The business formula for successful market growth for sales and marketing is: CREATIVITY + RELEVANCY = WON.
Media7: You are one of America’s top sales and marketing leaders with a comprehensive career leading marketing and sales teams across some of the world’s biggest brands. What are some of the key players or expertise do you prefer to have on your team that can help you drive success?
Peter Weedfald: I believe my bi-modal role is unique, designed to lead both sales and brand marketing under one leadership umbrella for SHARP Home Electronics Company of America. My extensive experience within both disciplines reveals and fuels a viable competitive alliance with respect to brand, product, advertising measurements, research, customer centricity, and sales channel approach. Most importantly, the resulting measurements of sales and advertising in the language of human and financial capital investments versus market competitors. I believe sales and marketing need to be fastidious, dauntless, focused together and highly penetrative, united, deployed, and measured as one. Sales and marketing of course, should always be in accord with brand and company mission.
Success is artfully driven by ardent subject matter experts passionately motivated to learn, articulate, navigate, invigorate, and amalgamate a united sales and marketing mission. I have always been lost in admiration for those who are hungry to learn, earn, stretch, create, and exercise their personal strengths and values for the greater part of the brand, the market, and their team. In other words, multi-modal sales and marketing leaders who work together with fidelity across departments, workgroups, and the enterprise to identify and unionize company assets capable to engine further market growth. Those who can best participate, accelerate, and mature market focused opportunities, define expertise worth hunting for, and investing in. These are the people who are worth promoting. Team members that truly strive-to-thrive, to create growth opportunities thru united sales, marketing, and high value company asset deployment crafted to best fuel market opportunity.
In addition, our most valuable key players are those identified to have the will, the need, and the means to be flexible and passionate: to extend and unite their own personal passion for team comradely, focus, and intended victories. Heroic fans and docents of sales and marketing wish to enjoy the unbridled thrill to add value, participate, and invigorate teams, customers, markets, and the almighty P&L. Their personal thrill to build a brand, make and take a market, close the sale, in essence, is to ultimately win with their team. Whether originally versed in marketing or sales, all team members are exposed to and invited to become subject matter experts across both sales and marketing disciplines. This union catalysts a more holistic, inclusive, and progressive offense in business where of course, risk never sleeps, opportunities always abound.
Of course, this comprehensive division wide approach to run sales and marketing as one team can never succeed without purposeful, caring, sharing, affable, and giving leadership. Leadership should always lead their team from behind to best promote and promulgate a dare-to-lead philosophy, to create fresh and energizing sales and marketing opportunities thru team, not self. Leadership knows that creative ideas will service the imagination and growth acceleration of customers, and consumers. Leadership that warrants respect thru smarter operational exchanges, critical knowledge, creativity, salesmanship, marketing, and yes of course, the ability to lead-the-ship united as one, spelled, “w.o.n.”
Sales and marketing leaders are in highly visible and unique positions to be aggressive harbingers of change - decreed and tuned to drive market success. Whether they like it or not, they will be held responsible for opportunities or losses, as directional catalysts of change, with celerity. In my case, I decree three team-based words to accent and declare our united creed, to build and accelerate market opportunities, “change, focus and speed.” Any leader’s role, in lockstep and accord with their team members is to identify key sales and marketing areas to change, to enhance, mature, and ensure the company mission will be achieved. Change cannot be exercised, curated nor matured without coring down and heaving up with team alliance and focus. Once the focus to seed and enact viable change is mature, then all team members are charged to speed up sales and marketing initiatives. Clearly for achievable success, organizational leadership must be anointed with best of breed expertise, highly passionate team members who have the will, the need and the means to unite-together to drive change, focus, and speed identified in mission and augured by leadership to overachieve company goals.
M7: How have you aligned sales and marketing to help SHARP further its commitment to health, wellness, and Simply Better Living?
