduction workshop mentioned above. If you have been through it, consider registering for the follow-on workshop, Building a Challenger Content Ecosystem, where you’ll learn how to spin a commercial insight across a variety of channels and content types to achieve maximal impact on the purchase process.

Social media is established firmly as a corporate outreach channel. According research findings at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, as many as 73% of Fortune 500 companies had Twitter Accounts, 66% had a Facebook page and 28% had a public facing blog. However, while social media uptake has grown, marketers are grappling to understand the immense channel choices available to them, and figure out ways of measuring ROI.

Choice can be confusing, and a failure to justify it is definitely frustrating. In our conversations with marketers, CEB’s Marketing Practice has identified four areas of frustration with the digital medium in general, and with social media in particular. These are:

1. Understanding available touchpoint choices: Not only are there a large number of digital channel choices available, each channel often has more than one touchpoint that marketing could use. Compounding the complexity is the fact that many touchpoints evolve rapidly. This presents itself as a large and dynamic set of complex information to marketers, making it difficult for them select one touchpoint over the other.
2. Understanding potential touchpoint tactics: Each digital touchpoint is more suitable in achieving certain marketing objectives over others. Marketers must therefore also understand the best-practice use-cases of digital touchpoints. This adds a third layer of complexity – not only must marketers understand each digital channel, but also know about each touchpoint within that channel, and the objectives it can help them achieve.
3. Prioritizing touchpoint selection: Unfamiliar with what digital touchpoints can help them achieve, marketers default to an omni-channel approach, i.e., be present on all channels and touchpoints. Although digital marketing is cheaper as compared to traditional marketing, an omni-channel approach results in wasteful spend, and sub-optimal ROI from digital marketing.
4. Calculating digital marketing ROI: Last, and definitely not the least, marketers are unable to measure the business impact of their digital touchpoint selection. While in some cases performance metrics might not be available, in cases where they are, marketers are unable to determine the ones they should use to calculate digital marketing ROI.

Beginning this January, CEB’s Marketing Practice will periodically publish content that familiarizes you with popular digital marketing tactics and how they can generate business impact for your company. As a beginning, we want to familiarize you with Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, Facebook Sponsored Stories and LinkedIn Ads. When you click on each of the pages above, you will find:

• A brief introduction to the digital touchpoint
• A presentation of  best-practice marketing-use cases of the touchpoint
• A decision guide that helps you decide whether or not to invest in the touchpoint
• A recommended list of metrics to help you clarify the return on your investment in the touchpoint

If you have any questions or suggestions about this new initiative, you can email me or drop a comment below.

MLC Members can view additional best-practice guidance on our Digital and Social Media topic centers.

By Kirsten Robinson

The Super Bowl is back—meaning it’s time to stock up on Buffalo Chicken dip, kick back in front of the TV and watch some of the best commercials you’ll see all year. Or, catch some football. Whether you’re a sports fanatic or not, the creative ads airing between tackles are always highly anticipated. As well they should be—advertisers shell out close to $3million for a 30-second spot.

While some ads miss the mark, many make such an impact that we still talk about them years later. We’ve compiled a list of our top Super Bowl ads ever for your very own trip down memory lane: Read More »

Want to learn how to get more mileage out of your content – and produce less of it? Join us for a webinar February 7.

As you probably already know, MLC’s 2012 research for B2Bs focused in on the shift to content marketing – the creation of collateral designed to support customers and prospects, both in their day-to-day jobs and as they go through the purchase decision. (And if you didn’t know that – shame on you!). Overwhelmingly, we heard that the biggest problem in making content that really works was scale – the swirl of emerging industry news, new customer needs, and new products creating an insatiable need for new content.

I wish we could give you advice on how to indefinitely feed this “content beast”, but it isn’t possible. If your goal in producing content is to influence and inform all customers, in all situations, about all things related to your space, you will be on the hamster wheel for the rest of your career.

But who says your content has to be all things to all people? What if you simplified – finding out which topics and which themes give you maximum business impact, doubling down on them, and doing them really well? This requires identifying those things, and getting buy-in on those things – which is hard – but once you’ve done that, there are a few examples of companies that have set up effective content machines that consistently move the needle for the broader commercial team.

