MARKETING SPECIAL
Building marketing and sales capabilities to beat the market
Consistent growth is
difficult; consistent outperformance rarer still. Yet many companies still fail
to develop their marketing and sales capabilities to drive performance.
The lean-manufacturing
revolution profoundly
altered the business world as companies reinvented how they built things to be
more efficient and productive. We believe it’s time that companies apply that
same level of scrutiny and commitment to marketing and sales. Our research is
increasingly clear: companies with better marketing and sales capabilities grow
faster. At a time when growth is not only more important but arguably more
elusive than ever, companies must tap the potential of marketing and sales to
deliver better results.
To help leaders
understand marketing and sales performance, we recently conducted a detailed
benchmarking study involving 15,000 employees at more than 140 leading B2B and
B2B2C global businesses. Our findings were clear: revenue growth at companies
with more advanced marketing and sales capabilities tended to be 30 percent
greater than the average company within their sector (exhibit). That means in
an industry growing at 4 percent annually, a company in the top quartile of
marketing and sales capabilities typically grows by around 5.3 percent.
Seven hallmarks of
superior marketing and sales capabilities
Many senior executives still argue that the
return on investment (ROI) from marketing and sales is just too difficult to
assess, especially when compared with revenue-generating line businesses. So,
instead of taking a systematic and deliberate approach to investing in their
institutional marketing and sales capabilities, many companies choose to focus
on tactical efforts that provide quick, visible results. That’s a mistake.
Sustainable competitive advantage flows to companies with the best marketing
and sales capabilities, and our research and deep industry experience has
identified these seven hallmarks of leading companies:
·
Viewing
marketing and sales as an investment, not an expense.
Our research shows
that, if done well, investing to build a carefully chosen group of marketing
and sales capabilities can yield a massive return—as much as five or ten times
that of an investment in hard assets such as factory equipment. However,
companies rarely calculate the ROI of building marketing and sales
capabilities. Too often, leadership looks at marketing and sales as an expense
rather than an investment in top-line growth.
It is possible to measure the ROI of building
marketing and sales capabilities; in fact, it’s necessary to measure ROI to be
effective. The best-performing companies focus on building capabilities that
are directly linked to specific growth and margin opportunities by instilling
ROI discipline. For example, a building-materials business found there was
enormous value available (about two percentage points of margin) from improving
capabilities in transactional pricing, sales, and local tactical marketing.
Historically, the company had found it hard to fund the investment required to
build those capabilities, given that it was a large expense without a return in
the same year. But when executives calculated the internal rate of return of a
serious and sustained performance-linked investment to build those capabilities
(such as new account-planning tools, pricing software, value selling,
sales-manager training, and targeted hiring), they found it was four times
greater than building another manufacturing plant.
·
Knowing
what needs to be fixed.
It is virtually
impossible to fix something if you don’t know what’s wrong with it. Yet while
most businesses rigorously measure and track key performance indicators, few
apply the same approach to capabilities—and if they do, they typically look at
individual rather than true institutional capabilities such as tools,
methodologies, core processes, and systems. Companies should not only know
their marketing and sales capabilities but also how they compare against their
best-performing peers.
Acquiring this knowledge requires undertaking
a diagnostic that reveals capability strengths and weaknesses—and does so with
sufficient granularity and analytical rigor to allow action to be taken. When a
global chemical company benchmarked the specific capabilities of its marketing,
sales, and pricing functions, it found that while one business unit was strong
at delivering value, its strategic marketing capabilities needed improvement to
drive growth. Just as important, the company rolled out a shorter version of
the diagnostic on an annual basis to gauge ongoing performance and to spot
emerging trends.
·
Targeting
the capabilities that matter the most.
Companies tend to
invest in capabilities without thinking through which are likely to have the
most impact or are most important to beat the competition. This is generally
the result of a faulty understanding of existing capabilities and/or decisions
driven by personalities rather than a set of facts everyone agrees on.
