Digital Transformation In A Commercial World

It’s almost impossible for an organisation to plan investment and manage cash flow if there is little visibility on what the sales pipeline looks like, particularly in the B2B space where sales cycles can be 18 months or longer. Accurate sales forecasts are often critical to the perception of how well an organisation is run. If a company misses revenue guidance, investors question the capability of the organisation to understand its prospects for success.

Very often the response is for the organisation to install a new piece of software, thinking that technology holds all the answers. Yet recent research shows that around 70% of all digital transformations fail to deliver the benefits they promised. With around $1.3 trillion being spent each year on such projects, that means project investments worth $900 million are failing to deliver on promises.

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success nor dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. “ Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli – 1513

Scarily, that figure doesn’t include the value of the benefits those projects were supposed to deliver!

A key challenge is that there are multiple systems of record in play, with data housed in separate data silos owned by different functions such as marketing, sales, operations, finance and support. What’s more, the data in each system is often not easily linked as the people who make the decision to buy, are different to the people that place the order, pay the invoice or ask for support.

On top of this, organisations also have to contend with the fact the data being collected is often inaccurate or not up to date, is often codified and placed in different data hierarchies and structures depending on which system is being used and which part of the organisation is inputting it.

A recent article by Bob Suh in Harvard Business Review highlighted how despite investments in CRM systems, AI and other advanced technologies, sales leaders still get blindsided by forecasts that “turn out to be embarrassingly overinflated”. Suh highlights that the root causes are all too often human behaviours, and cites the following as the five most harmful:

1. Withholding bad news – salespeople often hold back reporting lost deals
2. Maintaining two sets of books – most sales people keep their own records on top of the “official” ones in the CRM
3. Hoping against hope – people tend to be loss averse, so rather than accepting a no and moving on, they inflate pipelines and increase sales cycle stats
4. Using conveniently fuzzy definitions – deal health metrics are notoriously unreliable, and switching to a velocity index that showed how long a deal had been pending proved far more accurate
5. Failing to ask the obvious question – organisations need to check that conversion rates from each stage of a funnel match those being assigned, most leaders never ask this question!

It is staggering how often I have spoken with seasoned commercial leads that cannot truly assess the effectiveness of their efforts due to an inability to track customer data from first touch points through to sales and support. This lack of closed loop analytics hampers organisational ability not just to forecast sales for the next month, but to understand what levers need to be pulled in marketing to ensure the sales pipeline stays healthy.

I was recently asked to “sort out what was going on with our leads situation” after a series of changes in management, definitions of leads and lead capture processes led to a confusing picture of what the organisation could expect in the next 18 to 24 months. It was a particularly painful process to make any sort of prediction or state with any certainty what was going on as the reality of the situation was that I had no confidence in the data, or how it mapped together.

One of the critical issues in this case, was that while leads could more or less be tracked through the qualification process to opportunities, the sales team “hoping against hope” that opportunities were not lost and not closing out opportunities. That led to a bottle neck of open opportunities that meant that marketing really could not get visibility on the sales pipeline, where to focus their efforts or understand what levers they needed to pull on to make a real impact.

Problems stacking up

To compound matters, marketing functions are also adding more and more tools to their “marketing stacks” and creating ever more data silos.

For those of you who haven’t heard the phrase before, a marketing stack is a collection of technologies that marketers use to conduct and (hopefully) improve their marketing activities. The focus of these tools is often to make process easier and to better measure the impact of various marketing tactics.

The growth of marketing technology is truly staggering, as shown by data collected by marketing technology blog chiefmartec.com. Since 2011 the number of marketing technology solutions has grown from ¬150 to over 6800 in 2019. The growth from 2011 to 2019 is shown in the graphic below.

The marketing technology explosion between 2011 to 2018. Reproduced with permission from chiefmartec.com