On February 7, we’ll be featuring two marketing leaders who have done just that. Nick Panayi, Director of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC, and Todd Wheatland, Head of Thought Leadership and Marketing at KellyOCG, will join us on a webinar to detail their approaches to scaling effective content marketing. If you’re interested in learning how to get off the hamster wheel – join us in a few weeks.

This is the time of year when many are thinking about what goals they’re going to commit to. And part of this process also involves a consideration of the metrics the organization needs to measure and report on. This is always a tricky thing since the number of metrics is endless and you don’t want to settle on a dashboard that simply reports on what has happened and that offers no insight into how things are developing.

The solution is to try and model out the sales process and provide different individuals with numbers that will make it easier for them to deliver against their commitments:

• For reps, the metrics will be tend to be around the pipeline and will want to contain a mechanism for evaluating the quality of the opportunity as well as the usual pipeline metrics that are more focused on volume.

• Similarly, managers will want to have access to aggregate and trend information so that they can help achieve the desired outcomes. We would always recommend that any manager dashboards also include some softer measures, assessing the development needs of individual reps, as well as a measure of the quality of the relationship between the manager and the rep.

That said, I do believe that there are some metrics that absolutely every sales leader should know and track since they provide crucial clues as to what is happening. This is a personal list, and so I’d love for people to chime in and nominate some of their favorite metrics and why they like them.

The list is as follows:

1) Gross margin/sales per head

Measuring margin per head (revenue in a pinch) is fairly obvious and blunt, but it remains a crucial measure of the sales force’s efficiency.

Basically, this metric needs to show an increase each year and really comes into its own in the early stages of any decline in demand when it is very tempting to deliver revenue by simply throwing more commercial resources behind the sale. Instead, I would argue that a decline in this metric is always cause for some alarm and that leadership first needs to dispassionately identify the cause of the decline before committing to any further resources: chances are that something more fundamental is wrong.

2) The sales cycle

This is a more difficult metric to report on since few companies do a good job of tracking how long individual deals take to come to a resolution (or increasingly, simply wither away in no decision). That said, sales cycle time is also one of the best leading indicators of market demand. Interpreting it requires some detachment, but an across the board improvement of the sales cycle (especially with less good fit customers or less capable reps) is likely an indicator of increased demand and it’s a good reason for investigating whether or not the sales force needs to ramp up to fulfill the latent demand.

Conversely, if the sales cycle slows down across a large group (and especially your star reps), then this is a definite sign that the market has slowed. For the sales leader, the challenge will be to resist to ask for more resources but to start a more fundamental process of trying to determine how customer preferences might have changed. And if you do not have systems to measure sales cycle time, you can do worse than to periodically survey people as to whether their sales cycles are changing – you are looking for the systemic change, not the absolute number.

3) Share within different categories per customer or market segment

Long-term success in sales isn’t just about the odd blockbuster; it’s also about deepening relationships and becoming more involved with existing customers. Improvements in share are superb indicator of the quality of the relationship. Declines in share tend to indicate that a competitor has changed something about their approach or that customer needs are shifting. Similarly, a persistent inability to sell across different categories tends to suggest a problem with the underlying value proposition.

4) Customer loyalty scores for different segments

Periodically asking your customers questions around whether they want to continue to purchase your product, whether they are interested in new offers, and whether or not they would recommend you is simple, the data is easy to analyze and provides invaluable attitudinal data that you can use for trend analysis purposes. In B2B, in particular, the buyers tend to be reasonably well known and even if the samples are small there is tremendous value in knowing how the few important people think about the relationship.

5) Churn/retention rates for different customers

Too often reporting only takes place on a financial level, but you also need to know the rate at which a company is adding or losing customers. For one thing, it’s likely impossible to grow your business unless your customers keep on coming back. In the short-run, it might be possible to maintain earnings by shedding less profitable customers, but reporting on the number of active/inactive customers offers valuable clues in terms of a company’s market appeal. This is critical since an accidental pursuit of earnings can easily result in a situation where a company loses touch with the bulk of a market and fails to appreciate the potential for disruption from below until it is too late.

Again, these are my favorite high-level metrics for evaluating how a business is running, what are yours and why?

