The 4D Sales Model is created around four key disciplines Market, Process, People, and Tools, each with its sub-disciplines.
Looking at any business through The 4D Sales Model helps to assess the current situation of the business, identify areas that are missing or can be improved, and helps to prioritise the actions to be taken.
This way we can help your company grow by building up your marketing and sales organisation around these four key disciplines. This structure in our methodology enables us to direct the development of the organisation, and prepare a plan in the order in which different parts of the marketing and sales organisation can best be built.
Before anything else, you need to have very clear what it is you do exactly and who you are doing it for. You need to understand your buyers and the market thoroughly in order to make well-informed strategic decisions. By gaining this knowledge of your market, you can align your positioning to it and develop strategies that target specific personas and segments. This in turn, enables your people to have value-adding conversations with buyers. It also helps to drive a sales enablement strategy that allows both marketing and sales to sell.
The buyer stands centrally in any marketing and sales organisation; whatever is done or decision is made, has to be aimed to provide value to these people. This is why it is critical to fully understand how we can be helpful to them. In order to reduce friction in the buying experience for these personas, we have to understand what their preferred way to engage with sales is, which parts of the product/service is most valuable to them, and why. We have to analyse the market to fully understand where these personas are, what our ideal customer profiles are and how we can segment the market based on them. It is important to have a complete overview of the market, to ensure the strategy matches the opportunity. Well-defined personas, clear ideal customer profiles, and a solid segmented market are essential for developing a successful positioning strategy and outreach programme.
In order to truly effectively communicate the value that is delivered, we have to define and clarify the main ideas and key messages of the product/service. The value proposition needs to be tailored towards your personas, so the marketing and sales efforts connect with their specific needs and challenges. Based on our gained understanding of personas and the target market, a differentiation strategy is developed to optimise the cross section of key value propositions, pricing, and bundles that target specific personas and segments. By defining the basic narrative structure within this differentiation strategy, clear guidelines can be created of how we should always manage the messages of the product/service.
Based on our understanding of the personas, the positioning, and key interactions between the commercial organisation and the (target) client, the buyer and customer journey can be mapped. Content distribution is done both online and offline, and both manually and automated, which makes it extremely important to have a clear understanding of the interactions in these journeys. This way, you can add value to each key interaction and align multiple actors throughout multiple interactions into one well-ordered flow. These key interactions, the information shared, and content provided are decisive to a (potential) client’s image of your organisation, influence the speed of the sales cycle, and ultimately drive your sales.
Providing your people with clear guidelines on how to get from A to Z is another key discipline to establish an effective marketing and sales organisation. Therefore it is important to work according to a common framework that defines the stages of your marketing and sales process, the roles accountable, value to be delivered, content to be used, and tools to be managed. It also entails systematic alignment on critical metrics and measuring the performance of your people to improve their performance across the acquisition, retention, and growth of clients.
An excellent way to lay out hands-on and clear guidance to your people is through the use of marketing and sales playbooks. Such a playbook needs to cover client acquisition (bringing in new clients, also known as buyer journey) and client success (retention and growth of existing clients, also known as customer journey). Clearly defined playbooks that describe sales stages, role accountabilities, actions to be taken, value to be delivered, and tools to be operated will enable your teams to work effectively, according to a common framework that can be easily shared, understood, and used.
Solid communication flows and knowledge sharing processes are key to the success of any marketing and sales organisation. Without consistent communication flows people will have a hard time keeping one another informed and staying aligned. Incorporating a set of structured and organised meetings in which the right people talk about the right things, helps improve marketing and sales teams to align, focus the attention of team members on critical metrics, and allow for quicker transmission of best practices and therefore improve learning of the whole team.
Having your finger on the pulse of your marketing and sales organisation should be at the heart of your strategic decisions. To achieve this it is essential to establish reasonable objectives and consistently measure performance to identify strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. Measuring key data and setting the right objectives on both individual as team level is essential for bringing out the best of people in their day-to-day performance, as well as aligning teams and bringing focus in the aims and directions of the group as a whole.
Excellent employees are the driving force behind any successful organisation. To enable yourself to leverage the power of your people it is crucial to make sure you hire the right profiles, have a solid organisational structure in place, and you champion a culture of coaching and development. This way you can provide your marketing and sales people with an organisation that drives them to excellence.
Employing the right people means aligning the organisational needs to fill specific marketing and sales roles by people with the right profile. This calls for solid recruitment and onboarding processes to make sure you attract and hire the right profiles for the job. Offering robust training programs, compensation plans, and career development paths enable your people to develop their skill set, understand what is expected of them, and work oriented towards performance. All together, this will reduce ramp up time of new hires, enhance job satisfaction, and keep rotation low.
The organisational structure is the backbone of the marketing and sales organisation as it provides your people with a framework in which formal accountabilities and communication flows for each role, team, and leader are organised. This way people know who is responsible for what and can be held accountable for their responsibilities. Moreover, it provides objective and clear guidelines for the definition of competencies, recruitment processes, required training, compensation plans, onboarding process, and career development paths.
When your people are solution oriented and focused on results, true excellence can be achieved. To help your people overcome obstacles it is vital to continuously coach your team members to find their own solutions. This way you empower your people to grow in their role, be accountable for their own actions, and develop themselves faster. Ultimately, this leads to increased awareness, responsiveness, focus, and results.
Your tools are connecting marketing and sales and give them a common place to collaborate, the tech stack is the place where your market, process, and people come together. Tools allow for collaboration among colleagues, engagement with (potential) clients, and collection of useful insights.
Knowing what are the essential and most suitable tools to have in your tech stack is critical to the effectiveness of your marketing and sales strategy and operations. The marketing and sales organisational infrastructure is essentially built around a solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with additional (or integrated) sales enablement and marketing automation tools. Internal processes, the buyer and client journey, and the marketing and sales strategy are the basis that create requirements for specific functionalities on which decisions for tools should be made. These decisions for tools ultimately decide the way in which messages and value are delivered, teams work together, and individual team members are supported to achieve their objectives.
The collection and suitable interpretation of your data allows for valuable insights and optimisations with regards to all four disciplines of the 4D Sales Model, while also being the catalysator for automations and coordinated campaigns that integrate marketing and sales teams. While many organisations are able to capture a lot of data, it is critical to provide focus in which metrics are important, how to interpret the information, and how to adjust operations in response to these insights in order to make them actionable for the people in your organisation.
Continuous configuration, coordination, and management of your tech stack is important to ensure that the tools you are using contribute to the performance of your people, following your processes, using your content. This is done through continuous improvements in segmentation of your market into sub-groups, based on the persona profiles and information gathered from ongoing marketing and sales activities. The improvements in integrated campaigns in which multiple channels are leveraged to reach your target audiences will result in process optimisations that will ultimately minimise costs while maximising output and efficiency.
Building a solid commercial operation from a relatively small open-minded operation directly managed by the founder(s), to a scalable sales organisation with a solid growth strategy.
Small and medium-sized enterprises with a steady on-going and growing marketing and sales organisation face challenges to maintain growth and avoid stagnation.
Check out our resources section to discover templates, articles and success cases that will help you grow your organisation.
