Customer Reviews

Escaping the Black Hole: Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing-Sales Disconnect

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I met Bob Schmonsees recently when he and I were both speaking at an industry event. Before ever reading this book, it was clear from our conversation that Bob is an extremely experienced and bright marketing mind. This book proved it.

Over the last decade, we have been bombarded with tons of useless charges like, "We need to become customer-focused", "We need to focus on solving our clients' business problems", and other meaninglessly lofty corporate platitudes. Furthermore, we all have bookshelves full of tomes that lay out elegant strategies for acheiving those goals - books that philosophize more than instruct.

This book takes those strategic objectives down to the tactical level where most of us in the business world live. It provides actionable, step-by-step advice on how marketing managers can create tremendous value for their salespeople by giving them the information and guidance that they have desperately needed since the advent of consultative selling. If you follow the processes in this book, your customers will breathe a sigh of relief as your salespeople begin to sound smarter about their business issues and provide more value as trusted problem-solvers.

Other reviewers will give detailed accounts of what is inside this book, but let me offer that I have spent years helping clients struggle with these issues, and this is the most useful and practical book I have seen on the subject.

If your salespeople are missing the mark with your customers, 'Escaping the Black Hole' will provide you with a means to help them ask the right questions, uncover the real problems, propose the right solutions, impress more customers, and close more deals.

This book is simultaneously visionary and prescriptive. It's must reading in our organization.

The author's assertion that fixing the marketing/sales disconnect will become as important in the next decade as quality and customer focus has been in the last couple of decades is compelling. He lays out strong explanations for the problems as well as their impact on businesses.

This book provides a compelling vision for implementing solution selling, methods for aligning marketing and sales, and prescriptions for specific actions to improve business-to-business selling effectiveness.

We have begun implementing specific recommendations such as "value mapping", and found them extremely useful. We see this as a key instrument to get marketing and sales aligned to the best common messages, all centered on how we provide value to customers.

The idea of "institutionalizing the organization's understanding of customer needs" is powerful, as is the consideration that the facts, insights, and opinions behind the value messages and best sales practices are "the marketing and sales dna of the enterprise".

The only thing missing are more examples of company experiences implementing these compelling ideas.

This book is truly a must read for any mid- to upper-level manager in Marketing as well as company Executives! Unlike many books out there today, it provides real world analysis of the situation today within Marketing and Sales departments and then presents the reader with a practical blueprint that company's can begin to use to reduce the communication black hole between Marketing and Sales.

A cornerstone of the book is the need for company's to begin treating their Marketing and Sales content as a core asset. The author challenges the reader to begin thinking of their content in manageable chunks with a foundation based upon the needs of the constituents to which they are trying to sell their product. While the outside-in and solution selling approaches are not new, the concept of applying them to the content that the Marketing department creates and manages is new. While there are many great books out there for Marketing and Sales professionals to read on outside-in marketing or solution selling, there is often a disconnect as to what next and how to begin from a practical perspective. The value of this book is that it presents a real-world plan that company's can begin to implement on their own as to how to apply these valuable concepts and begin acting upon them - starting with their content as the foundation!

Most corporate sales and marketing executives will acknowledge there are a lot of challenges. It is one thing to have lived through these challenges, another to figure out the root causes and come up with a plan, and yet another to live long enough to write about it! Robert Schmonsees has done all these things. The testimony and origional thinking in this book, even with its flaws, represents a valuable contribution to sales and marketing literature.

In "Escaping the Black Hole, Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing and Selling Disconnect" (Thompson Publishing, 2005), author Bob Schmonsees demonstrates that in many companies that waste is as much as 25% as a result of misaligned assets, processes, and activities.

Schmonsees begins with an examination of the symptoms and costs of dysfunctional sales and marketing relationships, and traces them directly to the heart of the problem: misalignment of the key processes and assets that drive the day-to-day activities of marketing and sales professionals. He also provides the reader with two axioms that will help companies institutionalize the principles of solutions centric-selling and turn the way they go to market into a sustainable competitive advantage.

* Marketing and sales must institutionalize a greater understanding of the customer's business problems and the implications of those problems on the constituencies and stakeholders they sell to.
* The way a company markets and sells must be subservient to the way their customers buy.

Schmonsees brings a wealth of background to his project, including a stint as salesman at IBM, and chief marketing and sales officer for several medium and large software and services companies where he implemented early versions of lead and pipeline management and sales forecasting applications. He has invested in and advised dozens of high-tech startups, and founded a successful technology startup called WisdomWare in 1996. Along the way he lived in the trenches of sales and sales management, as well as living the life of a harried marketing executive. He has made the mistakes he chronicles in the book, and is able to present a reasoned approach for dealing with its challenges.

