A great Level 4 insight from an e-book reader

In the Marketing Unbound. e-book, Level 4 Motion is about establishing a concrete and measurable frame of reference for your business (current position, future state), and charting a specific path with specific goals to which marketing investments are tied.

I got a great piece of feedback from one reader, about how an important internal dynamic shifts at Level 4: the relationship between marketing and sales.  I wasn't smart enough to call this out in the book, but she's right.  With the clarity and validation achieved at Levels 2 and 3, and the disciplined metrics in place at Level 4, there is a critical shift in the nature of the sales / marketing interaction model.

Let's stipulate that in the transition to Level 4, target segments and prospect personae are specifically defined, and conversion metrics (lead to opportunity, opportunity to contract, and the dozens of variations and refinements thereof) are known -- even if they are not 100% precise.  If a marketing program is not performing to expectation (and typically by this stage the over / under performance of programs tends to be marginal, i.e. within 20% of original goal), the conversation becomes very precise, and for more valuable than the typical "those leads were useless" rhetoric of earlier Levels.

The sales / marketing conversation becomes one about refining the definition of the target prospect; improving, through better testing, the resonance of messages to those targets; revisiting the sizing of the addressable market.

Index fingers: return to your brethren!