unified business model (whitepaper)

THE UNIFIED BUSINESS MODEL™

BY STRUCTSALES

HOW TO ALIGN SALES AND MARKETING

IN THE DIGITAL BUSINESS WORLD

© Structsales 2015 Yusuf Hasanogullari

Oliver Lopez All Rights Reserved

1

© Structsales 2015 All Rights Reserved

What is The Unified Business Model™? The Unified Business Model™ shows an integrated view of a complete sales and

marketing organization which proactively and predictably produces business. It is

derived from a wealth of previous experience and has been shown to be applicable to a

range of industries and products, as long as the sales process of such a product is fairly

complex and involves a decision making process which is longer than a single meeting

or call.

The model itself consists of three dimensions:

1. The Ideal Sales and Marketing Organization,

2. The Ideal Sales and Marketing Process, and

3. The Ideal Sales and Marketing KPIs

With this document, we hope to give a concise overview of the model in its entirety, and

a short summary of each of its components.

Dimension 1: The Organization

Most companies have a general “Marketing” role and a general “Sales” role. In some

cases, they have specialized roles such as “Social Media Manager” or “Inbound

Marketer”. In most cases, the salespeople are expected to produce “sales”, and the

marketing people are expected to produce (in the best case) “leads” or “PR”.

Only the very best companies that we have met, who have consistent sales month after

month, are able to clearly articulate the different specialized roles, the relationship

between those roles, and what they are expected to produce (the KPIs).

We have seen that there are, in general, 5 general sales roles and 3 general marketing

roles. Each of these is tasked with fulfilling very specific KPI’s, each KPI being a link in a

larger chain leading ultimately to sales.

The roles can be viewed as different “hats” that people wear when performing different,

specialized tasks. Whether you want it or not, these tasks are going to be performed. If

they are being performed ad-hoc, with vague, fuzzy measurements (at best), and without

being aware of how the tasks are actually interlinked in a chain of events that will lead to

sales, you are running at a very low efficiency. Every hour spent will lead to very little

sales. And what’s worse, because you have no way of measuring it, you will not be

aware of this fact.

2


The remedy is to first become aware of what these specialized tasks are. The next step

is to think about how to start breaking the roles out of the “generic blurb” of “salesperson”

or “marketing person”. The challenge is to identify which role and associated tasks to

break out first to immediately get an increase in efficiency. This is then repeated for the

next role and task, and so on until the organization has started functioning in the desired

systematic way.

Below is an overview of the roles, what tasks they perform, and what their key outputs

are:

3


Dimension 2: The Process Each of the roles above are responsible for their part of the interlinked sales and

marketing chain. The entire chain consists of three sub-processes:

1. The Outbound Sales Sub-Process enhanced by Marketing

2. The Inbound Marketing and Sales Sub-Process

3. The Nurturing Sub-Process

It also shows how each of these sub-processes link to each other, thereby creating the

Integrated Sales and Marketing Chain. The interlinking shows how the different

specialized roles within Sales and Marketing can co-operate, pass prospects and leads

to each other in the optimal way to ultimately produce sales in a reliable, consistent and

measurable way:

Of course, an organization cannot and is not expected to implement this all at once.

Most organizations are at a stage where some of this is already being done (consciously

or unconsciously), while they lack in other areas. Although the real power and potential

of the model is reached when every part is implemented (because the synergy between

each part then strengthens the other parts), the implementation of each part will produce

ROI by itself.

The ideal way for an organization to reach the end goal is therefore to view this model as

the long-term roadmap, and implement each of the steps serially, where each step is a

stand-alone project with its own timeline and expected results.

Below are each of these steps. The steps are not in the order at which they should be

implemented. Instead, it is up to each organization to determine how far they have come

in various parts and which step would bring them the most bang for buck right now

before the next step is taken.

4


Sub-Process: Outbound Sales enhanced by Marketing

Step 1: Prospecting

The purpose of the prospector is to create high-quality calling lists for the Hunters in the

following step of the chain. Although it may seem like a trivial role, up to 50% of a

salesperson’s time is spent figuring out which companies to call, when to call them, and

looking at old CRM records to determine if it is OK to call them or if they are already

engaged with someone in our company. Rather than having your most expensive

salespeople do this kind of work, which is both expensive and decreases their

momentum, it is more efficient to have specialized prospectors do it. In addition, this role

typically requires a more analytical mindset, which is not the same as the ideal

salesperson’s mindset.

5


Step 2: Hunting

The hunter has one task: Call the people in the list he/she receives from the prospectors.

By having the prospecting work already done for them, and being served lists of people

who are OK to call (pre-checked against the existing CRM records, companies we want

to target), he/she can gain real momentum in the cold calling process, often making 50-

100 calls per day and producing 2-4 meetings per day. Based on your sales cycle and

close rates, most businesses see that this alone could increase their sales significantly,

and gain them the proactivity they need - for example the ability to target specific

industries, types of customers, or geographies.

