Introduction
Aggressive Growth Targets Require Sales and Marketing Alignment
A regional talent recruitment professional services powerhouse sought to grow nationally to become a billion-dollar company by the end of 2024. However, they were experiencing misalignment within their marketing and sales teams and a lack of targeted vertical market efforts. With similar industry end markets, buying groups and overall value propositions this organization required a quantitative assessment to streamline marketing investments and performance.
As a result, they desired an assessment of their marketing capabilities, focusing on identifying optimization and enhancement opportunities, allowing them to achieve a broader growth transformation.
Project goals included:
Elevating best practices across business and developing an operating model to scale organizational capabilities
Understanding their current marketing capabilities and enablers
Benchmarking performance and investment levels against their peers and best practices
Identifying marketing strategies to drive growth for the upcoming years
Prioritizing improvement areas to achieve benchmarks and best-in-class organizational status
The client chose Alexander Group because of our experience in marketing organization assessment and effectiveness.
Approach
Assess the Current Organization
The first step required Alexander Group to assess the marketing organization by confirming the current state and creating diagnostic and blueprint reports. In addition, we reviewed key metrics, including performance trends, peer organization benchmarks and revenue growth metrics. Finally, Alexander Group interviewed 12 stakeholders to gain qualitative insights.
Key Findings
Improve Productivity Drains, Optimize Sales Opportunities
Alexander Group’s assessment revealed:
The client needed to clearly define segments and account assignments, total area market (TAM) sizes and account priorities to drive targeted account-based marketing activities.
Only 6% of accounts make up 80% of gross margin dollars, indicating that their sales force necessitated more guidance in high-value opportunities.
Sales reps cannot maximize their time spent on sales-generating activities.
Few inbound leads impede market growth, leaving account executives (AEs) to self-prospect 79% of leads.
AEs spend 36% of their time on pre-sales activities, significantly higher than the 25% industry benchmark.
Compared to benchmarks, AMs spend nearly 50% more time on low-value activities, including order entry and fulfillment, implementation issues, customer service, administration and reporting.
Recommendations & Outcomes
Optimized Marketing Focus Supports Sales Growth
Alexander Group’s recommendations included a) creating targeted campaign motions to propel growth and b) increasing headcount investments for the next three years across sales and marketing.
With improved market focus, the client could now set their sights on:
As a result of the marketing assessment, the client’s future vision includes increasing visibility in growth marketing that occurs earlier in the buyer journey. The client expects to create a more efficient, higher-velocity marketing funnel that enables sales to spend increased time on engaged selling. They are also planning to equip sellers to offer the correct value propositions to differentiated buyers and end markets.
Address Your Biggest Marketing Challenges
Alexander Group helps organizations address critical growth challenges by assessing and optimizing their marketing engine. From expanding into new markets, determining your demand generation strategy and realizing revenue conversion opportunities, Alexander Group can align your marketing organization with your growth objectives.
About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.
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