With apologies to Jason Falls – nothing. Facebook’s Graph Search means nothing for marketers.

Marketing is, as a discipline, way too fast to jump on every technological bandwagon and Bright Shiny Object that the hype machine dangles in front of our faces. Most of the time, this is dangerous only in the aggregate; wasting a little time on one silly social media platform isn’t a huge deal.

But Graph Search is something different. And it shows that Facebook – and the marketers that enthusiastically await every new bell and whistle that the company produces – have gotten something fundamentally wrong about human nature.

Immanuel Kant once wrote: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” It’s a poetic way of saying that we as humans defy tight logic or neat, pat stories explaining our actions and motivations. We do not behave according to any set of rules; we scoff in the face of logical, social, or legal proscriptions on our actions. This is more than the standard marketer endorsement of consumer irrationality; it means that human beings will generally defy and find ways around any set of strictures you put on them at all.

Now think about what the Facebook Graph Search is. (Go ahead, read Facebook’s breathless promotional website). It is meant to be a straight, legible, easily-digested representation of people and their relationships with other people, interests, brands, businesses, and geographical locations. You can, for instance, ask Graph Search, “Which Chinese restaurants do my friends like in Seattle?”, or “Which of my friends are into Radiohead in Ft. Worth?” Straight, angular connections between people, locations, and the ultimate goal: commerce. Is this really what friendship is?

Of course it isn’t. In boiling down connections between friends to shared interests, shared geographies, and shared purchase behavior, Facebook has created a web of connections that are not those of friends at all. It’s a “graph” that only a computer could produce. Because as anyone that has friends can tell you, friendship is not about shared interests or similar tastes in Asian cuisine. It’s a bond that defies logical, graphical representation. There is no map of friendships, no path to becoming a friend. Friendship – like everything else about humanity – isn’t straight or easily explainable, and cannot be made so.

The practical upshot of all this philosophizing is simple: I couldn’t give less of a damn about my friends’ favorite Korean restaurants in DC. Why? Because my tastes are not necessarily the same as theirs, and even if they were, I’d have no idea whether they “liked” a restaurant to get a discount, or because their cousin works there, or because they got confused and hit the wrong button. A friend’s “like” has very low signal value. Honestly, think about your friend group. Think of how many questions you could ask Graph Search that would result in meaningful information that you would then take action on – information that’s better than typing in “best Korean restaurant DC” into Google or Yelp.

Falls gives away the game in the middle of his post. “Granted, I’ve not seen Graph Search in full action yet,” he says. “But if the execution follows the promise, search is now not something Google can safely say it owns.” The execution cannot follow the promise, because Facebook doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what friendship actually is.

Facebook is good for some things. It’s a great way to communicate with die-hard fans, for instance; it’s also a great way to influence low-involvement purchases. But the social graph is not Marketing’s path to salvation, precisely because it doesn’t resemble the connections of our customers at all. For that, you’ll need old-fashioned creative thinking – not technological whiz-bangs.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com. 

You’ve landed on the ground in your new role as CMO.  Congratulations!  You’re facing the tough challenge of forging customer bonds in a noisy, fast-moving marketplace.  Social and mobile media beckon.  Big data and analytics are the key to your marketing future.   Oh, and the economy is moving sideways.

It’s a really exciting time to be a CMO, right?

Here’s the downer.  Nearly half (46 percent) of  marketing leaders will struggle quietly in their new role.  And, when they struggle, it ripples. Direct reports perform 15 percent worse than those reporting to a high-performing new leader.  Those direct reports are also 20 percent more likely to leave.  Tougher to quantify are the botched growth strategies, new product launches or major marketing initiatives that come with astruggling new leader.

CEB researchers recently conducted a comprehensive study  onleadership transitions informed by data from nearly 30,000 leaders and hundreds of interviews.  We found that the best leadership transitions happen when companies proactively engineer the transition experience to provide tailored support for four transition types:

• Replacing an Icon—This is when you have to follow the equivalent of Steve Jobs.
• Following a Train Wreck—Your predecessor flamed out.  Sometimes this is due to personal failings, but quite often it’s because of underlying business problems.  This is what Kathy Savitt faces at Yahoo!, for example.
• Jump Start—The prior leader was neither strong nor weak, but marketing needs to move in a new direction.  You might putMichael Senackerib, the newly appointed CMO at Campbell Soup, in this category.
• Breaking Ground—You’re filling a newly created position.  For example, Bill Hornbuckle at MGM is filling an expanded CMO (and President) mandate with new responsibility for product development.