While there are as many as 40 clusters of
marketing and sales capabilities, top-performing companies tend to focus on
improving only about 6 that are important to the company’s individual goal. One
leading consumer-electronics player, for example, identified the most important
capability gaps it needed to close: product launches, in-store execution,
tactical marketing-spend optimization, and managing sales growth at
granularity. For product launches, it retooled its approach and trained the key
marketers involved (for example, about 45 product-launch champions in Europe,
the Middle East, and Africa). Focusing on improving these capabilities enabled
it to gain up to ten percentage points in market share in targeted product
categories.
·
Not
trying to do too much.
Building capabilities
requires focused attention. For example, we know one manufacturing company that
found, when working to upgrade its commercial capabilities, that any unit that
built out three capabilities at once failed. However, if units stuck to two
capabilities at a time, they succeeded. Not trying to do too much, too soon
ensured they met their goal of improving margins by three percentage points.
Another reason for keeping the scope narrow is that changing how an
organization works is a prolonged endeavor. The likelihood of failing or losing
momentum only increases when companies do too much at once.
·
Tailoring
the approach to the company’s stage of development.
A successful
investment in marketing and sales isn’t just about choosing the right
capabilities; it’s about choosing to develop them in the right sequence. Our
research suggests that where you are on the business-performance curve should
inform your decisions about which capabilities to develop:
Stage 1: Low growth
and profitability relative to market. Investment should focus on foundational capabilities that give
businesses the tools to grow, such as transactional pricing, performance
management, and customer-portfolio management. Without this foundation,
companies will not be able to make it to the next stage.
Stage 2: Low growth
but high profits. To promote growth,
companies should focus on building capabilities in branding, strategic
marketing, customer life-cycle management, and customer service.
Stage 3: High growth
and high profitability.
To become a market leader, businesses need to invest in higher-factor skills
such as channel performance and integration as well as alternative go-to-market
approaches such as inside sales or e-commerce.
·
Thinking
institutional capabilities, not just individual skills.
Different elements of
a business often have their own perspective on the relative importance of a
given capability. That can be problematic: individuals leave, but companies
need to sustain capabilities over time. The only way to implement true
institutional capabilities is to encourage a broad, inclusive discussion that
creates a clear view of which capabilities are necessary across the entire
company and how to prioritize them. In effect, companies must create a common
and accepted frame of reference. For example, one company regularly surveys
2,000 of its marketing and sales people about their sense of the need to build
a particular capability. While this feedback provides valuable insights, it
also helps to create a single working vocabulary about capabilities.
·
Having
an operating model to keep it all running.
In the end, building
marketing and sales capabilities alone isn’t enough. Without the right
operating model to support change, even the most advanced capabilities will
wither. An operating model needs to be specific and measurable, including
elements such as clear annual performance-improvement goals; scheduled and
formal reviews throughout the year by segment, key account, and other
categories; individual and business-unit performance reviews; incentives aligned
with institutional goals; and leadership role modeling to shape the culture.
Culture, in particular, should not be
underrated. Top-performing companies actively build a culture that’s
customer-focused, managed for the long term, creative, confident, flexible, and
fast moving. One consumer-electronics company, for example, revitalized its
sales in Europe by focusing on a program to deliberately build a growth
culture. It reorganized teams so they spent more time with customers, became
more focused on execution, and enforced stronger accountability both for teams
and individuals. In addition, executives worked to become more agile through
faster decision making, creating cross-functional teams around specific
initiatives and using technology to collaborate virtually.
Questions to get started
While transforming marketing and sales
capabilities to drive growth is not easy, many companies have difficulty simply
knowing where to start. In our experience, CEOs and senior executives should
ask the following three questions to get the process moving in a fruitful
direction:
·
How good are our
marketing and sales capabilities today compared with best practice?
·
How much value is at
stake in radically improving our marketing and sales performance?
·
What’s the ROI on our
current capability investments?
Starting with these questions will help ensure
that your company focuses on building capabilities that improve the business’s
financial performance and help it beat the market.
By Bart Delmulle, Brett Grehan, and Vikas Sagar
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/Building_marketing_and_sales_capabilities_to_beat_the_market?cid=mckgrowth-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1503
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