tJP

Sales and marketing is sometimes deemed “Part Art, Part Science”. There seems to be little science - particulalry in the sales and marketing processes, and they have not kept up with processes in other parts of a business.

Imagine a car company - they make cars on a production line, same way each time. Or look at the way a jet engine is made - each step mapped out, checked, validated and measured. These environments have long and mature tool-sets like Six Sigma and Lean to help them monitor and improve processes.

Take a look at the sales and marketing processes of those same companies and you’ll find limited processes, limited measurement, little validation and a new way to do something for each campaign. Why?

Why is marketing’s lead generation, lead development and handover to sales not a better, more repeatable and predicatble process? I think we need to take a look at how we can create a steady stream of leads to sales, that takes advantage of modern automation and the 1:1 relationship skills of sales.

Comments most welcome.

I spent many years working as a Windows product manager for Microsoft. To be even asking this question seems strange.

So I have spend a few weeks looking at replacing my Notebook and Smart-phone and here’s the points I have looked at:

1. Current SW- MS Office, Firefox, Tweetdeck, MindManager, GTD Add-on for Outlook
2. What my customers run - mainly Windows but some have Mac’s.
3. How I work -spent lots of time in Office and Outlook in particular. Added GTD Add-in to manage tasks and projects. This syncs to a very old Palm Tungsten E. Means I have everything in one place on the road or in the office. Unfortunately phone is separate.

In making a decision point 3 became the key driver. The Office Apps run well on both platforms, email is available on both and a blue cable is standard.

So the decision came down to handling GTD Tasks on the notebook and the phone. ( As an aside I believe David Allen still runs his mobile office on a Palm Treo - last I asked). From a phone perspective, this knocks out the Nokia platform as Symbian just does not handle Outlook tasks well, same for iPhone as iTunes does not sync with Outlook tasks.

Looked at a purely online set of solutions, GoogleMail and taks, GTD for Firefox, Remember the Milk and a variety of other solutions. Main thing is a trusted system and to handle lots of things - with over 100 @Next Actions. Most of the solutions seemed OK, but did not a) do the GTD thing tightly b) seem to be able to quickly process large volumes of tasks with quick push-button simplicity.

So, the decision? - well the decision was to stay with Outlook and the GTD Add-in. This resulted in a decision to go Windows 7. Lots of people have told me that the MacBook will run windows apps, but my inner geek is not interested in running a VM instance. Some have asked if I have ever used a Mac, the answer is yes for a couple of years, but a long time ago. It was pretty dreadful but no worse than Vista.

The phone, well in my perfect world it would be a Palm Pre, but as they have not yet arrived in Australia, I think it will be a Blackberry or maybe a HTC based Windows mobile as both handle tasks well.

I know a lot of people moving to MacBook’s and the decision was not easy, but at the end of the day, is it 9 times better than a PC running Windows 7? Its not and this post looks at why innovations fail and switching is so hard. The 9 times better Effect.