Each of these transition contexts demands a different set of organizational support and transition activities for the new leader.  Let’s break it down.

Replacing an Icon

About 20 percent  of marketing transitions involve following an iconic leader.  The first priority is to clarify the role and build relationships that will help legitimize you as the new leader and advance an agenda.  A big dose of stakeholder alignment is in order here, both inside the organization and amongst external partners.  That means going well beyond the standard “listening tour.”

One B2B CMO who recently transitioned in this type of scenario fielded a diagnostic survey to both the marketing and sales teams.  He found common areas of perceived strengths and weaknesses in 20 different dimensions, from lead generation to sales enablement to customer insight development.  Most importantly, he found the areas of greatest disagreement and dove deeper to understand the why behind the disagreement.  He found an important difference in the view of how sales reps should engage customers.  This was something that the prior iconic marketing leader was able to skirt past by sheer force of personality.  That discovery led to a dramatic shift in marketing’s demand generation and content marketing strategy.

Following a Train Wreck

Accounting for 27 percent of leadership transitions, train-wreck-following means the new leader needs to establish a clear vision, build new relationships, and repair damaged ones.

Following a train wreck, new marketing leaders must seize the opportunity to redefine marketing’s role and set KPIs that align with that new vision. This is especially tough for CMOs today because the ways that marketing can create economic value are shifting dramatically.  That said, leading CMOs in this transition type must re-think the very boundaries of marketing.

For example, the sales and marketing teams at one financial services provider have driven investment of $250 million in data and analytics across the past four years.  Most importantly, those investments are enabling marketing to develop and demonstrate the power of new product development in a previously very slow moving industry.  As a result, marketing’s role has shifted beyond its prior focus of delivering marketing communications to now encompass a much more strategic role in developing the product offer itself, including the surrounding customer experience.

Jump Start

Another 20 percent of transitions are jump starts.  The most successful transitions here involve quickly understanding the industry and organization, as well as the dynamics of the new team.  This meansunderstanding where there are breakdowns in the marketing fundamentals of the team.

It also means assessing the team mix and identifying the highest performing marketers, based on CEB  research around what separates high performance marketers and marketing teams in a volatile environment.

Breaking Ground

About 40 percent of transitions involve moving into a newly created position, and we see this increasingly in marketing.  In many cases, the CMO’s portfolio is expanding to include some combination of strategy, customer experience and even technology.  That means a new role for the CMO, as well as new roles for certain direct reports.  In these transitions, success hinges  on properly defining the role and organizational structure, and gathering a deep understanding of the neighboring stakeholders.

For example, we’re seeing some marketing leaders take bold steps to re-draw the traditional lines around and within marketing to break apart silos.  One consumer-packaged goods enterprise has re-organized marketing services away from traditional lines of TV, promotions, digital, etc. Instead, it is organizing roles by paid, earned and owned communications by forcing the mixing of digital and non-digital knowledge and expertise.  For instance, paid media roles have responsibility for both TV and paid digital media (including paid social display).  Earned media includes both PR and social of the earned variety.

This is the sort of re-thinking that the breaking ground transition requires.  We believe we’ll see it much more often in the areas of customer experience, insights and analytics, and innovation, where traditional silos are causing more harm than good.

So, whether you’re following a Steve Jobs type of icon or cleaning up after a debacle, take heed. Not only does it take a village to successfully transition a new leader, it takes matching the focus of the village to the context of the transition.

We’re a few months into our biggest project of the year for B2Bs, and one thing we’ve heard repeatedly is the need to really figure out lead nurturing and lead scoring.

As with lots of buzzwordy-sounding things, it’s worth unpacking what we’re actually talking about here. From our conversations, it seems that the goal of lead nurturing/lead scoring – the combination of which I’ll refer to going forward as “lead management” – is to identify prospective buyers, match them with information designed – however remotely – to motivate purchase, and score them on an ongoing basis on their receptivity to and engagement with that information.