Schmonsees introduces what he calls a "Value-Centric Communications Model" based on a value map of customer and stakeholder needs, and product and service capabilities. That map is the basis for a deliberate process of developing, deploying, and gathering feedback on "sanctioned" marketing communications content used in the course of converting prospects to customers. This content is a means of integrating everything that surrounds the salesperson and touches the customer such as sales tools and training, CRM systems, marketing and product collateral, and promotional vehicles and media. In Schmonsees' view managing and maintaining the intellectual assets is the essence of connecting the marketing and sales functions, and of improving effectiveness and reducing waste in marketing and sales organizations.

Schmonsees' perspectives are expansive and candid. I found myself cheering at sections titled "B 2 B Branding Blunders" and "The Failure of Solutions Selling." At the same time, although he liberally shares stories and anecdotes from his background, many of his diagrams and concepts would benefit from even more specific case examples and illustrations.

Yet the business world needs more books like this one. Far too many corporations are saddled with marketing managers who have no clue what their salespeople's lives are like, sales managers who are weak on analytical ability or vision, and senior executives who have difficulty thinking like a customer. I highly recommend "Escaping the Black Hole" for its expansive and comprehensive - and healthy - view of how to improve sales and marketing organizations today.

Michael Webb
www.salesperformance.com

Escaping the Black Hole is an excellent analysis of the disconnect between sales and marketing, why it's widening, and how the cost is getting more significant. Prior to this work, there have been few thought leaders focused on this disconnect in a useful way. Most of us know it's there, but few of us have had mechanisms for removing it. Fortunately, Bob Schmonsees has pulled together a lot of interesting research, combined it with his wealth of experience, and produced a set of ideas and tools in Escaping the Black Hole for aligning the parts of the enterprise that face the market most directly: sales and marketing.

This book is a valuable read. Although you may have to wait 100 pages or so to get to the real meat of the book, you'll be much savvier by spending time with Escaping the Black Hole.

I have never read a book with more insight into the problem facing most sales and marketing organizations today, as Bob has provided in this book. He is right on target! This is a must read for every CEO, CMO and Sales Manager in a B to B industry. Bob outlines exactly what the probelm is and what steps are required to fix it. There are very few pages in the book I read that aren't marked up and underlined.

Bob, thank you for helping to clear the fog that most sales and marketing people operate under. I hope that this book will become the corner stone of marketing and sales organizations for years to come.

A must read for all CXO's and sales/marketing types at all levels. Over my 24 year sales career I have seen many dysfunctional sales and marketing organizations across the globe from a variety of perspectives - people, process and technology. Bob has addressed this topic in an enlightening, visionary and concise manner with so many strategic and tactical tips, techniques and tools, make sure and have your notepad at the ready. Bob's guidance is broad, deep, simple, based upon rock solid data and research and just makes good common sense. With 1000's of books on strategy, sales or marketing, this is one of the best that combines all three and clearly explains how to make them work as one to drive the top and bottom line in any B2B organization in any industry. The book is a little wordy with lots of lists. Break it up into chunks, reading all at once will be overwhelming. Took me total less than 4 hours.

This book is full of practical steps for aligning marketing and sales. This is more common sense than rocket science, but the author does such a good job of describing how to create an environment for the two groups to share information and synchronize efforts to really work together. He connects marketing strategy to everyday activities of the sales team. The best part is that it's not just theory - it's a practical roadmap to improving effectiveness.

Fellow Virginian Schmonsees effectively describes the disconnect between the marketing and sales functions and why this disconnect exists in the first place. He then prescribes the cure.

The cure is contained in his conceptual framework of managing core intellectual assets much like Work In Process in a manufacturing environment. Imagine if you will defining every benefit, every value statement and every bit of information about your products and services in bite-sized chunks and keeping these in an inventory silo. Then imagine being able to pull, combine and deliver these assets to prospects and customers at the very moment these assets are best able to demonstrate the value you can deliver to your customers -- and doing it all in the most compelling way based on how each specific customer prefers to make purchasing decisions. Marketing creates the customer value and creates all the supporting materials and arguments in an a la carte, standardized and sanctioned fashion and then combines, compiles and delivers these materials to Sales exactly when and how they need them to make the most compelling case of how your firm will deliver value to your customers. Part marketing, part branding, part sales, part information technology, part inventory management but 100% focused on delivering value to your customers in a systematic way.

That is the essence of this book.

This is an invaluable resource for managers and executives in all mid- to large-sized companies. I highly recommend it.

--Review by the author of the e-book, "How to Build and Manage Your Brand (in sickness and in health)."

I found this book to be very on-point to the vast chasm's that exist between marketing and sales organizations. Especially helpful for companies with over 100 sales people who sell a diverse portfolio of goods and services in a value-based selling model. To which my company is now evaluating a number of vendors who specialize in what is also known as Enterprise Sales Enablement. One vendor in particular, The SAVO Group, www.savogroup.com stands alone. If you're serious in improving sales effectiveness and aligning your marketing organization with top line revenue production, this book is for you and you should check out The SAVO Group.