Hunters become even more efficient by teaming up with marketing. Together with

marketing, your hunters can set up call campaigns with multiple touches. With a click of

a button, an introductory email is first sent. When the email is opened, the hunter is

notified, and follows up immediately with a call. If the call isn’t answered, another email is

triggered a couple of days later. If the call is answered and the prospect wants more

information, a click of a button triggers a series of emails that send the information and

check if a follow up is appropriate. The hunter is notified when the body language

indicates that a call should be placed. If, after the entire series, no interest was detected,

the prospect is lodged into the nurturing leads bucket for long-term nurturing.

Contrary to what many say, cold calling is not dead. Traditional cold calling may be, but

cold calling enhanced by strong collaboration with marketing is the best way for a

company to proactively produce significant amounts of new business.

6


Step 3: Closing

Closers are the typical person most people think of when they hear the word

“salesperson”. These are the people who love to sit in front of a customer, establish

trust, show the value of your products and services, and seal the deal.

What they don’t like to do is: Prospecting and Cold Calling. There is a reason for this:

Their personality type is that of one who loves to sit in front of a person and convince,

inspire, negotiate and win. Not sit in front of a computer or hope to reach people through

cold calling. Remove anything that stands in the way of them getting precious face-time

in front of customers.

Your Closers should create fantastic and customized presentations to leads who are able to

buy. This means, they should ignore leads who are NOT able to buy.

Thus, the first thing a closer should do for each new customer is to qualify them. Qualify by

finding out if the person they are speaking with is the decision maker, the level of pain they

are experiencing, and if your solutions can help them relieve this pain. If the answer is yes to

these questions, spend an unproportionate amount of time on these customers.

Since your closers will get 2-4 meetings both from our Hunters and from your Inbound

Marketing Sub-Process (which we will see below), they can afford to be picky. And by

meeting and talking with customers all day, every day, even average sales people will

become very sharp.

7


Sub-Process: Inbound Marketing

Step 1: Attracting

The Online Broadcasters are responsible for reaching out to the big mass of people.

They do this to make the mass of potential customers aware of your brand (for

lubricating the Hunters’ ability to get meetings), and to make them visit your owned

properties (for example your site or specific offer pages). They do this by reaching out

through various media, for example your blog, your social media channels, and online

advertising.

8


Step 2: Converting

The campaign managers are responsible for converting the visitors that the Online

Broadcasters produce into Marketing Leads. They do this by introducing regular

Conversion Campaigns. Each Conversion Campaign targets a specific problem or

need for a specific audience. It consists of 1) a Conversion Offer, 2) a Conversion Page

and 3) an Ascension Autoresponder email sequence which tries to ascend the leads into

Sales Qualified Leads (in practice, asks them through a series of emails if they want to

have a meeting with a sales person about the specific subject they showed interest in).

Campaign Managers are the heart of the Proactive Marketing Process, because they are

the strategists who devise which target groups to go after with which content and at

which time. While they sit in the marketing organization, they are actually salespeople -

because the content they produce is meant to directly create sales opportunities.

Therefore, these people are also marketing’s bridge into sales.

The Campaign Managers work with the Online Broadcasters and Email Broadcasters

(which we will look at below) to generate visits for each campaign. In-between

campaigns, the Online and Email Broadcasters continue their regular non-salesy flow of

relationship- and brand building communications.

9


Sub-Process: Nurturing

Finally, the Nurturing Sub-Process (and step) is the connection back from sales into

marketing, and the knot that ties it all together. A customer is likely to go through three

distinict phases in their buying cycle:

1. Awareness (Becoming aware of their problem)

2. Consideration (Considering different types of solutions)

3. Decision (Deciding on which service or product to choose to solve the problem)

If a customer in the Awareness or Consideration stages is contacted by a Hunter or is put

into an Ascension Autoresponder Sequence, they are not likely to request a meeting with a

salesperson. However, they might still be a good potential future customer if properly

educated.

The Email Broadcaster is the equivalent of the Online Broadcaster, but with a focus on

your existing list of subscribers. They are tasked with sending out educational messages

in order to take subscribers from the Awareness stage through to the Decision Stage.

Each time the Campaign Manager creates a conversion campaign, the Email

Broadcaster will be able to re-convert a portion of the Nurturing Leads, who are now

more educated, back into the sales process by turning them back into a Marketing Lead.

10


Dimension 3: The KPIs Most organizations measure so called vanity metrics that make you feel good, not actionable

metrics that help you make decisions. Actionable metrics applied to the Unified Business

Model™ are able to answer the following two questions:

What is my biggest bottleneck to more revenue?