And so it’s worth examining the underlying assumptions here a bit. Implicit in this view of prospect conversion are a few ideas:

• Likeliness to buy can be measured. Prospects can be identified by behavior or attributes observable by Marketing.
• Information consumption can be (to some degree) controlled. A given prospect can be exposed to information most likely to increase likeliness to buy at any given moment.
• Information consumption is a metric for likeliness to purchase. Receptivity to and engagement with information is a reasonable proxy for lead quality.
• Information consumption leads to purchase. Purchase can be motivated with information.

So, based on these assumptions, many B2B marketers have gone and built content, marketing automation platforms, and lead scoring schemes – all based on the idea, perhaps implicitly held, that information is the key variable in driving purchase. In this telling, engagement with information not only predicts the likelihood of purchase, it also increases the likelihood of purchase.

But we have the tools to measure information consumption – in the digital age, it’s easier than ever. And yet marketers still say that lead management is their biggest challenge – the systems they’ve built aren’t accurate, Sales doesn’t use them, and they’re not providing measurable value.

One hypothesis we’ve been kicking around is the idea that information consumption, the main variable lead management systems influence and measure, is not the right variable to build these systems around. In other words, that information isn’t the key thing driving group decisions forward: instead, it’s “softer” factors like buyer emotions, power/status competitions within the buying organization, cognitive bias, influence by fads in business, and that kind of thing.

That’s what we’re taking to you: why don’t lead management systems work? Is it because they’re measuring and inflecting the wrong thing? Or because they’re measuring the right thing inaccurately? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

As part of our 2013 B2B research – which we talked about a little bit here – we’re taking a deep look into lead management. How are marketing organizations doing it now? What model of customer decisions does it rest on? How is it succeeding and how is it failing?

One thing we’ve heard again and again is that the biggest (surface) failing of existing lead development programs is that Sales doesn’t trust the outputs: in other words, Sales doesn’t believe that they produce ready-to-buy prospects. Marketing, however, is sure that they do. And therein lies the impasse: if Sales won’t act on marketing-generated leads, how can Marketing ever be sure if the leads they’ve generated are worth anything?

I mean, this isn’t Sales’ fault, exactly. In most organizations, a significant part (or the entirety) of their salary is commission-based. Why mess with what works, particularly if it means you can’t pay your bills? But it goes deeper than that: if Sales doesn’t trust Marketing-generated leads, there must be a reason beyond simple inertia: Marketing and Sales simply don’t agree on the way the market works for the products and services they sell.

And so the key to Marketing and Sales collaboration is to build a truly-shared vision of the market and how it works. Here are a few ways we’ve seen this work. It’s not that these are easy – far from it – only that they’re likely to surface the fundamental disconnects between the Sales and Marketing organizations.

• Collaborate on a shared vision of the customer. In this post we talked about how Marketing mostly endorses – perhaps without realizing it – an information-based vision of the customer. Most of our lead management systems are based in a simple equation: more information consumed = greater likelihood of buying. It stands to reason that if they’re not taking the leads we generate and nurture seriously, Sales must, at some level, disagree with this assessment. Establishing some common principles about who a customer is and how they operate is a start to bridging this gap.
• Create an inventory of existing customer information. Collectively, commercial organizations know a ton about their customers and how they think and operate – but the information is typically housed in silos. A starting exercise in a more broader collaboration is putting all of this information in one place to the extent possible – and it’s a task that will feed greater collaboration down the road. Learn more about how to do it here.
• Establish an ongoing information sharing system. It’s not enough to simply share information once and be done with it; there must be an ongoing, formalized system for sharing new information. We’ve seen members do this by establishing knowledge management systems like wikis; but it’s also important that information be actionable and valuable. See how others have done it here. 
• Find areas for tighter integration. Our Commercial Integration Diagnostic measures your Sales and Marketing team’s integration across 20 key attributes that drive the success of the broader commercial team. Check out where you need to be on the same page, and launch the diagnostic (it’s free!) to find areas where there’s more work to be done.