Sales and marketing performance index

B2B sales leaders in find it difficult to understand the respective and combined role and impact of the sales and marketing functions. Efforts to transform sales and marketing often suffer from the lack of methodology and understanding of what benefits to expect from digitization or optimization of both functions.

Bold & Sharp Sales and Marketing Index is a framework for clarifying how sales and marketing should contribute to business outcomes by delivering value for customer and the organization itself. This framework can be used to identify gaps between existing and expected results, determine which skills, systems, or capabilities to develop, which to scale down, remove or outsource to deliver value.

How to get it:

A truncated and limited version is available for download for our prospects here. To get the full version, contact us and tell us more about your needs. We will come back to you and provide guidance on how to use the Bold & Sharp Sales and marketing index and share the full version. The full version will allow you to conduct a self-evaluation. You may want to hire us to take the survey: we know the questions that underpin the scoring for each question of each section. We know what to ask and where to dig to complete an unbiased assessment of your sales and marketing performance…And the actions to take.

What’s in there:

The Bold & Sharp Sales and Marketing index is not a 30-minutes audit. It is used with our customers to deliver a detailed evaluation of their sales and marketing performance. It should be leveraged to deliver an in-depth assessment of your sales and marketing organization. It consists of 3 sections, 10 subsections, 20 categories, 72 subcategories, and 230 questions. The 3 main sections include:

Sales performance: we analyze sales value through the sales and customer journey:

1. Engage: starts with the basics of strategy and measures effectiveness and efficiency, from lead generation to sales acceptance.
2. Execute: analyses the fundamentals of the sales process, measures the execution standards and highlights gaps to maximum efficiency.
3. Excel: measures how knowledge is leveraged to outlearn competition, how performance drives the sales organization and how management and resources support the sales effort.

Collaborations and frictions: we analyze the frictions between sales and other departments.

1. Excite: possible gaps between sales and marketing on automation, lead generation, conversion, and innovation.
2. Entice: possible gaps between sales and presales on resources allocation, activities, engagement and impact.
3. Deliver: possible gaps between sales and professional services on collaboration, roles, and impact on customer success.
4. Delight: possible gaps between sales and customer success on collaboration, roles, and impact on customer satisfaction.
5. Upgrade: possible gaps between sales and partner managers on go-to-market, collaboration and network added value.

Marketing performance: we analyze marketing value from two different angles.

Value for the customer

1. Attract: measures marketing impact on market assessment, influence on sales cycle , and personalization.
2. Enhance: measures marketing impact on portfolio management, innovation, and marketing mix.
3. Connect: measures marketing impact on channels, medias, and communities.

Value for your organization

1. Activate: evaluates how marketing leverages data to make your organization cleaver.
2. Augment: evaluates marketing impact on value proposition, growth, and revenue streaming.
3. Enable : evaluates how marketing supports your organization and partner network knowledge.

KPIs ad metrics:

Bold & Sharp Sales and Marketing Index does not include predefined KPIs. These may vary depending on the industry you are in, your business situations, or your maturity. KPIs based on so called industry standards or best in class metrics do not make sense. Each company has a different vision, strategies, priorities, and measures, all set up according to their life cycle. Whether your most admired company has an overall score of 84 will not make you better off. It may stretch you and put you entire organization under pressure. Instead, the purpose of the index is to help you set SMART goals that will point in the right direction.

The SMB and Enterprise divide:

The dive between SMB and Enterprise Selling is similar to the assumedly unbridgeable gap between haute couture and mass production in French fashion. While SMB is activity and productivity driven, cracking the code in strategic accounts requires more strategic thinking, resources orchestration and cross functional skills. SMB sales are often compared with sending a net and expecting short term results. Selling into strategic accounts requires proper targeting, patience and taming complexity in long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders. Some recipes like activity-based management, hyper segmentation, account tiering or account-based marketing work for both segments, although leveraged differently. Both segments can learn from each other. Both kind of sellers can learn from each other too. So, the index works for both segments.

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