PW: I have a personal passion for customer and consumer facing, market-making, market-taking disciplines. For decades I have been blessed to lead sales and marketing organizations to realize and mature their commonalities, strengths, and most importantly, similarities to achieve profitable market growth. When asked through my career “what is the difference between sales and marketing,” my kinetic and empirical response is always “nothing.” That sales and marketing are equally charged with engaging and gaining a customer through a logical and creative process. The goal of the sales organization is to gain the attention, interest, conviction, and desire of a customer and “earn the right” to ask for the order, and close the deal. In congress, the goal of the marketing organization is to gain the attention, interest, conviction, and desire of a customer to “earn the right” for a brand or product consideration to ask for the order, and close the deal. The sales and marketing departments certainly have varying tools, investments, and expertise to complete their tasks however, when purposefully united together, their efforts can be amazing and highly effective.
From my perspective, the core commonality, the driving force of both successful sales and or marketing organizations is creativity and relevancy. If the sales organization is highly creative but not relevant, the sale will be lost. If the marketing organization is highly relevant yet void of creativity, the customer will ignore the message, sacrificing the sale to a more creative and relevant competitor. Each organization indeed has its own tool kit to drive creativity and relevancy to advance opportunity through the sales and marketing funnel. The business formula for successful market growth for sales and marketing is: CREATIVITY + RELEVANCY = WON. When your team unites to core down and heavy up through creativity and relevancy, market centric growth will focus on your brand, products, determination, and deliverables to ensure profitable omni-channel results.
Refulgent creativity and relevancy void of sales and marketing consistency, frequency and organizational leadership is a formula for failure. A traditional, conventional head of sales has one market focus and priority - to sell and close business. By title, such a formidable union of sales and marketing lives under the wider umbrella of a role titled Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). A CRO is a leader responsible to engage, unite and energize all team members across relevant departments, work groups and the enterprise, recognizing sales as just one key component to drive revenue and growth. This cross department, cross functional leadership role galvanizes sales and marketing teams to smartly focus on growing profitable market share, together. In addition, the CRO is the chief harbinger to enhance and perfect, “change, focus and speed” through measured growth (KPI’s). This role demands the ability to hire high-potential talent to seek and enable the best sales, and marketing tools with measured accountability. The CRO needs to specifically empower sales and marketing team members to stretch and morph while simultaneously adapting and maturing an emporium of digital tools that unite minds and opportunities.
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The greatest marketing tool is understanding that your brand is a promise, and our promise is, “SHARP | Simply Better Living.”
M7: Given your extensive experience in marketing, how do you see it evolving in the near future? What are some exciting developments we can look out for?
PW: In my opinion, the broader evolution and offense of marketing (and sales) will be hyper-focused on the maturing promise of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), better designed, integrated, skilled, captured and monetized thru data lakes of highly relevant consumer information. Having said this, I officially rename the acronym CRM to stand for “Consumers Really Matter.” That Customer Relationship Management is a data dynamic backroom technology platform which is in my opinion, lacks perfectly tuned, curated creativity and relevancy to stimulate one-to-one market opportunities. Thru the evolution of sales and marketing I believe creativity and relevancy must advance itself to on-time, all the time, one-to-one consumer preference. If consumers really matter, CRM platforms and data lakes will highly respect and focus content, knowledge, brands, products and services to mirror consumers’ wants and desires.
The evolutionary promise of real time integrated and curated artificial intelligence (AI) is a measured calculus designed to spirit and fuel consumer preference. It is in fact, a sales and marketing revolution. Artificial intelligence promises to enhance and energize consumers thru perfect CRM data integration. Indeed, it is the massive matrix computing power of AI in direct congress with CRM data mining that will actuate and calculate valued consumer preference and market advancements. Key growth and profit triggers such as data integrity, ROCA (Return On Customer Acquisition) and predictive consumer modeling will best stimulate time-to-market volume opportunities and results. The real time integration of CRM and AI will also reduce time and costs for market research, course corrections, and sales/marketing investments. Most importantly, through the preferences captured within CRM data lakes, consumers will be happier, more productive, save time and surely lean deeper into brands, products and services that deliver on their personal and business demands and needs. As an example, Smart Home activation will include auto-replenishment of a light bulb, or soap detergent, medicine, etc. based upon usage, need and desire. In addition, watch for the smashing of e-commerce, CRM and AI across televisions, across all TV content as the next mammoth platform for selling and buying products and services real time, all the time on the big screen.
M7: What are your go-to marketing tools and techniques for SHARP Home Appliances?
