I had several interesting discussions recently about vendor sales and marketing roles throughout the buyer’s journey from interest (top of funnel) to purchase (bottom of funnel), and how a SaaS marketing and sales team aligns with the buyer’s needs. It made me think more about full-funnel management and the need to reflect the buyer’s journey in the way a sales team supports the process. Buyers used to follow a path from discovering marketing materials and doing casual shopping, to raising their hand, to asking for more information, which led to a sales development rep (SDR) or a sales person getting involved. This was a key handoff point between marketing and sales. Marketing content remained relatively high-level, and the handoff to sales took place in the upper part of the sales funnel.
What changed in the last several years is that enterprise shoppers do much more research on their own before they are willing to engage a vendor’s sales team. Outbound marketing techniques no longer entice shoppers to raise their hand before they are really educated and ready to make a purchase decision. The result is that the handoff from marketing to sales has moved further down the funnel, and marketing has had to adapt by expanding its role beyond surface creation of awareness to serious nurturing and education. It has also shifted the initial sales role further down the funnel, and changed, or eliminated, the SDR function. This all means a change in the staffing criteria for sales and marketing, and in some markets, it has expanded the role of channel partners.
Let’s look at these changes one at a time. As you move down the funnel and the buyer is seeking more and more education and doing extensive research, the content put forth has to become more and more specific and deliver much greater depth. In many cases, a marketer who was comfortable at the top of the funnel with value messages and positioning statements is not sufficiently technical and comfortable creating the materials that will carry the buyer down through the funnel to the point where they are ready to speak with sales. Marketing leaders need to adapt their hiring practices. Their team needs more domain expertise in content creation, and more target market awareness in demand generation. Marketing’s role has to shift from generating basic brand awareness to building market credibility. Marcus Sheridan wrote a terrific book titled “They Ask You Answer” about becoming the shopper’s ultimate source of market information as the key to building credibility.
As the contribution from marketing becomes deeper and moves further down the funnel, the leads handed to sales are more knowledgeable, and further along in their journey. The result is that the SDR role has to adapt or disappear. Too often, the SDR function is an entry-level gate keeper with a primary purpose of screening out unqualified leads to avoid passing along shoppers who will waste a salesperson’s time. From the perspective of the vendor and the sales person, this may be efficient, but from the perspective of a knowledgeable buyer this can be very inefficient and annoying. At a minimum, as buyers become more sophisticated, and the first contact with sales moves further down the funnel, the SDR role requires much more product and market awareness.
Alternatively, we just need to eliminate the SDR role and focus on the seller filling the need. The change in buyer behavior means that by the time a seller gets involved, the nature of the questions and the specificity of the buyer’s needs are well formed. Buyers expect the seller to be an expert and provide specific demos and information about exactly how the solution will meet their unique needs. For some vendors, this means sellers have to also take on more of the traditional sales engineer responsibilities, or perhaps staffing ratios of sellers to sales engineers will need to change. The overriding message is that as buyers become more sophisticated, vendors need to adjust their selling methods to meet the buyers where they are today, not where they used to be. Many of the CEOs and sales leaders I have spoken with argue for expanding the role of a seller to be a full-stack player. More qualified sellers with fewer supporting contributors such as SDRs and SEs.
This change in buyer sophistication also opens the door for a different voice to participate in the process. In many markets, a channel partner or MSP may be the perfect match. Channel partners are force multipliers, but they also may have much deeper market awareness and a better understanding of the specific needs of the shopper. The partner can become the trusted expert advisor, and they can be the sherpa that carries the shopper to become a buyer. This is not a new or radical idea, but putting the shift in buyer behavior in the context of full-funnel management and factoring in the delineation of duties between the vendor’s personnel and channel partners can lead to a redesign of the marketing process and the sales cycle that will benefit both the vendor and the buyer. Vendors need to consciously strive to meet the buyer with the smartest person in the room who will be able to guide the shopper through the funnel.