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
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.