PW: The greatest marketing tool is understanding that your brand is a promise, and our promise is, “SHARP | Simply Better Living.” From our brand perspective, we focus on seven key areas to generate, curate, and accelerate our brand promise and its value proposition for our products and services. I personally believe products make brands, brands do not make products. That indeed it is the product experience across key areas (cosmetics, design, usability, quality, functionality, price to value, competitive distance, and superiority) that fuels and boomerangs brand value, loyalty, and long tail consumer support. These key brand measurable areas include:
1. Brand Elasticity is a tangible asset determined through the incremental value of sales and marketing as it pertains to increased or decreased brand awareness and purchasing to a given buying audience.
2. Brand Equity is measured through incremental turns accrued by branded product/service offerings measured against marketing/advertising spend.
3. Brand Income is ascertained as future cash flow based upon earnings and profit pools related to brand and product performance.
4. Brand Awareness measures consumer brand stages in the language of: awareness, consideration, intention, and purchase.
5. Brand Shaping creates consumer perception, drives engagements and motivates sales establishing formidable purpose and clarity of brand position.
6. Brand Diagnostics evaluates primary brand performance/under-performance with respect to specific marketing and advertising investments.
7. Brand ROI is a measurement critical to evaluate consumer behavior and preferences for products and services.
We utilize a formula I created called, “GMROAE” which stands for Gross Margin Return On Advertising Expense. A multitude of competitors and ad agencies and retail centric platforms measure advertising return with respect to product sales as ROAS which stands for Return On Advertising Spend which lacks gross margin or profit considerations.
If we spend $10,000 to advertise a product, and we sell $30,000 in product, and our gross margin is 5%, it means we earned $1,500 in gross margin. On a $30,000 advertising spend, to deliver $1,500 in gross margin must be considered a disaster not a victory. Gross Margin Return On Advertising Expense more appropriately takes into consideration all manufacturing related costs to bring the product to market, in contrast to ROAS which simply measures revenue results versus ad spend. Therefore, we use GMROAE as our guide for advertising investments.
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“Questions are always the answers” in business as well as through sales and marketing initiatives
M7: What kind of training and educational resources would you recommend to an entry-level marketer?
PW: Most importantly, read, listen, learn, and practice under the wings of a formidable company and caring, sharing and giving sales and marketing leader. Although there are a multitude of external educational resources for an entry-level-marketer and or an entry-level salesperson, the very best and most valued lessons will come from inside the organization. Both sales and marketing should be schooled on many pertinent touch points. The following seven questions and principles for maturing knowledge, relevancy, and success are important for sales and marketing team members to think and gain valued knowledge. It will stimulate them to think about change, focus and speed to best drive market advantage:
1. How do we best ignite our product, brand, services, and core advantages versus the number one market leader’s position that we wish to gain and attain over time?
2. How do our top two competitors articulate their brand value, their price to value market offerings, and their competitive advantages?
3. Can you explore, discover, and report back on the market leader’s product weaknesses and strengths with recommendations on how we can best accelerate our products to grow?
4. What is your sales and or marketing recommendations for us to core down and heavy up across all our marketing investments for higher channel and market impact?
5. What would you change within our product offerings, our packaging and our channel strategy to enhance our market advantage?
6. Can you ask 50 of your friends and neighbors what they think our brand stands for? Can you ask them to name several products they are familiar with? Please include likes, dislikes, and comments.
7. Can you please review our creative executions including social posts, e-mail, advertisements, retail floors, dealer promotions and e-commerce sites and give us your opinion and recommendations to make them better?
These fungible questions, to smartly create an arena of ideas, are only the beginning to best accelerate and mature our valuable sales and marketing resources. As “questions are always the answers” in business as well as through sales and marketing initiatives, so is the review, curation, and next steps to gain victory.
Questions and answers for entry level sales and marketing team members, indeed for all team members mollifies, strengthens, and privileges creative thinking, critical thinking, business judgment, sales and marketing comprehension which envelopes personal passion and brand building to help accelerate our market growth.
The unvarnished reality: the axiom of combining sales and marketing teams as one (spelled “w.o.n.”), uniting offense and defense, offers competitive market advantage versus those who would separate this highly competitive customer facing construct and market focus. Are questions always really the answers? Indeed, they are.