If I invest in relieving that bottleneck today, how much additional revenue will be

produced and after how long time?

In order to answer those two questions, you need to make some very specific

measurements and have very specific KPI’s for each role. Here are the most basic KPIs you

need to be able to see at any time:

On the Sales Sub-Process:

Calls per day (and conversion rate and time to Outbound Sales Lead)

Current number of Outbound Sales Leads (and conversion rate and time to Qualified Sales Lead vs. Marketing Lead)

Current number of Qualified Outbound Sales Leads (and conversion rate and time to Customer vs. Marketing Lead)

On the Marketing Sub-Process:

Visits per month (and conversion rate and time to Marketing Lead)

Current number of Marketing Leads (and conversion rate and time to Inbound

Sales Lead vs. Nurturing Lead)

Current number of Inbound Sales Leads (and conversion rate and time to

Qualified Inbound Sales Lead vs. Marketing Lead)

Current number of Qualified Inbound Sales Leads (and conversion rate and time

to Customer vs. Marketing Lead)

On the Nurturing Sub-Process:

Number of active Nurturing Leads (and conversion rate and time to Marketing

Lead)

With these numbers, you can build a “revenue calculator” that lets you play with different

numbers in each stage, see which change will have the biggest impact on your revenue, and

how much an increase in cost in various stages will have on your bottom line.

11


How to Implement the Unified Business Model™ The Unified Business Model™ first and foremost serves as a long-term roadmap, giving

everybody in the organization a clear picture of the desired end result and the steps to

reach it over time. From there, the specific sub-process and step that will provide the

best possible short-term return on investment is chosen and implemented as a single

independent project. When the return is proven, the organization can take a step back

and, looking at the long-term goal, chooses the next sub-process and step.

For some businesses, different products will require different marketing strategies and

sales processes. Therefore, multiple “Unified Business Models” will be implemented. Our

recommendation is that you implement one Unified Business Model™ per sales process

that you have.

Why Organizations Fail to Implement Change

Usually, there are three reasons why an organization will struggle to implement a

process such as the Unified Business Model™:

1) Strategy Failure: They fail to define and find consensus around a clear long-

term vision and goal about how their organization and processes should look.

2) Execution Failure: If they manage to find consencus around a good long-term

vision and goal, they fail to implement it because they don’t know the best

practices around each specific step along the road, and a trial and error approach

to implementation significantly slows down or even halts their progress.

3) Resource Failure: If they manage to find consensus and know how to

implement that vision, they fail to do so because they lack resources to actually

perform the change. Implementation is time-consuming, and requires taking

resources away from the day-to-day operations. Hiring new permanent

employees who take charge of the change is often not a good choice, because a

change is by its nature temporary and would mean that once the change is

made, the employee hired to implement it would become redundant. This creates

resistance in employees to ever “finish” a project, which creates “project creep”

and ever-green “projects” that are never completed.

This is where the difference between internal employees and external consultants

becomes clear:

● Internal employees should run existing processes

● External consultants should help set new processes through a well-defined,

temporary projects

12


How Structsales can help

Structsales brings in experience and best practices implementing each of the parts of the

Unified Business Model™ for dozens of previous customers. We know what works and

what doesn’t. By combining our best practices with the knowledge of the day-to-day

reality of our customers, we can help you implement the Unified Business Model™

efficiently. We do this in three steps:

1. Strategy: First, we help you choose the best sub-process and step to start with,

set the strategy for how an ideal end-state looks so that it will work for your

organization, and define the specific deliverables

2. Execution: We then affect the changes that need to be made in order to work

according to the processes (for example system implementation), and enter into

a temporary execution phase where we act as your own resources. Thus, we are

the first people in your organization who actually work according to the new

processes and workflows. This enables us to reality-test the new processes,

adjust them so that they work in practice, and measure everything in order to

prove the ROI of the new processes.

3. Hand-over: Once the processes are shown to work and ROI is proven, we

document the exact process in a document we call the “Process Playbook”. This

playbook is an operations manual which details, step by step, how to work

according to the new processes. It is written so that an employee can either

quickly get up to speed on the optimal way to work according to the process, best

practices and how to handle various situtaions that can occur, or as a reference

that can be checked to handle unexpected situations. It also describes the roles

required to run the process and the results the business can expect from each

such role following the processes. If needed, we also keep running the processes

for you until you have filled the roles with permanent employees, and provide

training for any employees in order to ensure a smooth handover and avoid

interruptions.

By employing us to help set these processes for you, you will reach your goals faster,

you can keep running your business without interruptions, and you will avoid going

through the trial-and-error process most organizations go through when they borrow

resources from day-to-day operations. In each step of the way, you will know the

expected outcome, and end up with a business that produces more business in a more

reliable way, giving you and your employees ease of mind, more freedom, and more

control.

unified business model (whitepaper)

Documents